13 Historical Events That Seriously Need A Movie

With the neverending stream of superhero movies getting churned out, it makes you kinda crave a blockbuster film based on actual, insane events. Sure, tons of them have been covered, but there's at least 13 gems out there that need some serious big screen attention.

1. Dear_Leader1948 -- Damn, and only 32 competitors? 

The 1904 Olympic Men's Marathon is pretty damn weird. Lack of water and extreme heat nearly killed multiple racers. One participant hitched a ride for much of the way, claimed victory, and was subsequently exposed. A Cuban lost all of his money, had to make his own clothes for racing, ate some rotten apples, got sick, and somehow made it in the top four. There was also a French guy who may have not even participated since he lost his papers.

TL;DR, 14 of 32 initial competitors finished. Movie could pretty much check off every character archetype in the book.

2. nadimmalak -- At the end of the Rasputin movie, they gotta reveal his dong ala Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights.

Rasputin

Or

The 600 and I don't know how many failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro

3. mjk1093 -- I'd go to a movie called 'The War of the Insane.' 

The War of the Insane - French vs. Hmong in Indochina. You could just title the movie the name of the actual war. The Hmong leader regularly climbed trees to receive orders from God, and his forces managed to independently re-invent the cannon.

4. Sam_R_K -- HBO should grab this.

The Punic Wars.

I'd love to see a whole drama on Hannibal Barca and his rivalry with Scipio Africanus.

5. fecksprinkles -- Now I gotta know about this justice boner ending.

The mutiny of the Batavia.

It has everything: the Dutch East India company, a mutiny (obviously), piracy, a shipwreck, rape, massacres, cannibalism, and a rescue against all odds by the ship's officers who rowed a fucking lifeboat from southern Western Australia to Jakarta. It even has a justice boner ending. 

http://museum.wa.gov.au/research/research-areas/maritime-archaeology/batavia-cape-inscription/batavia

6. account_exploded -- This is the chillest bear to ever live.

Less a historical event and more a neat story, Wojtek the Brown Bear was a bear adopted by Polish soldiers that left the Soviet union. The bear drank with the men, wrestled with them, and I believe even fought with them. In order to pay for his rations he was enlisted and promoted to the rank of Corporal. 

He lived out his days in the Edinburgh Zoo, and his old soldier friends would go and visit him, and he would recognize them as an old friend. 

I thought it would be a great good-feelings movie.

7. Adamant_Narwhal -- I'm stressed just reading about it.

the 1944 Battle for Leyte Gulf. It's basically several smaller battles that all took place almost simultaneously, and it's got every kind of naval warfare you could want. You want battleships dukeing it out? Battle of Surigao Strait. You want a lot of planes and dogfights? Battle of the Sibuyan Sea. You want desperation, tension, and all around badass-I'm-not-crying-sacrifice? Battle off Samar.

I mean, dudes were flying planes with little to no armament against battleships as they watched their carriers get overtaken and destroyed, then they had to land on the actual island of Leyte, where the marines are fighting on the ground, and then as soon as they jumped out of thier planes they were handed rifles and told to hunker down and fight off an attack on the airstrip. Crazy, crazy stuff, you can tell I've read a bit about it.

Check out The Battle for Leyte Gulf by Woodward, excellent book, quite short but beautifully written.

8. hotrod13 -- Gonna need to read up on this one.

The assassination of Franz Ferdinand needs a dark comedy.

9. caisblogs -- Get Michael Bay on the phone.

Great fire of London done ridiculous action disaster movie style

10. Occupier_9000 -- Damn.

Witold Pilecki's life. Homeboy was a resistance fighter in the Warsaw Uprising*, shortly after this, he had himself purposely thrown into Auschwitz so that he could organize a slave revolt from within the camp.

11. wilsonh915 -- More events = more sequels

The French Revolution is sadly underrepresented in film. Part of the reason is that it's a sprawling complex event with numerous potential starting and stopping points. It would be a feat to contain any kind of coherent history of the whole thing in the space of a reasonable length movie. However, there are so many little stories and dramas within the revolution that could be adapted - the Vendee uprising, Robespierre's fall, his relationship with Danton (yes, I'm aware of the Wajda film), the women's march on Versailles, the trial of the king or queen. We could go on and on. You don't need the whole story to dramatize these snapshots. It's such a rich and important moment in world history. The French Revolution deserves better cinematic treatment.

12. Arumple -- Seems like the man for the job. 

The Lewis and Clark expedition, maybe a mini series like band of brothers since Stephan Ambrose wrote "band of brothers" and a great Louis and Clark book "Undaunted Courage"

13. DrColdReality -- The original Westworld.

"The toughest town in the wild west," Palisade, Nevada.

Just about everything people believe about the wild west is a myth. In particular, the notion that it was a violent place with nearly nonstop gun battles was purely a creation of the dime novels of the time. Actually, wild west towns tended to be generally peaceful, boring places. The big cities of the east had much higher rates of violence. Most towns forbade the carrying of weapons in town.

But in the late 1870s, the town of Palisade decided they wanted to give the eastern dandies passing through on the railroad a little thrill. So they started staging gunfights when the trains stopped in town. It started out with just a single western-style quickdraw pistol duel (which, BTW, was an entirely fictitious creation of the dime novels and never actually happened), but eventually it turned into a veritable wild west Disneyland, with staged bank robberies, Indian raids fought off by US Cavalry, all the WW cliches. And everybody in the area was in on it, the townsfolk, the Army, the Indians, the railroads,...

This probably helped cement the idea in the popular imagination that the wild west cliches were real until 30 years or so later when the fledgling movie industry made them stick for good.

from CollegeHumor: Pictures https://ift.tt/2J9urSS