Disaster Movies & TV Shows Based On Real Events That Get The History Right

The Impossible tells the story of the Bennetts, a British family who spend the Christmas holiday at a resort in Thailand. Disaster strikes when a tsunami makes landfall, ripping apart the family and causing massive devastation across the region.

The Bennetts are a stand-in for the Belón family, who survived the real-life Thai tsunami of 2004 that took the lives of 230,000 people - some of whom have never been identified.

When the BBC asked María Belón, the family's matriarch, how accurate the film was to their experience, she responded: “The ball [that a character holds when the tsunami hits] was yellow and in the film it is red. The rest is exactly the same.”

Other survivors agree. Simon Jenkins particularly praised the film for shining a light on the local Thai community, who quickly rallied to help those impacted by the tsunami:

Both for my (then) 16-year-old self and the Belón family, it was the Thai people who waded through the settled water after the first wave and struck to help individuals and families. There is immense subtext that goes with this. The Thai people had just lost everything - homes, businesses, families - yet their instinct was to help the tourists. This sentiment was also shown in the hospital, wherein about 60% of the film is based. The portrayal of the medical staff at Takua Pa hospital was also amazingly accurate. Their reactions to the event saved thousands of lives, including several of my friends' and my own.

Chernobyl, HBO's unflinching look at the 1986 meltdown at the titular nuclear power plant in Ukraine, goes in deep to demonstrate what happens to a human body when it's exposed to dangerous levels of radiation.

High amounts of penetrating radiation discolor skin before causing blood vessel collapse, bone marrow failure, and internal organ shutdown. Symptoms include vomiting, diarrhea, hemorrhaging, high fever, cognitive impairment, seizures, and coma. People exposed to more than 70-80 rads of radiation typically pass within days or weeks.

Those exposed to lesser amounts may suffer anemia, immune system problems, fertility issues, have babies with birth defects, and develop certain types of cancer years later. Of the 600 workers who descended on Chernobyl shortly after the incident, 134 endured acute radiation sickness. Of those, 28 passed with 90 days, and most survivors took years to recover. According to the BBC, thousands more people have likely had their long-term health impacted.

In Chernobyl, the workers at the plant aren't the only ones vulnerable to radiation poisoning - even people living in the surrounding community suffer from acute radiation syndrome.

Engineer Oleksiy Breus witnessed the effects of radiation poisoning firsthand. He was at Chernobyl shortly after the explosion and saw some of the plant employees who had been there when it occurred:

They were not looking good, to put it mildly. It was clear they felt sick. They were very pale. [Operator Leonid] Toptunov had literally turned white… I saw other colleagues who worked that night. Their skin had a bright red colour. They later died in hospital in Moscow. 

Radiation exposure, red skin, radiation burns and steam burns were what many people talked about but it was never shown like this. When I finished my shift, my skin was brown, as if I had a proper suntan all over my body. My body parts not covered by clothes - such as hands, face and neck - were red.

Physician Lydia Zablotska explained to the University of California San Francisco that acute radiation syndrome was not as widespread as the miniseries portrays. She also describes what first responders faced at Chernobyl from a clinical perspective:

…There were no cases of ARS among the general public living in cities and villages around the Chernobyl power plant. 

Large doses of radiation could affect a number of systems in the body that are necessary for survival. Patients with ARS could develop a bone marrow syndrome, which suppresses their immunity, or a gastrointestinal syndrome, which would lead to damage to the lining of the intestines and associated infection, dehydration, and electrolyte imbalance. Then, a couple days later, the circulatory system collapses so people start having blood volume issues and so forth. The whole body is essentially collapsing.

To capture all of these varied and startling effects, makeup and prosthetics designer Daniel Parker actually had to study the physiological process of radiation poisoning, as very few photographs showcasing it in humans exist. According to Parker:

My research initially started off with trying to get a hold of photographs, but there are very few photographs, and most of the photographs that are there are not honest—propaganda photographs that were made up by the USSR… So I then started reading, and read and read. I read [about] the process—the actual chemical process—what happens to the human body when it’s exposed to this much radiation. From that reading, I then understood what happens to the human body, and I then started to develop the makeups and started doing tests.

In the autumn of 1991, a Nor'easter struck New England and Canada's Atlantic Provinces, wreaking havoc on the region. Among its casualties was the Andrea Gail, a commercial fishing vessel from Massachusetts that disappeared off the coast of Nova Scotia. Reportedly all six crew members perished.

Nine years later, Hollywood dramatized the tragedy in The Perfect Storm. Because there were no survivors, filmmakers took creative license in retelling the crew's final hours. In particular, it imagines that a massive, 100-foot wave ultimately overwhelms the ship and sinks it.

As National Weather Service meteorologist Joe Dellicarpini explained, this wasn't impossible:

The depiction was fairly accurate. The last scene of the very large wave of nearly 100 feet that essentially sunk [the Andrea Gail]. It's not out of the question that there were 100-foot waves in that storm. There was a buoy in Atlantic Canada that recorded one about that height.

The Finest Hours depicts the real-life rescue of the crew of the SS Pendleton. An article published by the National Endowment for the Humanities states the ship was “a T2-SE-AI tanker, built on the cheap during World War II. They were known for breaking in half.”

That's exactly what happened in 1952. During a voyage, the Pendleton sailed into a blizzard - and ripped in half. A US Coast Guard crew from Chatham, MA, came to the sinking ship's rescue. 

In The Finest Hours, Chris Pine plays Boatswain's Mate First Class Bernard "Bernie" Webber, a real-life member of the rescue team. In a scene in the movie, Webber must navigate the ship over a bar - a dangerous stretch of currents and waves brought up by a low sea bed. 

JoJo Mains, a former member of the US Coast Guard, commended the film's depiction of “crossing the bar,” or sailing over the bar:

…the scene where [Chris Pine] closes his eyes to count is real, to this day guys still do it, and I used to do it. Station Chatham, where the team were based, is on the outer arm of Massachusetts Bay where it is exposed to the entire Atlantic Ocean, so when the wind comes from the North East [sic] it creates mayhem in that part of the world. 

When we see Bernie closing his eyes and counting as he crosses the Bar, he is counting the waves and listening for his opportunity to cross the Bar. There is no magic piece of technology that allows you to do that, but there is night vision and other things available now which these guys simply would not have had. I was so impressed by that tiny fact that was shown in the film, it was so factual.

Apple TV+'s Five Days at Memorial recounts how a New Orleans hospital evacuated its patients in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. In the series, medical staff choose which patients should be evacuated. The chaos of the moment prompts some to make drastic decisions - including possibly euthanizing patients who are near death.

Dr. Bryan King, a real-life physician who worked at the hospital, spoke to CNN about what really happened:

…we focused on all the patients. We treated all the patients the same, with the same degree of care.

But the DNR [do not resuscitate] patients that were there, they were mixed in the population with the patients who weren't DNR. We didn't separate them out and say, the DNRs are here. We gave them DNR status. But we didn't separate them out and say, sit them over here and we will take the other patients… to some area of the hospital… I think that the patients that were on the second floor, probably, at some point… there were things done that shouldn't have been done.

Once officials were able to get into the hospital, they found 45 corpses. Toxicology reports indicate at least some of those patients had passed unnaturally, suggesting medical euthanasia may have ended their lives.

In August 79 CE, the Roman city of Pompeii disappeared beneath a cloud of volcanic ash. Mt. Vesuvius, a volcano in the Bay of Naples, erupted and killed whomever remained in the city.

Some people survived by fleeing immediately - and heading in the right direction, away from lava and ash - including Pliny the Younger, who wrote the only known eyewitness account of the disaster. Despite Pliny's writings, scientists have spent centuries trying to piece together what exactly happened that August day. 

Hollywood has made its own contributions to this debate, and several films and TV series have attempted to depict the city's final hours. Pompeii, a 2014 drama/adventure starring Kit Harington and Emily Browning, is the latest entry. 

The filmmakers attempted to depict the ancient city as accurately as possible. As archaeologist Sarah Yeomans told Scientific American, they were largely successful, depicting buildings in the right places and revealing details of everyday Roman life, like graffiti on walls and stones in the street for pedestrians.

The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius was, of course, a centerpiece of Pompeii, and filmmakers took care to properly depict it. Scientist Dr. Rosaly M. Lopes-Gautier expanded upon this to Mental Floss:

They got the sequence of events right: the fact that there were earthquakes before the main eruption, that a big explosion happened during the day but pyroclastic flows [rapidly moving flows of rock and hot gasses] only reached Pompeii much later (in the movie, it's during the night; in reality, it was early the next morning). The explosion cloud, the pyroclastic flows, [and] earthquakes, were all done very realistically.