Some stories shouldn’t need Hollywood to go all, well, Hollywood on them to make them riveting utterly compelling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But they do it anyway. And it’s almost always a massive drag. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s not a new phenomenon; The Battle of the Bulge <\/em>was utterly atrocious, seemingly feeling the need to dumb World War 2 down to a cowboys ‘n indians movie – for an audience that had in huge numbers actually been there. Even as a kid, the Hollywoodisms (“They’re sending tanks! Send the artillery and infantry to the rear!”) annoyed me to no end. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The effect wasn’t always catastrophic: the Great Escape <\/em>didn’t completely bastardize the subject, the greatest POW camp break in history<\/a> – although adding Americans to the cast was an audience-grabbing anachronism (all Americans had been sent to different camps shortly before the escape’s famous tunnels were started). <\/p>\n\n\n\n But Hollywood’s wall of shame exerts a powerful vortex. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Stories that don’t need <\/em>the Hollywood treatment get it anyway. 12 Strong <\/em>– the dramatization of the events of the fall of 2001, where 85 Green Berets – count ’em, 85 – led an insurgency that drove the Taliban from the battlefield. What “improvement” does a story like that need? Well, it got little from the movie<\/a> – which was watchable, but traded CGI for story all too often. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And the Tuskeegee Airmen’s story needs not even a whiff of gussying up; is there a bigger underdog war movie of all time? (There could be – if Hollywood ever produces Brothers in Arms<\/em>, the story of an all-black tank battalion that became one of Patton’s best<\/a>, written by none other than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). But gussying up it got, with Red Tails<\/a><\/em>, a George Lucas labor of love that substituted P51 Mustangs for X-wings, Germans for Stormtroopers, and white bigots for Emperor Palpatine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, when I saw that there was a remake of Midway<\/em> in the works, I thought “at last, someone can improve on the turgid but accurate-ish 1976 historical epic<\/a>. Then I saw the most dreaded six words in movies: <\/em>“From the maker of Independence Day<\/em>” (a movie, it needs to be said, that I detest with a cordial passion) and gave up all hope. Roland Emmerich would seem to have turned the all-in total-stakes back-against-the-wall fight by the battered American fleet against an undefeated Japanese Navy that outnumbered it by a prohibitive margin and had aims on closing the trap around Hawaii into a video game – and made an even worse movie than the 1976 version<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Worse still? <\/em>If there’s a story in American history that’s begging to just be told<\/em>, it’s Harriet Tubman. Her story is both pretty universally known and completely misunderstood; a gun-toting freedom fighter who defied the entire institution of slavery while running runaways to the North<\/a> (or, more often, Canada) and returned to run a huge, effective spy ring during the Civil War? One hardly needs a screenplay. <\/p>\n\n\n\n