Lies

Rating: 1/10 (23 December 2004)

No real spoiler here beyond the simple fact that the whole movie is more or less a lie. Yes, the Arab revolt did happen, but most of the movie is complete fabrication or distortion of historical fact.
A magnificent distortion of fact, yes, but a distortion nonetheless. T.E. Lawrence was a bigger man than O'Toole was equipped to portray. He wasn't some gut-wrenched drama queen who was magically able to walk from his Western ways into Arabic garb. The true story is a lot more believable and, at the same time, bigger than Messieurs Spiegel and Lean could have put on the screen.
Check out any book on this topic, and you won't be able to look at the movie without laughing or crying at the absurdity of this "historical" drama. "The book is better than the movie" is a common and, by now, trite complaint, but "Lawrence of Arabia" commits an altogether different crime of making people believe things about T.E. Lawrence that were simply not true in the least.