Why Movies Get Chess Wrong
Chess is one of the most popular games on Earth. So why do multimillion-dollar blockbusters keep making beginner’s errors?
You’re watching a movie that includes a football scene. As a gridiron fan, you’re pleased — at first. Then you notice something’s wrong: Why are there only seven players on either team, you wonder. Why do they seem to be running around at random? And is that a cricket ball the quarterback is passing?
Such baffling errors are what chess fans have come to anticipate when they sit down in a cinema. Even behemoths like Captain America: Civil War don’t check that their pieces are in the right place, committing mistakes that any patzer would catch.
Chess remains one of the most popular games on Earth — 605 million people play according to a 2012 YouGov poll — and it’s one of the few elements of everyday life that ties the U.S. to Nigeria to North Korea and the rest of the globe (along with linking classical antiquity to the Facebook era). Why, then, do filmmakers so often scatter pieces carelessly across the board?
David Edmonds is a co-author of Bobby Fischer Goes to War, the definitive history of the 1972 match that enthroned Fischer as a rare U.S. World Chess Champion. In researching the book, he set aside two months to…
