HISTORY LESSON (SEASON 35)

 

Welcome to History Lesson, where we take a closer look at the movies that dare to tackle real-life events with varying levels of accuracy, drama, and WTF casting choices. These films promise to educate and entertain, but more often than not, they rewrite history with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. We’ll be your guide through the land of miscast biopics, dramatic embellishments, and historical “inspired-by” liberties, breaking down whether these flicks are Golden Reel Award-worthy masterpieces or just a big-budget Wikipedia summary. Either way, it’s more fun than your high school history class—and there’s popcorn.

This time around we will take a look at Season 35's fact-based slate....

HISTORY LESSON: BLOOD AND GLORY

If Tarsem Singh was handed a history textbook about Alexander the Great and Darius III and immediately asked, “Yes, but what if everyone was glistening and on fire?” — Blood and Glory is the result. Visually? Unquestionably stunning. Every frame looks like it was painted in blood and gold leaf. Dave Bautista sacrifices bulls on ziggurats like he’s auditioning for “Most Intense Man Alive,” and Cosmo Jarvis’ Alexander spends much of the film charging into battle as if OSHA regulations were a personal insult. The problem is that once you scrape off the slow-motion gore and incense smoke, the film seems only vaguely aware of how the actual fourth century BCE worked. It plays less like a historical epic and more like a mythological fever dream inspired by someone who once overheard a podcast about Macedon.

The historical liberties here are… bold. Alexander burning his ships upon landing? That’s Cortez, not Macedonia. The siege of Ecbatana culminating in a one-on-one duel where Alexander personally skewers Darius in a dramatic temple square showdown? Spectacular cinema — completely fictional. Darius was betrayed and killed by Bessus while fleeing east, not engaging in gladiatorial death matches under flaming banners. Gaugamela is geographically and tactically compressed into a cinematic blender, timelines are flattened, and characters like Antigonus are killed in places and ways that make historians quietly close their laptops. Even the Siwa oracle scene, while rooted in fact, is rendered as a psychedelic Zeus-origin montage that feels closer to superhero canon than ancient record. The film wants epic inevitability; history, unfortunately, was messier and far more political. What we get instead is an operatic retelling where Alexander personally fights every major battle, Darius smashes pillars like a WWE champion (admittedly well-cast for that), and geopolitical nuance is sacrificed alongside that bull in Persepolis. Gorgeous? Absolutely. Accurate? Only in the broadest “Yes, these men existed” sense of the word.

HISTORY LESSON: THUS DREAMED ZARATHUSTRA

If you ever wondered what would happen if someone adapted Nietzsche’s life but filtered it through a Wagner opera and a DMT trip, here we are. Thus Dreamed Zarathustra is visually staggering - bone churches, desert mirrors, serpents with clock-hearts, centaur Wagners, sphinx Lou Salomé, and a literal book-beast demanding to be written. Franz Rogowski commits fully, wandering through metaphysical fever dreams like a man who just discovered philosophy is not a spectator sport. As filmmaking, it’s audacious and hypnotic - as subtlety, it’s extinct. Donnersmarck doesn’t imply symbolism - he hurls it at you in flaming slow motion until you either ascend to higher consciousness or politely excuse yourself from the theater to sit in silence.

Historically speaking, the film treats Nietzsche’s biography less like a record of events and more like a suggestion box. The real Friedrich Nietzsche did not physically duel abstractions in glass deserts, nor did Wagner gallop around as a mythic centaur issuing operatic ultimatums (though one suspects Wagner might have approved). The core milestones - Röcken, Leipzig, the break with Wagner, Lou Salomé, the Turin horse - are technically present, but they’re submerged beneath so much allegory that accuracy becomes secondary. And yet, in a strange way, it captures something truthful: not the literal details of Nietzsche’s life, but the operatic scale of his ideas. It’s wildly inaccurate as biography, gloriously excessive as art, and absolutely certain that if you’re going to dramatize the death of God, you might as well do it with skull chandeliers.

HISTORY LESSON: THE MOLANDER CASE

There’s a fascinating, morally thorny film buried inside The Molander Case — one about complicity, artistic compromise, and the quiet bargains people made under the Nazi regime — and you can feel it trying to claw its way out of this script. The problem is the film keeps undercutting its own strongest idea: that G. W. Pabst wasn’t a mustache-twirling villain or a simple victim, but something far more uncomfortable — a brilliant artist who chose to stay, adapt, and rationalize. Instead, the film leans a little too hard on dreamy symbolism and narrative withholding, to the point where key emotional beats feel oddly distant. The use of concentration camp prisoners as extras — the film’s most devastating element — lands, but it’s almost treated like a late-act reveal rather than the central moral rot it should be. You keep waiting for the story to really interrogate that choice, and instead it sort of drifts past it like smoke in one of its own scenes.

Historically, the film is playing in a murky but compelling space — Georg Wilhelm Pabst did return to Nazi-controlled Europe and did continue working, and the broader question of artists operating under authoritarian regimes is very real. But the fictional framing of The Molander Case itself muddies the waters in a frustrating way. By hinging everything on a possibly-lost film and a conveniently silent witness in Franz Wilzek, the story sidesteps the harder, more interesting truth: we already know enough about this era to not need a mystery box. The final “he had the film all along” reveal feels less like tragedy and more like narrative sleight-of-hand. It’s the kind of ending that wants to be haunting but instead makes you wonder why the film spent two hours circling a question it never fully commits to answering. Not a disaster — far from it — but frustratingly close to being something great and choosing, like its protagonist, the safer path instead.