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True fiction

Best lies have some truth in them. Hollywood knows that and usually blends true facts effortlessly with the most imaginative fiction.

A good example of this is the latest Indiana Jones movie - the Dial of Destiny. In it Indy ends up chasing after the real world artefact, one of my all time favourite besides the Voynich manuscript and Enigma machine - the Antikythera mechanism.

It is given quite accurate description and even the history how it was found is somewhat accurate. Of course they had to spice it up a notch, as if the real device wouldn't have been interesting enough. Besides timing various celestial events the movie version is also able to enable travel through the time!

Another false information given by the movie is the builder of the device. The movie claims it was built by Archimedes, but in real history he lived a couple of hundred years too early. This of course doesn't rule out the actual device couldn't be based on Archimedes' work.

While I don't mind fixing fact and fiction I'm always annoyed when the actual facts are being messed up at this level. It isn't apparent to a viewer to tell apart what's true and what's just an alternate facts unless they have deep knowledge about the subject.