Is historical fiction okay?

Is it okay to use real life tragedies (like 9/11) in fictionalized stories in movies?

This is a weird topic, I think. There have been plenty of times that movies have used things like the Holocaust, WWII, Vietnam, or really just war in general to tell fictional stories. In literature it's known as historical fiction. Is this okay, morally? Normally I would say yes, but one of the reasons I hate The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is because I feel like its finale tries to piggyback on the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina to ratchet up the tension and emotion that it wasn’t a good enough movie to create itself in the first place. So then I wonder if I think historical fiction is okay after all. There are movies like Remember Me, where the use of 9/11 just feels tacky, but not necessarily offensive to me. I’m honestly not sure what I think about this subject, so I pose the question to myself.

I think the question is less about accurately portraying a tragedy and more about the ethics of telling a fictionalized story using the framework of a real world tragedy. Is it offensive to the real pain that real people went through and how the tragedy changed their lives? Is it disingenuous because you could also just tell the real story of one of the real people the event happened to? Is it using the inherent emotions of a tragedy to manipulate the audience rather than creating emotions on your own as a storyteller? Those are the questions that interest me more than whether or not the movie accurately portrays how an event happened. And those are the questions I think are more important to ask and think about.


What do you think?