First of all, talk about the characters in the film and television.
Of course, the characters in historical dramas must have "historical people". Since they have become dramas, they should be able to grasp a lot of information about this person. But once "history" is linked to business, many aspects of this character may be changed, leading to the artificial deviation between this character and the real history. For example, we all know that Zhu Yuanzhang is not very good-looking, but Zhu Yuanzhang in historical film and television dramas is heroic and handsome, and there are many handsome guys ... What I want to say is that it is a real cow to find an ugly actor close to the historical prototype to play the domineering and cunning Zhu Yuanzhang! When people can see a Zhu Yuanzhang who is really close to their own image on the screen, can we say that this role will lack commercial success? In addition to looks, most of the characters in historical dramas are fashionable and well documented. But many times, our directors give up these factors and find some so-called "fashion designers" to design clothes and "image designers" to design hairstyles. I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with looking for a "designer", but in related works, designers should do the work of "beautifying and matching" rather than "designing". It used to be like that. Do they need to "design"? Therefore, after a long period of tossing by these designers, our historical film and television dramas often have "time-space mixed collocation" of clothes, props or weapons, and many contemporary fabrics and decorative materials appear.
Qing Palace Drama is the most popular historical drama theme in China at present. Perhaps many people don't know that the way of shaving hair in Qing dynasty is "three heads and three hairs", that is, hair can only grow in one third of the back of the head. But look at the actual Qing Dynasty drama, how many "clean hairstyles" are in line with the historical truth? Some people shave their heads from above their ears, and some people leave their hair directly to their foreheads ... In fact, that hairstyle had no head in the Qing Dynasty. In terms of hairstyles and costume props of various historical dramas, continental drama is more formal, while Hong Kong and Taiwan dramas are the most nondescript. In addition, regardless of movies or TV, our costume drama extras have always been the "hat army". I know that the director definitely just doesn't want to put makeup and hairstyles on the extras, but in this way, many people mistakenly think that the ancients really like "wearing hats" that much. From the protagonist to passers-by, it's too informal. I don't know how to add the slogan of "history" to the propaganda of the play.
In addition, the age image of historical drama characters is also one of the common mistakes. In order to show some historical events that happened to children, we change children into adults everywhere in the play, which is often misleading. However, many historical figures who died very young often appear as old people in film and television works. I really don't know if this is the fault of the writer or the director. For example, there are the roles of prince and emperor, which often appear as young people and middle-aged people respectively, regardless of the fact that the prince may be only a few years old and the emperor may be a young man in his twenties (Chen plays the middle-aged and old-aged apocalypse emperor in a historical drama, and the apocalypse emperor died at the age of 23; Nie Yuan also played an "eight-year-old" prince, intrigued with the adults. The popular TVB drama "Cai E and Fengxian Xiao" is not rigorous in this respect: DAMIAN LAU in his fifties and sixties plays Cai E in his thirties, while Liang Qichao in his thirties and forties becomes an old man in his sixties, who is also a bearded version of Liang Qichao. It can be said that the chronological fallacy is the most common mistake in historical dramas. Although you can joke with historical figures, since you use the names of historical figures, you should at least give him a not-too-distant image.
Let's talk about "location" first.
At present, the exterior scenes of film and television dramas are very similar (those rough "exterior scenes" built temporarily are not worth mentioning). We often see the same street, the same river, the same building and the same palace in stories of different dynasties and regions. For example, in the Forbidden City, there are actually only two palaces in China's historical dramas: the East Palace and the West Palace in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (often regardless of Nanjing and Beijing), and the West Palace in the Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han and Tang Dynasties. The situation about the Forbidden City is still close to the truth, while those Qin Gong Tang palaces are often quite different from historical facts. Every time I see the "West Palace" such as Chang 'an and Xianyang, the director always likes to depict the huge steps in front of the palace with a wide-angle lens in order to give it momentum, regardless of the actual palace. According to the archaeological findings of Da Ming Palace in Xi 'an, there were no such large-scale stone steps in the palaces in Han and Tang Dynasties, and the so-called "imposing manner" was just what the designers imagined. It is said that when the location of this "West Palace" was just built, the designer imagined the palace according to the "Epang Palace" of the Qin Dynasty (see Qin Song, Qin Qin, Hero and other films. ). Later, the palace was copied and used when a movie with the theme of Han and Tang Dynasties was made. Since Epang Palace is a fictional palace, how can the later Han Palace and Tang Palace be true?
When shooting a large-scale "besieged city" scene, we often see the same city, only changing the place names on the towers. Many siege scenes in warlords attacking Suzhou, condor heroes attacking Xiangyang, Three Kingdoms and Water Margin all show a familiar city: towers are towering, and there must be a large open space in front of the city gate for war. In fact, this practice is very old-fashioned, falling into the trap left by traditional storytelling, because most siege wars in history were carried out in places dozens of miles away from the suburbs, and "hand-to-hand combat" only happened when the city was captured. At that time, the city's main defense force had actually been eliminated in the suburbs. In history, the battle of Makino in Shang and Zhou Dynasties created such a mode of "attacking the city slightly", that is, the war was carried out in the suburbs and did not directly affect the people in the city. The purpose of siege is to grasp the economic lifeline of the city, and the people who paint charcoal are not what the two sides of the war want to see, so this practice has been used for generations. The "Xiangyang Defence War" that lasted for six years in the history of Song and Yuan Dynasties did not take place at the gates of Xiangyang, but in barrier areas such as Xiangfan. After losing the barrier, Xiangyang defenders surrendered voluntarily. Similarly, Tongguan is related to Chang 'an, and Shanhaiguan is related to Beijing. Therefore, the wars against Chang 'an and Beijing mostly took place in Tongguan and Shanhaiguan, which was the basic war mode of "micro-siege" in ancient China. When attacking a place, it is not enough to just hang a place name on the tower. This is perfunctory and misleading the audience.
Nowadays, many film and television dramas often shoot real scenes when it comes to natural location, and the location of the small town in this area is followed by the location of the film and television city, which often leads to the absurdity of "the location of the border of Jiangnan town". If you want to study the trees in the city, there are many mistakes and omissions, so it is not surprising that you can frequently see many trees unique to the south in Chang 'an (many southern trees were transplanted to the north after liberation).
As for the specific historical events, it should be the specialty of various film and television dramas. For specific historical events, screenwriters usually deepen the story, aggravate the contradictions in the events, while retaining the essence of historical events, which is the only desirable place for our historical film and television dramas at present. Even so, due to the limitation of the writer's historical knowledge, "Zhang Guan Dai Li" still happens from time to time, and the most common is the misuse of allusions and poems. For example, Jiang Taigong said, "Exhausted your bones and muscles, starved your skin (the ancients in the pre-Qin Dynasty said that the pre-Qin allusions were not necessarily right)", and Li Shimin said, "The moon, now full of crossing the sea, will be the end of the world at this time (the Tang Dynasty said that Tang poetry is not necessarily right)" and so on. , are all such mistakes. There are also some war dramas in Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties that quoted the military strategy in Sun Bin's The Art of War. I don't know that Sun Bin's Art of War has been lost for a long time, and it didn't reappear until the 1970s. How can it be quoted in the war hundreds of years ago? Even, Sun Wu's art of war appeared in Gou Jian's play. The screenwriter may not know that although Sun Wu was a man of that era, Sun Wu's art of war spread to the world only after wuyue's hegemony. There are also some problems in the use of ancient Chinese characters, such as the misuse of Song script (Song Dynasty) and official script (Late Eastern Han Dynasty), which exposed the weakness of historical knowledge in historical film and television dramas.
Therefore, it is better to treat our historical drama as a costume drama, and directors and producers should not always say that their own things are "historical dramas of the year". It is estimated that directors, producers and screenwriters do not know how much real history these film and television dramas can restore.