Films That Should Have Been Alternate History Instead
- Dec 26, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Dec 27, 2025
By Gary Oswald.
Inglourious Basterds is a 2009 Quentin Tarantino war film about allied agents operating in occupied France during 1944. Those agents are planning an assassination of Adolf Hitler and, to spoil a 16-year-old film, they shockingly actually succeed. Hitler is killed by the French resistance in 1944 rather killing himself in 1945.
That obviously has huge political and military implications. But the film isn't about that, it’s about the suspense of the operation to kill Hitler, and the correct ending of that film is for the operation to succeed. It's the climax that story needs.
And yet, it's something that feels incredibly transgressive, perhaps more than it should. Obviously it never happened, but the entire operation never happened either. There was no promise that this film would stick to the broader historical truths given it used entirely fictional characters.And yet, it flips an assumption you make about historical fiction which you don't even think about, that whatever changes around the margins the big historical events still happen, the ones that there is already innate knowledge of by the audience. Most historical films, however many liberties they take, stick to those big known facts of history: the Titanic will sink, the Valkyrie plot will fail, the USA will become independent etc. U-571 can have the Americans, rather than the British or Polish, capture the first Enigma machine but it can't have the Germans win the war.
But why not?
Sometimes the story demands that fidelity, Titanic needs the ship to sink to provide the story its drama, and sometimes the point is to educate on a particular area of history, so the historical accuracy is what makes the film work. But often it isn't. Something like A Knights Tale has no aspirations to accuracy. If your story works better with a triumphant climax that history doesn't provide you, why not just do what Inglourious Basterds did and ignore it by making your film an Alternate History story instead? Especially once time travel or aliens or monsters are involved (as often happens), why restrict yourself to the facts? Why does the Doctor Who episode where Agatha Christie fights a giant alien wasp have to stick to the story of her life otherwise? There's a giant alien wasp there!
When I think of this, two films in particular come to mind. Both are wonderful period pieces with a strong sense of time and place but also want to tell plots that don't really work within that time and place.
One is 2006's El laberinto del fauno, released in English markets as Pan's Labyrinth. It is a wonderful fairy tale parable about a young girl escaping into a fantasy world to escape her fascist stepfather in 1944 Francoist Spain. It ends in a moment of retribution and revenge with the stepfather is killed by local resistance groups and his son raised by them. Those resistance groups talk in the film about how the D-day landings is a source of hope for them, as it was in OTL, but of course in reality, Franco was neutral, the allies did not attack him, and the Spanish Maquis were largely eliminated by 1950. The ending of triumph the film gives us is a temporary one.
I thought this was a deliberate choice by the writer, but one of my friends (who I saw the film with) argued instead that the film never actually hints at that aftermath within the text. Domestic audiences in Spain, she argued, would know about the survival of the Francoist regime but because that is never spelt out, foreign audiences, unfamiliar with the history, can take the justice of the ending at face value. The film lies by omission. If that is indeed the correct interpretation, and I'd argue it is at least defendable, then why stop there? If you want a triumphant victory over fascism, just make it explicit that in this world Franco's Spain isn't neutral. After all, there's a giant fawn there.
The film that I think would most benefit, from an explicit diversion from established history is probably 2022's The Woman King. A film that I utterly adore.
The Woman King is about the all-female armies (the Mino) of the West African Kingdom of Dahomey during its long wars with the Nigerian Kingdom of Oyo. It is a wonderfully paced and well-acted political war drama with great action scenes and, I think, does an incredible job of capturing a society that is very alien to us in the west. They got so many little cultural details right and one of the reasons I am forgiving of the little inaccuracies (the Mino should all have far more guns during this time period than they do) is they capture the feeling of how the Dahomian armies fought, surprise followed by sudden and overwhelming violence. This army did not fight through the lines and sieges of European armies but by quick brutal surprise attacks and the film really captured that in a way that delighted me.
Having said that, the film also tells a story of Dahomey moving away from the Atlantic Slave Trade and the sale of slaves for moral reasons. And that simply did not happen. Dahomey utterly refused any suggestion that might happen, even when suggested to them by the British. Their economy was reliant on slavery, as was their political system. But it didn't have to be, there had been previous attempts by Dahomian kings to cut down their reliance on the slave trade; it was the way in which the palace had become unable to stand up to the traders that stopped that.
The plot of The Woman King is essentially that a king is placed on the throne of Dahomey in 1822 after a vicious civil war in the palace in which the palace women (women who acted as government ministers and guards within Abomey Palace) supported the new ruler. This king is a traditionalist and leans much more on these palace women, ultimately taking their advice and breaking his previously good relationship with the Afro-Brazilian traders to instead promote the palace women in their place. As such the Kingdom breaks from the slave trade with Brazil in favour instead of trade with the British, who are mentioned several time as abolitionists.
Only, well this king, played excellently by John Boyega, is called Ghezo and the historical figure of Ghezo is important because he was the first king to win without the support of palace women. He instead won due to the support of the Brazilian traders who he relied on instead, side-lining the women, which is why Ghezo never broke from the slave trade and refused to do so when asked by Richard Burton.
So, say you do the exact film, only instead you call Boyega's character Dakpo. Dakpo was the candidate of the palace women who Ghezo defeated. It doesn't have to be a big deal or explained to a casual audience what that means but it tells the less casual audience that yeah, in this world that break from the slave trade can happen, because things are different now. The film is fictional anyway, it's about events that didn't happen. Why stick to the straight jacket of Ghezo must be King because he was King in real life, when you don't intend to use Ghezo's actual personality?
I want to see an historical epic about the Incan Empire where the Spanish just lose. Or a biopic of Anne Boleyn where she doesn't marry Henry VIII. Or a story about Take That where Robbie Williams is really a monkey. Why not?
If you want your story to have your black African kingdom oppose the slave trade or your fascist soldiers in Spain to get their just desserts, just ignore the history that says they can't. It worked when Tarantino did it.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.
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