Ancient v. Modern History

I just finished watching First Man, a 2 hour+ made for Netflix movie about Neil Armstrong, starting in about 1960 with early astronaut training and climaxing, of course, with the moon landing. On the other hand, I am currently binge watching Vikings, and I’m almost up to season 6.
There is a difference between watching ancient history and watching modern history. Of course, I’m interested in both because it is history, the ongoing story of mankind and, as a human being, that is of great interest to me, but I enjoy watching the ancient stuff more, and by ancient I guess I mean anything that happened before the 1950s, when I was born.
One difference, of course, is that I remember the moon landing, and a lot of the events that led up to it, because space is also fascinating. So, the film held few surprises. I did catch them in one historical inaccuracy. It was in a montage scene of people objecting to ‘so much money’ being spent on NASA (which is chronically and shamefully underfunded imho, hence the scare quotes), and they showed Gil Scott-Heron performing ‘Whitey on the Moon,’ which wasn’t released until 1970, after the moon landing. A minor thing, and a brilliant poem, actually.
Vikings, on the other hand, is only very loosely historical. One of the main characters at this point is Ivar the Boneless. I went to Wikipedia, of course, and they said that his name may have referred to a physical handicap, or impotence, or maybe it was a total mistranslation and just meant Ivar the Hated, but apparently the makers of the film just decided to cover all those bases, and portray him as a legless, impotent son of a bitch who enjoys torturing and killing people to a totally unnatural degree, especially if they are related to him. The character of Lagertha, pretty much the only one I still sympathize with at this point, may be totally mythical, or a compendium of real characters, a la Robin Hood, or King Arthur.
The further back you go, the more liberties you can take, seems to be the rule.