Review of Parkland (2013) by Michael W — 03 Oct 2013

I was really very disappointed with this movie. I've been a student of the JFK assassination for many years. I was excited to see this movie because it appeared to have the potential to add a new dimension to the story.

Many movies and videos have covered the "Oswald did it" scenario and many, many more have covered the various conspiracy possibilities. Parkland, on the other hand, didn't take sides. The focus was not on who did it, rather it was supposed to be a factual accounting of what happened that tragic day in the lives of various individuals who were involved in some way or another.

Here is where the movie fails spectacularly. If the goal was to show a factual view of the happenings of the assassination weekend, one would expect that those involved would have meticulously researched these events.

Clearly, they did not. In scene after scene, throughout the entire movie, ridiculous mistakes were made. Case in point, as Kennedy is frantically wheeled into the emergency room, supposedly, the Secret Service agents who loaded him onto the gurney thought it important to put Jackie's blood-stained pillbox hat and bouquet of roses on the stricken president's chest.

In the emergency room scenes (of both Kennedy and Oswald), the amount of blood covering everyone in the room was just ridiculous. In reality, JFK had a small wound in his throat that was hardly bleeding at all, a similar wound in his back, below the shoulder blade to the right of his spine that also wasn't bleeding much, and a massive would in the right rear of his skull that bleed profusely and oozed brain tissue onto the cart.

The blood from the head wound, however, from all accounts, stayed mostly on the gurney, the floor and the hand of the doctors working on Kennedy, in the movie, virtually everyone in the room was drenched in it.

Even when the doctors were working on Oswald, they show everyone drenched, even though he had a single wound that bleed almost entirely internally. Before they made the incision, they were covered in blood.

When Lyndon Johnson was brought into the hospital, the Secret Service searched for a safe place for him. They settled on the Minor Medicine department. In the movie, they have him shoved into what looks like an oversized closet filled with files.

There were so many stupid mistakes that I left wondering, if they intended ONLY to show a factual rendition of the events yet didn't even research those same events, why did they even bother to make this movie.