Movies of Great Wrongness

Right now, I'm watching Troy. It's pretty perfectly awful.

Besides minor cosmological and geographic inaccuracies (such as giving Sparta a port, and having the sun rise in the west), it basically takes a gigantic smelly shit all over not only the Iliad, but pretty much all of Classical Greek literature. The Trojan War lasts about a week and a half. People who are supposed to live, die, and people who are supposed to die, live.

There are also llamas. In Asia Minor. (The hell of it is, the thing's pretty decently cast, which is why I'm watching. Eric Bana is a good Hector and Sean Bean is a slamming Odysseus.)

What other movies are out there that basically use their source material as toilet paper?

I, Robot shared a couple character names, Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, and damned little else.

Starship Troopers may have been a good action flick, I don't know. I just have heard more than enough to know that it has damned little do with the Heinlein book it purports to be based upon.

I have ranted on the awfulness that is Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor - if you really want all the gritty details, I'll dig them up - but the short version is that I have a great deal of frustration for a movie that purports to be about the Pearl Harbor attack, but focuses, instead, on Army Air Corps personnel.

Pretty much any movie ever made about the gunfight at the O. K. Corral.

Not a movie, but the Showtime series The Tudors manages to get almost everything wrong, from the big stuff (the relative ages of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, the bizarre compression of the timeline) to the little stuff (music, fashions, food). In fact, the only way the show could be more wrong if it they based it on Mars.

Probably too obvious, but Starship Troopers fits. An intentional insult to its source, made worse by being ineptly executed as such.

(Yes, probably so obvious it was mentioned already. It wasn't a very entertaining action film, since it was trying to be bad for satirical reasons; instead it just comes off as bad.)


Disney's Three Musketeers made the story into a farce, keeping only the names and a smidgen of the characters. The Simpsons parodied it by mixing it with Zorro, which probably would have been better.

Most things directed by Mel Gibson by BraveHeart is so historically wrong that he should be pegged to the ground somewhere in Scotland and pelted to death by haggis.

It is also a really, really bad film as well.