I’m glad before seeing this incredibly inaccurate movie I caught the podcast Real Dictators and a similar show on Netflix. All three sources were spot on about how fucking disastrous Idi Amin was. The movie’s major sins were:
- Messing with the timeline of events during his rule.
- Highlighting only the major disastrous things he did for purposes of storytelling because a few major murders and the war with Tanzania were omitted.
- The creation of Dr. Garrigan (McAvoy) as a person who never existed not help the audience follow along, minor spoiler alert, he didn’t escape as the ending shows.
It all begins with Garrigan graduating from medical school but he doesn’t want to join his father’s steady, boring practice in Scotland. He would rather make a difference. Ergo, off he goes to Uganda which gained its independence from the UK some few years earlier. He figures this will be part adventure and part Good Samaritan after everything the West had done to the numerous African lands. Within weeks, President Obote is overthrown by Amin. The older, more experienced doctor running their clinic in the countryside warns Garrigan to be careful, reprisals against Obote’s followers will likely follow.
Then through a chance meeting, Garrigan encounters Amin’s motorcade due to one of the vehicles injuring a farmer’s cow. Amin is impressed with the young doctor’s initiative and resourcefulness. Garrigan being Scottish helps too for the new “president” is quite fond of their culture. This eventually leads Garrgian to becoming Amin’s personal doctor, then the minister of health and then an advisor to the “president,” all while being oblivious to the paranoid, murderous, sociopathic tendencies Amin has…until it’s too late. Some of it is the doctor’s desire to see the good in all, another element is how he enjoys seeing an African leader sticking it to the English.
I don’t know if the film was covered by Hollywood v. History before the History Channel joined the ranks of showing White Trash Under Pressure = Cheap Entertainment, but this would be a great candidate. If Real Dictators is spot on, older Ugandans who survived the eight-year terror of Amin’s brutal dictatorship just hate this movie since the generations born way after 1979 think it’s factual. I’d say they’re Americans! Given the current worship of Reagan and Nixon, I get their serious complaint.
Anyway, Scotland‘s primary flaw is its timeline which is both compressed and complete absence of what year it is when the various horrors occurred. It didn’t unravel overnight, it was a slow burn, mistake by mistake made by Amin. His love of shopping in England was ignored too; he pissed away much of the country’s GDP on booze and fancy clothes. The sinister murders of Bishop Mubiru and two Western journalists getting left out mattered, it’s when support for him in the West began to waver. The story concludes around the Entebbe debacle Amin chose to get involved in so I can forgive coverage of the war with Tanzania being dropped for it was his last, desperate move to stay in power. Declaring a war with a neighbor or “other” is a standard dictator move to cover up all the failures on the domestic front; see Putin with Ukraine, Bush II with Iraq, Hussein with Iran/Kuwait and I fear Milei will pick a fight in a couple years when his “reforms” put Argentina in a much worse state.
Is this worth watching? I guess. Whitaker proved why he earned his Oscar® and it is very disturbing story with enough truths. It just doesn’t tel the whole story accurately enough and I find this troubling. Too many people acquire their “facts” through “based upon a true story” crap instead of seeking better sources, namely books, documentaries (not obligated to be entertaining) or podcasts.