5 Worst Movie Swords (Historical)

hey there I'm Matt eastern of Scala gladitoria I'm a historical fencing instructor antique arms dealer and I'm looking at the five worst movie swords let's be more specific about that historically worst it doesn't mean to say they're necessarily bad swords and themselves or bad props or indeed that the movies were bad or the fighting was bad or anything else I'm simply looking at the most inappropriate historically swords found in five movies which I could find very often what we find with movies is that generally speaking the swords are the weapons even armor shown within a movie can be pretty historically accurate or more or less historically accurate whether we're looking at Pirates of the Caribbean or gladiator we can find a general look which generally looks okay and most of the stuff is okay but very often we'll find that heroes or major characters because the director wants them to stand out from the other from the other more or less historically correct people in the movie they're often given things which are odd or strange or large or standout in some way and that's what we see in these examples which follow we find that particular swords just don't fit within that historical period or indeed within any historical period in some cases first up we have the 1995 film Braveheart Braveheart is a a very popular choice for critics of historical movies because quite fundamentally it's full of horrible errors and terrible things but anyway there is one thing which stands out in the movie of Braveheart and that is brave hearts own sword it stands out like a sore thumb because generally speaking a fair amount of equipment shown in the film Braveheart I'm sure the historians will be shouting at me here but a fair amount of it is approximately historically correct so what is historical what Braveheart was set generally speaking we're looking at the life of William Wallace here so William Wallace died in 1305 and the Battle of Stirling Bridge for example who was in 1297 so we're looking at arms and equipment around the year 1300 whilst Mel Gibson portraying William Wallace himself to show various different weapons throughout the movie and in fact obviously we see his troops and the people he fights with and against holding are using many different types of weapons the the weapon which stands out most significantly as his weapon is this large two-handed sword now there's no question that the reason that the directors and the writers decided to give him this large two-handed sword was because there is a famous sword in Scotland which is attributed to William Wallace however that is almost certainly not the sword of William Wallace experiments have shown that it is in fact made of three bits of metal in the blade which may come from three old swords we don't know but certainly this style of sword just simply wasn't around in the year 1300 and you might be saying or maybe it had a new hilt maybe this is a sixteenth or seventeenth century hilt that's been added on according to the style of it but it doesn't seem that the blade is original either but what's kind of ironic is the people making the movie decided to give them a large two-hand sword but it is not the sort of that's featured in in the Wallace sword that survives today although you could say that I suppose that the blade could be somewhat similar and they decided to put a hill which looks slightly more believable on it but is that help believable well no every element of it perhaps apart from the grip I suppose but you could say the grips too long for this period the pommel is just completely wrong for this period the cross guards wrong the leather covering on the ricasso is wrong essentially this is a kind of fantasy sword there's no real analog form for a sword like this existing in history if we took the leather off the ricasso we could say it's approximately a late 15th or mid to late 15th century sword but then of course that puts it at least a hundred and fifty years later than Wallace's own life so we can say without any shadow of a doubt that this sword is just completely wrong for Braveheart I understand why they put it in there but historically it's complete rubbish and even just as a sword even if it was in a movie set in the year 1500 it wouldn't be right either it just doesn't really look like any historical examples that we know of next up we have nineteen six one's else'd starring Charlton Heston in many ways this has parallels with Braveheart from 1995 undoubtedly very part was partly inspired by movies like l-sit who was El Cid historically well he was Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar who lived from around 10:43 to 1099 so we're looking at the 11th century here think the Battle of Hastings think of William the Conqueror think of the Bayeux Tapestry yet what we see in the movie is very different to images we see from the Bayeux Tapestry and and what we would expect to see in the Battle of Hastings with that level of technology they clearly wanted to create a movie which was set during the the higher Middle Ages with more classically medieval symbology so we see Knights with bits of plate armor and lifting visors and Lance's with hand guards sitting on jostling horses El Cid is a strange example in that generally speaking they get some of the weapons and the look of the period kind of correct but there is an awful lot to criticize there and the swords are no exception to that there are in fact three of El Cid swords which are so drastically out of period and so starkly against when it's supposed to be set that being the ten hundreds of the 11th century and the first and probably most striking example is the t's ona sword which in fairness is based on an actual sword which is in Spain and which is believed to have been owned by El Cid but quite simply the hilt of it is in the style of the late 15th century possibly the 16th century and so quite simply El Cid cannot have owned this sword in the way that we see it today some people may argue that the blade may have been realted and indeed the blade may have been part of a sword that belonged to El Cid I personally find this dubious but nevertheless the fact is that the sword would not have looked like that in the ten hundreds because they simply didn't have hilts that look like this next up we occasionally see El Cid Rodrigo going around with what's essentially a side sword a sixteenth-century side sword which is easily noticed by all of its elaborate side bars which give extra protection and in the 16th century when people started wearing swords more regularly in civilian life and indeed the culture of dueling started to expand we do indeed see swords like side swords and rapiers developed with more hand protection but they were not around in the 11th century having a 16th century sword in the 11th century that is 500 years 500 years half a millennium that that's like seeing a car in in a movie about Henry the 8th and finally we see two large two-handed swords used in what is quite frankly one of movie's greatest duels probably and it is an absolutely fantastic fight and you know what I love the movie El Cid and as a kid I absolutely adored it I didn't care about the historic historically correct nature of it but the fact is that these types of two-handed swords yet again don't really aren't really seen until the late 15th century and really the 16th century and these swords are very clearly modeled on two-handed swords from the 16th century so again we have 16th century swords in an 11th century setting 500 years different next up is 2006 YZ 300 or the 300 depending on how you want to call it and you know quite simply we have to admit straight off that this is based on the 1998 comic series by Frank Miller and so therefore it is due a certain degree we could say it's a bit fantasy it's certainly based on graphic novel but nevertheless it is also based on a true event that happened at the Battle of Thermopylae during the Persian Wars in 480 BC now generally speaking the most noticeable thing about this movie is that lack of armor why the Spartans so naked they do seem to like their little their pants and not worrying much else which you know we'll leave that aside this is this is a video about swords now there is one particular sword and that I want to pick up on and that is the sword of king leonidas played by Jared Butler of course now what is that strange sword he's holding well before we go into that I think we need to admit straight off that most of the soldiers most of the Spartans do correctly use saws which look more or less like the zyphus the zyphus was the double edged straight pointed weapon you could say almost it was like an early predecessor of the Roman Gladius and indeed they do use swords which are somewhat like the zyphus so I'm not going to criticize those but the sword that leonie does himself uses is very clearly supposed to be a copies or falcata however the actual form of it as it's represented in the movie really looks quite different to it to a copy or a file Carter as you can see here with these original examples there is a very characteristic shape which it has to be said is somewhat similar to a later Ottoman yet again or indeed like a scaled up version of the Gurkha cookery the characteristic features being a forward recurved blade with a form of curved around pommel sort of curves up over the little fingers and a rudimentary hand guard now all of those features are indeed present on Leonidas this sword but they just kind of got the shape wrong and you know I accept it is based on a graphic novel so it does it is supposed to have a different look to it so I'm not going to dwell on this one but nevertheless just that you're aware this is not really what an actual original copies or falcata really looks like next up we have that famous scene from 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark featuring Indiana Jones against the swordsman and a small piece of trivia originally this scene he famously pulls out the the revolver and shoots the swordsman originally he was supposed to use his whip to disarm the swordsman it was Harrison Ford's own idea to just pull his revolver out but that swordsman what on earth is that sword that he's waving around well quite simply it seems to be a sort of Disney version of a scimitar it looks like something that's come straight out of a 1940's Disney Prince of Persia type Aladdin film I'm not really sure where they got the idea that this swordsman should be armed with this type of giant falchion and actually that's the point what he's actually waving around looks far more like medieval European fashion than anything anything that would have been used in the Middle East at this time in actual fact that clipped point is very characteristic of European fashions and when we look at medieval manuscripts often the set during the Crusades or showing events that happen during the Crusades very often the Crusaders are shown with this fictionalized idea of what the Islamic world were using a source but in fact they weren't and if we look at this sword for example that belonged to the Ottoman ruler Mehmet the Conqueror the Conqueror of Constantinople and you can see that indeed it does have a sort of raised false edge known as a yelman however this is a very different shape to this sort of fashion or clipped back wall most like a giant bowie knife type shape that for some reason 19th century and 20th century fiction has got into its head is the type of sword or the type of scimitar that was used in the Middle East and North Africa at this time it simply wasn't so quite simply he's holding yet again a fantasy sword this is not a sword really that this type of character would have been using against Indiana Jones and 5th and finally to finish off one of my teenage favorite films Robin Hood Prince of Thieves from 1991 and it has to be said that whilst the armor and costume is fairly terrible for the 11 90s when this is supposed to be said most of the swords featured in the movie are actually not too bad they are one-handed what we would call arming swords with approximately 12th century ish hilts on them so they look kind of more or less okay however there are two particular swords which really stand out as incorrect for the 11 90s one being Robin's father's sword and the other being azim or Morgan Freeman's sword now we have to acknowledge of course that Robin Hood is probably fantasy to some degree but nevertheless it's set within a historical period it's very definitely set in the eleven 90s we know that because at the end of the third crusade we see Richard the Lionheart we have King John we know it's very much a stab within a historical period now we must also admit that previous versions of Robin Hood have been equally historically incorrect especially in regards for the swords very commonly with old versions of Robin Hood they used very narrow bladed swords that made it easier for the actors to do the type of staged fencing based on Sabre fencing that they were familiar with so we should at least give credit where credit's due Robin Hood Prince of Thieves does more or less show most of the medieval swords in roughly the right proportions and shapes for what they should be for the end of the 12th century however these two swords really stand out Robin's father's sword is what we would call a long sword it's a two-handed sword now that's not to say that 200 swords absolutely didn't exist in the eleven 90s they were probably just about starting to appear in this sort of proportion with this kind of hand and a half hilt as we would call it however they certainly didn't become common until a hundred years later at the very least and this particular shape of sword that's being held here by the Sheriff of Nottingham is very much a 14th century design or although we have to say with a very strange pummel the pommel being in the form of a hollow cross I don't know of any historical swords which really have pommels like that but if we ignore that and assume that it was a solid wheeled pommel or just this was just a unique example the proportions of their hilts the style of the blade the taper of the blade the style of the cross guard generally speaking we would say that this was a late 14th century sword so you know we're talking about 200 years too far in the future so this sword very much doesn't really belong in this movie although once again I do understand why they put it in there it's a hero's sword it has to stand out it has to look different from the other swords so I do understand it from a moviemaking point of view but the sword in Robin Hood principies that really stands out from the others is Azim sword it's very clearly being designed to stand out and it's supposed to look exotic and foreign and presumably Middle Eastern but yet again we've got this print of Persia Aladdin sort of faked fantasy middle eastern-style scimitar that doesn't seem to have any place in actual history perhaps the only bit of this sword which really seems historical ironically is not the sword it's the scabbard the scabbard you might think how does that scabbard function with such a broad blade how do you draw the blade after the scabbard but we see that it has a slot in the top well this is actually historical we see that many for example Ottoman Turkish Killick swords do in fact have a slot at the top so that you can draw out a broader ended blade but the sword itself seems to be pure fantasy is an extremely curved blade with a very strangely shaped clipped point I can't really think of ever blade that that could be modeled on certainly from this period in this region and the hilt equally is really quite bizarre and at first sight looks almost like certain stars of Indian hilt or Nepalese for example if we look at the Nepalese kora the Nepalese kora fundamentally has a similar hilt to this but not really in these proportions and not was such thick chunky guard and pommel but the overall combination of the hilt and the blade just really bizarre and I can only imagine that the prop designer wanted to have something that not only looked a bit Middle Eastern but looked a bit African and maybe they took a conscious decision in order to put Morgan Freeman's character within within the movie to almost give him his own weapon which didn't really look specifically like the weapon of any particular other culture so there we have it thank you very much for watching these are five of the movies containing the most bizarre or historically incorrect swords that I can think of if you can think of other movies which feature equally wrongly placed weapons swords or any other type of weapon in fact then feel free to post below and maybe I'll do a follow-up video at some point in the future thanks for watching thanks for watching please subscribe we have extra videos on patreon and you can follow us on Facebook

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 644,287

Rating: 4.7585945 out of 5

Keywords: 5 worst swords, movies, 300, braveheart, robin hood prince of thieves, el cid, indiana jones, raiders of the lost ark, review

Id: IOaxqagdM1w

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 07 2018