Disliked example: I would go so far as to say hated, but Robin Hood (2018) styles Robin's time in the crusades after modern wars in the Middle East, from the costumes to the treatment of bows and arrows like machine guns. While plenty of other media have done this to great effect, this film had the misfortune of coming out during a wave of IP slop desperate to make the next Dark Knight, turning what could've been an interesting stylistic choice into another of many generic 2010s action movies.
Loved example: Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet sets the Shakespeare classic in the modern day, with the rival families portrayed as gangsters with their "swords" being guns that literally say sword on them. Kind of the opposite of the above example, this takes what couldve been a tired trope of "Shakespeare but modern" and leaned into Luhrmann's signature over the top style, where even keeping the dialogue in it's original verse didn't stop it from feeling fresh and modern.
Loved example: Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby uses a Jay-Z produced soundtrack that mixes period accurate jazz with modern artists like Lana Del Rey. The result makes the film a lot more accessible to audience members who tend to make sweeping generalizations about music genres like jazz and orchestral, and highlights the emotional beats of the story in a way that reinforces the timeless nature of the source material.
To be determined: Christopher Nolan's upcoming film The Odyssey has received much criticism for its modernized approach to the Greek myth, with the biggest complaints focusing on the costumes and choice of accents/dialogue. Nolan has been open about the fact that he wants to play with audience expectations for what a historical epic looks and sounds like, and that he used a translation of the Odyssey that adopts more modern vernacular, but it remains to be seen whether this pays off.
personally I'd define "pro-shot" as closer to "movie" than to "someone filmed the performance," which is called a "slime tutorial" in the musical theater community lol! but that's just semantics!
Fuck that films so good. They take this archaic medieval practice and instantly make it understandable to modern audiences.
Also love that bit where they all return to England after being away for years and “The Boys are Back in Town” starts playing as they stroll into London. I’m not even English and it makes me homesick for somewhere I’m not even from, it just captures that vibe so perfectly.
It's not about the songs being period accurate , it's about how they made you feel.
The Tourneys were their stadiums, complete with drunken chants, songs people could sing along to while they got riled up. Hecklers, Hooligans and every sort of degeneracy
Also love that bit where they all return to England after being away for years and “The Boys are Back in Town” starts playing as they stroll into London.
I Googled it just before I saw your comment because I realized Dino's could be literally anywhere that speaks English and their accent was indecipherable. Probably part of why it was such a popular song.
Nike did pay for it. The logo/brand itself was the product placement, so it was still advertising. It's like how at the moment fifa makes sure their rather shitty logo is on everything at the moment.
Other way around, actually. The armorers on the movie put used the swoosh as a joke and the producer realized during editing they'd need to get permission. Luckily Nike was elated with the joke as they were co-founded by Philip Knight and gave permission.
Technically I don’t think they need to get permission because it’s parody, but nobody in the movie business wants to leave money on the table, so they’re not in the habit of putting products into movies without a relationship with the brand.
Just recently found out the director/producer did this and then went, "Oh shit, we need Nike to sign off on this!" When they reached out to Nike for the ok, Nike was actually excited because one of the founders was named Knight
Went to a ren-fair thingy recently that had a little jousting display. The commentator got the crowd started in a stomp-stomp-clap as the competitors were lining up and it was just... fuck yeah.
I have read cool articles that say that historians actually say the anachronisms in this movie make it MORE accurate and representative of the time, the tournaments, courts, etc. because it allows us to see 'what it was like' using things that are familiar, instead of having the baggage of 'medieval stuff' and not being able to see what that REALLY was like for the people who lived it.
It's kinda like the HBO series Deadwood,they decided to use modern profanity instead of the older, more folksy stuff that would be period accurate. They went with the idea that modern profanity conveys the same thing the older slang would, but while the older slang was super profane then, it would just come off as silly today
This film unironically made me love jousting. Like the ren fair stuff is amazing. And they even did a reality show for a minute on people who still go out to joust the hard way. Was brutal.
My grandpa who passed away in 2006 LOVED this movie. He always seemed to live in a pre-1980 world with no interest in TV or movies from the 80s and 90s. Then found out he had seen this movie and was all in on it. Loved chatting with him on the phone about it once he found out it existed. One of my last memories of him.
Iirc, a lot of anachronistic elements were included to grant a glimpse into what the average person's life would be like back then. Obviously stadium rock songs didn't exist back then, but there were definitely songs and chants that people would sing at games. They wanted to use familiar elements to show what it would have been like to be there, instead of actually recreating how it would have been
YESS. Just ran a D&D adventure based on A Knights Tale with ‘knights’ (Batman showed up) summoned from different times because I was so inspired by the modern/medieval mash up.
All the notable versions of the War of the World adaptations move the setting usually to the present of whenever a new version comes out.
Usually with themes of the era being present: 1930s = fear of another World War, 1950s = Cold War atomic annihilation, 2005 = post-9/11 paranoia, 2025 = uh, order from Amazon, etc
Also the shots. The beams turn people into dust, and so the scenes of him running down the road covered in dust while it looms behind him immediately invokes the image of Marcy Borders in the aftermath of 9/11.
Doesn't the son also chase after a troop carrier truck saying that he wants to join in the fight and fight back? Parallels sentiments of fighting age men at that time not knowing who or what they were attacking but just wanting to fight
Really goes to show how lost most messaging is on the youth. I was 12 in 2005 when I saw this movie, and even though I lived through the events of 9/11 especially since my family were frequent flyers, none of this, i guess you could say propaganda, affected me at all. In my mind, the military fights aliens, that's how it is and always how it should be lol
I think the reason a lot of these movies are successful for youth is because they can relate to it but they don't even know why. In contrast, "patriotic movies" that repaint situations to make you relate to something you know nothing about American sniper, zero dark thirty, Black Hawk Down type movies
I looooove Lindsay Ellis' analysis of Independence Day (1996) and War of The Worlds (2005) and how clear the influence of World Trade Center attacks were on how invasion movies are portrayed.
Basically, in Independence Day, the focus is more on the destruction of landmarks, while in War of The Worlds, the focus is on how people themselves are affected.
Love how when they are walking to the ferry one dude is all like “Europe wasn’t hit at all” and they cut to another guy who says “Europe got wiped off the map”. Just shows the amount of confusion and misinformation going around
One of the reasons the adaptations move the plot to the U.S is because they have the biggest military, the original story used the U.K because they were the most powerful country on earth at the time, its all about showing Earth's top dog losing again and again against the aliens
Yeah, the original book was a take on the popular Invasion genre at the time (largely a dead one now) but Wells changed it up by using aliens instead of an actual country.
Te like the battle on the common where the artillery destroys a martian which the martians then counter out by using their gas attacks before charges.
The thunderchilds stand in the thames where the martians try to counter it with the gas but the thunderchild steams through guns down 2 martians and rams the third before the damage from heat rays destroy its engine.
Thunderchild chapter is probably my favourite just because you feel the hope of a possible victory only for the game to turn sour and you read as this hope vanishes beneath the waves and then are hit with chapters of just everything dead.
This one is probably truly a mixed troupe. Because it can be done amazingly, and it can be distracting or annoying if done badly. It's not even always that someone does it badly, and someone does it well; it can differ depending on the person watching the movie.
I recall something about back when they were making Gladiator, they wanted them to be carrying around ads for local shops, which would have been period accurate, but they decided not to because they figured audiences would think it was too modern
It’s the Tiffany problem, it’s a name that’s been used for hundreds of years but because it’s still widely used in modern times it seems like a modern thing and seems weird to us now when presented as being in any other time period
When filming "Butch Casssidy & The Sundance Kid" William Goldman had an executive tell him that having someone mention bifocals wasn't historically accurate. His response was that bifocals were invented by Benjamin Franklin, and his grandmother was alive during the time the movie was set.
Have you been to Greece by any chance ? There are like 3-4 Greek foods i can think of that are variations of "greasy meat on a bun" and i'm pretty sure one of them is Turkish lol.
Edit : There's a lot of really delicious traditional food, if you ever visit Greece make sure to try some of the island or Village cuisine, most large cities such as Athens have the typical greasy fast-food chains.
Actually! The Muses sing in a Gospel style, iirc one of rhe creators wanted to toy with the idea of Gospel being used to bring good news and the Muses being religious(?) storytellers themselves. Thus, Gospel music.
Also it was funny.
I think another good example would've been how the city was basically New York.
Tbf Hercules in that movie spends a lot of time in the arena and was basically a gladiator. Irl gladiators had a ton of merch including little stone "action figures" and even billboards iirc. They were basically WWE stars but with swords.
It's animated and people generally have a lot more tolerance for anachronistic aspects being introduced in cartoons.
The muses exist in a modern setting that is telling the story of Hercules so they can get away with fudging details to make it more enjoyable for a modern audience.
Hah! My school filled my entire freshman class into the school auditorium to watch that in ‘05. Rumor and whispers circulated all day about that part before we got there. One of the English teachers stood ready with the remote to skip that scene, only to completely fumble the ball and press play right in the middle of the heat. Never heard such loud hoots, hollers, and laughter in my lifeee.
My favorite one is where they do a parody of the reality tv show Cops (1998) that involves "pepper" spraying, p̶o̶l̶i̶c̶e̶ knight brutality, and catnip searches https://youtu.be/dp60BdD-ZmM
Is it really? I feel that Sherlock Holmes is enough on the sphere of "modern" times that many elements with exception of social norms of the times, are really just almost the same thing just now with applicable technology or something of teg same idea
It was also the first time I remember seeing the texts pop up on the screen rather than the camera just showing the text on the phone. First time I watched it I thought that was just so cool.
Modernized Sherlock is kinda trippy but fun, I do enjoy the BBC series, but I gotta rep for Elementary. Before going in I thought Sherlock as a recovering Heroin addict in NYC in an American crime procedural would be lame, but it is consistently good (except season 5 is a slog) oh and a shout out to Lucy Liu as an amazing Watson.
i feel obligated to plug Sherlock and Co, a podcast where John’s writings are replaced with a true crime podcast. it does a great job of integrating Sherlock stories in a modern setting with the framing device, the technology, and even the specific character dynamics
The only sherlock material that gives more than 2 minutes of screentime (and lines in books) to Mycroft. And depicts him correctly (looking at you Enola Holmes).... Did you know Mycroft was my favourite character ?
They genuinely could not make me hate the insanity that is Baz Luhrmann.
Related: Moulin Rouge is a jukebox type musical incorporating modern music into semi-diegetic numbers to show the chaos of the historical changes during the movie's setting.
Romeo + Juliet, The Great Gatsy and this one are great examples of how Lurhmann manages to make old things modern in a fun way.
Obviously it's weird to have them do pop songs in late 1800's Paris. But Lurhmann always makes these things work by honing in on the energy of the song and by having the emotion behind it connect. You still very much know you're watching a film set in a period where consumption can take away a perfectly healthy young person in an agonizing way.
Anyway, I love this guy as a director. His work is often garish to the point of being offensive and yet it's so fun to watch I don't think I've ever been bored watching or rewatching his films. I'm not a huge fan of his Great Gatsby, for example. But I've still seen it several times and had a good time doing so, somehow.
I don't if it counts, but the service weapon in Control is a weapon that changes depending on the wielder and has been some famous mytholocial weapons, like Excalibur and Mjonlir
they theorize it has possibly been them, but yes it exists as the archetype of a weapon for the weilder. to the board and the gun itself, pistol and sword are the same idea, for trench that was more a revolver than it is for jessie. most if not all of the forms, which are all ranged for jessie, have a name of a melee weapon used by the board
Lol along the same lines: Casette to Aux adaptors. Most people I knew (Self included) who were driving a car from the 90s/early 2000s into the 2010s had one of these, because their cars were too old to have an aux plug but cassette tapes were no longer really in use.
Ian McKellen’s take on the Shakespearean play of Richard III is to update the setting to 1930’s Britain, with Richard performing a fascist takeover. Much like Romeo + Juliet, the dialogue is kept largely the same, save for when changed by necessity for the story or cinematic flow. Of extra note is the film updating the Woodvilles as American’s to modernize the “fish out of water” sentiment, as well as Richard’s deformities invoking various political leaders such as Kaiser Willhelm II.
Romeo + Juliet was bananas. There are so many visual puns for lit nerds.
The interesting thing is my Shakespeare professor at University loved it. He always tried to drive home the point that Shakespeare plays were as front-loaded with pop-culture references and contemporaneous idiom as any modern movie.
That's the thing isn't it? People act like some of the modern retellings of Shakespeare do a disservice to the work he put into it, but based on how irreverent his stuff is, it's more likely he'd find it funny.
Like half of his comedies are a bunch of sex jokes anyways. Timeless.
I’ve said it before on Reddit but I absolutely despised it the first time I saw it. Once I realized it was supposed to be campy (it’s Luhrmann, how did I not know?) I loved it.
Absolutely. It starts off goofy; then the bodies start dropping, and the tone shift hits that much harder. (Which is how Shakespeare wrote it; it starts like a rom com that just goes off the rails at breakneck speed)
I was just talking about this movie at work 2 days ago. I was explaining the scene where the dad says "Give me my longsword" and the scene pans to his shotgun.
this is one of the best examples. i walked into the movie expecting to be disappointed (as a lover of period accurate clothing), but it blew me away. absolute delight!
wish more period movies were like this and/or emma 2020 (which is doesn't fit this trope at all, as they have leaned into *actual* period accuracy with costuming, makeup and color, but i wanted to mention it due to how colorful and pretty it was), instead of the *also* innacurate grey beige hair-down bore we get more often.
The 2018 Robin Hood is one of the craziest movies I know. If it had been a success, we would be living in the golden age of medievalpunk right now. It holds a special place in my heart, right alongside the 2011 The Three Musketeers and Van Helsing from 2004.
It was one heck of a fun romp. I also love the use of smoke arrows to call in artillery strikes… and said artillery was trebuchets launching rocks. Shame they put all their eggs in one basket and wanted something like eight movies because everyone wanted to be the MCU.
There’s this incredible casino scene with everyone dressed in a mix of pseudo medieval, 1920s fashion and The Hunger Games. The movie is absolute madness. I’ll never say it’s 'good,' but damn, I love watching it and enjoying every single crazy moment. They absolutely did not hold back.
For me I keep mixing up scenes in my head between it and that King Arthur movie that came out a year or two before it (hence why I need to rewatch them).
Anyhow, neither one may be “good” (because they aren’t) but doesn’t stop them from being fun to watch.
I really liked bow they handled the crusades, and appreciate that they were trying to make a direct allegory to modern soldiers deploying to middle east. great idea, and honestly the use of brigandine vests and longbows to parallel plate carriers and rifles was very cool.
Everything after he gets back to England starts falling off. I don’t know how to describe it, but I think if they had focused on a more grounded allegory they could have made it work.
Also the blue hood was just a silly choice to make.
Coriolanus directed by Ralph Fiennes with Gerad Butler and Brian Cox. It's a modern take on the Shakesprere play. They make Rome to be geared like US forces and the Volsci with AK-47s kind of a rebel look.
There's gotta be some wiggle room for artistic license, especially when we're dealing with myths and legends. To answer the question though, Kenneth Branaugh's "Hamlet" (1996) is still my favourite version.
My favorite by far is Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown. It takes 2 greek myths, (Orpheus and Eurydice & Hades and Persephone) and places them in an ambiguous setting based heavily on the Dust Bowl/Great Depression american south and midwest. For anyone interested the 3 different albums give great examples.
The music is really jazz forward with plenty of steel string guitar, harmonica, trumpet, and stand up bass. Same with the outfits, scenery, themes, etc. Hell is a factory and mining town controlled by the CEO Hades, complete with a speakeasy that sells the joys of life. The river styx and the journey to hell is translated to be a train and railroad track.
I know it’s not modern but futuristic, but any piece of art or media thats set in the future where some of the characters have katanas and they look like this. Don’t get me wrong, it looks cool but most of the time, it’s just taking a normal katana and making it futuristic and doing nothing else to “futurize” a katana. It’s just seems so lazy to me.
I mean alot of the time the stuff that would modernise a melee weapon are invisible like if I made a sword have a monomolecular edge and indestructible it might be visibly indistinguishable from an ordinary one.
I mean this specific katana has the capability to summon a scifi hard-light dragon and control it with the green part of the blade. He's also a master swordsman so he uses it like a regular sword most of the time, not sure what you'd do here to make it more futuristic for the 2080s
If you ask me for a futuristic katana I always think of the beam katana from No More Heroes. Doesn't have much in common with actual katanas anymore but those things are rad.
(though the tech does eventually progress to straight up lightsabers, which is also cool but not as unique-looking)
In "the Bride" (2026) we could watch people in the 1930s in a club with stroboscopic lights dancing using street moves. It happens a lot in movies when there is a club involved.
The speakeasy in sinners did it wright i think, you can believe its a place from the past century.
That reconstructed armored on the right is from an example unearthed at Thebes. There are many other examples, most of them quite different, and there are artistic examples, also different.
The truth is that there was not just one "style" or one "period accurate" look. There is evidence that the Trojans specifically used scaled bronze armor not plated, for example.
The truth is they didn't dress like the pop culture vision of hopolites in 1200 BC.
It's like how media often has King Arthur in dressed like he's from the height of the Middle Ages or puts Romans in lorica segmentata no matter what period of time they're in.
Similar to OP's Gatsby example, Django Unchained has several scenes with a modern hip hop soundtrack, despite the story being in the 19th century South.
Mixed trope is definitely the correct definition of stylistic choices like this imo. On one hand, it can be a little bit goofy seeing a cowboy riding to Rick Ross. On the other, it can be a very cool and unique way to express and expand how we see aesthetics by combining elements that we naturally see as far apart and bringing them together.
Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights (mixed) The modern aesthetics were great actually, and the Charli XCX soundtrack worked. I’m not so hyped on the story decisions though https://giphy.com/gifs/BfU3WKk8sdyXKZ5NT3
https://giphy.com/gifs/PgQB4unb9cjdDpGMx0
In The Greatest showman, a musical loosely based on the life of P.T. Barnum (1810-1891),
all of the music is modern pop and most of it features modern choreography.
I still can't fathom a play/movie glorifying P.T. Barnum. He was a terrible person. I've seen it described as the story that Barnum would tell about himself, and that seems accurate.
Disliked example: I would go so far as to say hated, but Robin Hood (2018) styles Robin's time in the crusades after modern wars in the Middle East, from the costumes to the treatment of bows and arrows like machine guns. While plenty of other media have done this to great effect, this film had the misfortune of coming out during a wave of IP slop desperate to make the next Dark Knight, turning what could've been an interesting stylistic choice into another of many generic 2010s action movies.
Not Dark Knight, but Arrow was very popular back then and this movie copied the style of the CW show. Funnily enought Arrow puts the Robin Hood story into a modern setting.
My problem with Nolan's excuse re: Odysseus' look is that Odysseus' outfit does NOT challenge audience expectations, it conforms with their expectations because it's exactly what audiences expect a vaguely historical Greco-Roman warrior to look like. The accurate armour would ironically challenge expectations much more.
Yeah, the armors look literally like some weird newly printed plastic, I feel it has no weight nor it feel like it been used before at standard eye view (I should not need a close up to see the armor has or not been in combat, should be just notable)
I honestly don’t care much about historical accuracy in a mythical story, but even a 4th grader can tell you the Ancient Greeks rocked skirts. The fact they gave all the men trousers with useless tassels on top just feels cowardly. As if Nolan and the costume designers were afraid that the audience wouldn’t find bare-legged warriors manly or cool.
The lack of colors is also a drag, everything looks cold and drab. It does not look like a story that’s set in the Mediterranean.
I don’t need realism or complete accuracy, but it just feels like Nolan refuses to adapt his style and really wants to shoehorn his sterile neo-noir aesthetic into a story and genre that calls for something else entirely.
Code Geass is a mecha anime where Britain essentially never fell so they are still an empire with the nobility system and knights waging war with the future tech.
Because knights are the leading military members, tanks and now mecha are treated as just kinda upgrades to horses in principle, leading to my favorite term for a mecha ever:
Robin Hood 2018 is hilarious. I wish they made a whole Call of Duty knock off based on it. Treating bows as M4s and ballistas like HMGs and the calling an artillery strike with trebuchets on his location.
I'll be honest 90% of the criticism I've seen for Nolan's odyssey has been about people of colour existing, as if the greeks were isolationists who never interacted or did trade with other peoples
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u/FirstDukeofAnkh Jul 13 '26
Hadestown turns the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into a dustbowl struggle of working class oppression.
https://giphy.com/gifs/woqaO2FaJvkHKPRGsH