英语专业晨读美文-文化篇 8 Movies I

（单词翻译）

[00:01.20]The Most Historically Inaccurate¹ MoviesⅠ
[00:06.65]10 000 B.C.
[00:10.10]Director Roland Emmerich is usually a stickler² for realism.
[00:14.40]So we hate to inform him that woolly mammoths were not,
[00:18.22]in fact, used to build pyramids.
[00:19.76]Woolly mammoths weren't even found in the desert.
[00:22.84]They wouldn't need to be woolly if that were the case.
[00:25.53]And there weren't any pyramids in Egypt until 2 500 B.C. or so.
[00:29.70]Gladiator
[00:32.92]Emperor Commodus was not the sniveling sister-
[00:35.60]obsessed creep portrayed³ in the movie.
[00:37.63]A violent alcoholic⁴, sure, but not so whiny⁵.
[00:41.39]He ruled ably for over a decade rather than
[00:45.04]ineptly for a couple months.
[00:46.61]He also didn't kill his father, Marcus Aurelius,
[00:50.37]who actually died of chickenpox.
[00:52.42]And instead of being killed in the gladiatorial arena⁶,
[00:55.69]he was murdered in his bathtub.
[00:57.56]300
[00:59.49]Though this paean⁷ to ancient moral codes
[01:02.05]and modern physical training is based on
[01:03.61]the real Battle of Thermopylae,
[01:04.97]the film takes many stylistic liberties.
[01:07.55]The most obvious one being Persian king Xerxes was
[01:10.81]not an 8-foot-tall leader. The Spartan⁸ council
[01:14.11]was made up of men over the age of 60,
[01:16.26]with no one as young as Theron
[01:18.30](played by 37-year-old Dominic West).
[01:21.35]And the warriors⁹ of Sparta went into battle
[01:24.02]wearing bronze armor, not just leather Speedos.
[01:26.92]The Last Samurai
[01:28.53]The Japanese in the late 19th century did hire
[01:32.10]foreign advisers¹⁰ to modernize¹¹ their army,
[01:34.39]but they were mostly French, not American.
[01:36.83]Ken Watanabe's character was based on
[01:39.66]the real Saigo Takamori who committed ritual suicide,
[01:43.66]in defeat rather than in a volley of Gatling gun fire.
[01:47.57]Also, it's doubtful that a 40-something
[01:50.50]alcoholic Civil War veteran,
[01:51.79]even one with great hair, would master the chopsticks
[01:55.37]much less the samurai sword.
[01:57.98]Apocalypto
[01:59.87]This one movie has given entire
[02:02.04]anthropology departments migraines.
[02:04.40]Sure the Maya did have the odd human sacrifice
[02:07.51]but not to the Sun God, and only high-ranking captives
[02:11.59]taken in battle were killed. The conquistadors
[02:14.88]arriving at the end of the film made for unlikely saviors:
[02:18.32]an estimated 90% of indigenous¹² American population
[02:23.42]was killed by smallpox¹³ from their infected livestock¹⁴.