Ever since my father told the teen me that “based on a true story” doesn’t mean it’s a documentary I stopped watching those things altogether, since then I only engage with historical fiction if it’s so out there it’s obvious it’s not real.
That’s a pretty narrow way to cut yourself off from a LOT of great storytelling.
Yeah, that wording is so misleading. “Inspired by real events” is the more accurate wording, but I feel like I haven’t seen anything with that in ages.
“Inspired by” is way more loose than “dramatization of historical events”. The former can be pretty much anything even loosely based on some idea, but the latter has a more strict set of rules, although still rather subjective.
Chernobyl was definitely a dramatization, not just “inspired by”. It really did tell the events much as they happened, only taking liberties in things that truly required it for the show to work as drama. Like one thing they did was replace what was a large panel of scientists with one character who made the points the panel did. Does that take away from the veracity of the events? I think not much at least.
Some works will outright lie about it. For example, the TV show and movie Fargo specifically tell you it’s a true story, and even that names have been changed but ‘the rest has been told exactly as it happened’.
To me that’s weird. It doesn’t really add to the end result in my opinion, but would breed distrust when people discovered it was wholly fictional.
Still, even with things that are meant to be accurate portrayal of an event, it’s always good to check the facts. Hollywood just can’t help but fiddle with reality to tell a more interesting story, even when it doesn’t need it.
