The King's Man

The first panoramic shots of trenches, with the voiceover of The Shepherd, in particular the part depicting mountains of shell cases are taken from real photographs of the Battle of The Somme. Fought between July and November 1916, with no clear winner, it cost the lives of around 700,000 British and French soldiers and 550,000 Germans. As shown, entire battalions were mowed down with machine gun fire, and over one million shells were fired in the first week alone.

There is a brief flashback showing the death of Tsar Nicholas and his family, and while the scene has been painstakingly reconstructed down to the wallpaper of the basement, the family is shown being quickly killed with a single discharge of what appears to be a machine pistol by one person pretending to be a photographer. The real execution was far messier and cruel: the assassins tricked the family into posing for a photograph, but no camera was brought. Instead, the chief of the guards read a makeshift death sentence and then an entire squad entered the room. After the shooting, the Tsar, his wife and son had been killed, but the four daughters were still alive, due to the fact they had sewn jewels in their clothes, so the troops finished them off with bayonets and the butts of their rifles. Due to the gruesome nature of this, it is possible this is a deliberate alteration by the director.

Tom Hollander is credited as 'Tom Hollander³', as he plays three different characters.

Featured in The Oscars (2021)