This is copied (with some modifications for links) from a comment I made at Richard Hanania’s going way off track from his post just because this material was on my mind:
Speaking of Cortez’ encounter with the Aztecs (part of a general pattern of conquistadors worth exploring), earlier this week I finally watched James Cameron’s Avatar and I just couldn’t get into a movie where a primitive tribe with bows & arrows is able to militarily defeat a professional force with spaceships, machineguns, bombs etc. But I guess that’s what our culture demands. It seems like we’ve gotten more detached from reality since Dances with Wolves, which ends by making the obvious point that the sympathetic Plains Indians were inevitably defeated by the US Army. I could chalk that up to Avatar being completely fictional whereas we know what happened to the real natives, but then I think about other films since Avatar like Buffalo Boys & RRR. Both end with the plucky duo of Indonesians/Indians (respectively) defeating the colonialists in a big fight, but both are set well before colonization ended so the audience knows the colonialists were actually triumphant at those times. The latter uses the names of real guys who were killed as part of their political struggles, but the film isn’t willing to let them actually be martyrs. I suppose something similar also applies to Pan’s Labyrinth, which is less triumphant in that the protagonist arguably dies in “real life”, but still features a Francoist military fort being defeated by maquis in post-Civil War Spain when I don’t think any such thing ever happened in reality.
Entitled to an Opinion 
December 18, 2022 at 1:33 am
See Poul Anderson’s “The High Crusade” for an earlier fictional victory of low technology over high technology. And real cases did sometimes happen in history, though usually when the disparity was smaller, from the Barbarian Invasions of the Roman Empire, through the Rise of Islam and the Mongols in China, to the Zulu Wars and the U.S. attack on Korea that failed to open it up like Japan.
December 18, 2022 at 7:19 am
Greg Cochran just included that novel in his 2022 books list.
Did the barbarians who invaded Rome really have less advanced military technology, or was it social organization that distinguished the Roman empire from them? And wasn’t the Anglo-Zulu War ultimately won by the British?
In between Dances with Wolves and Avatar I also watched The Last Samurai, and I’ve heard that prior to the Satsuma Rebellion fictionalized in that film, the Boshin War actually had the modernizing Tokugawa Shogunate defeated by the less technologically advanced samurai of the Imperial Court faction (the reverse of the situation in the film).