Something I dislike in movies is when a movie is set in a non-English-speaking country, but all the characters are speaking English. I would rather have the characters speak the proper language for the country, with English subtitles. But I guess the movie execs have calculated that subtitles will make the movie less profitable.
I disagree. I think that sometimes it is good to have a language that is correct to the setting of the movie but also it does make it harder to follow if you don’t speak that language and it does reduce from the visual aspect if you have to focus your eyes on the subtitles so it’s not always the best option.
I would say that for slow-paced movies or documentaries it makes sense use the correct local language
I don’t mind this. I also don’t mind watching a movie in a non-English language so long as there are subtitles (Pan’s Labyrinth was awesome).
What I dislike are movies/series that decide to include a conversation in a different language without providing subtitles.
I hate this. Spending the next 5-10 minutes searching the internet to find a complete script of a show just so I have a complete understanding of what’s going on is annoying, not fun.
oh man youd hate the star wars holiday special. wookiee is spoken for a good chunk of the film and there are no subtitles
It doesn’t fit a lot of movies, but some movies start in the foreign language and then switch to English
Even worse in my opinion is when they use a generic British accent as a stand-in for literally any time and place in history. Ancient Rome? British accent. Ancient Greece? Also British accent. Ancient Persia? British accent again! Ancient Egypt? You guessed it! British accent! Even when the actors aren’t even British, the accent is. It makes no sense. It’s lazy and arrogant.
If I had a billion dollars, I’d make the most painstakingly realistic movie about Samurai in feudal Japan, and have all Japanese actors using a SoCal Chicano accent. Or maybe a hyper realistic Viking epic with a full Nordic cast, but they all talk like surfer bros.
The audience needs to be forced to see how insulting that shit is.
a hyper realistic Viking epic with a full Nordic cast, but they all talk like surfer bros
Jarl! My dude! We totally viking’d the shit out of that Irish monastery! It was fucking rad!
“Duuuuude… King Ælla’s a total boner. We gotta roll up on Northumbria and fully hack these posers to bits, brah. Then maybe, y’know, hit the mead hall and get wasted with some totally rad shield maidens.”
I swear to Odin, I would make this movie and only release a few short trailers with no dialog in them. Just brilliant cinematic shots of action, scenery, all the super authentic costumes and customs, and get some historians to endorse it (I know a few who would love the joke and the chaos). Then BAM, hit the audience with the most ridiculous shit ever.
Yeah I can understand speaking English and avoiding subtitles, but there are basically three options for accent:
- American, with some allowance for “urban” vs “country”
- Not American - English
- Evil - Russian or German, depending
They’re made for an American audience, who are generally afraid of non-English languages
When I was a kid I saw The Longest Day and loved that all the Germans spoke German.
German in US movies has a wild array of quality levels.
The best ones are all from native German speaking actors. Movie actors don’t need native proficiency since the script is written out for them. The accents are really hard to nail down though and native speakers often have some regional dialect that second language learners almost never pick up.
Mac Steinmeir nails it in Saving Private Ryan and he’s Bavarian. Christopher Walz speaks flawless German. His French and Italian sound perfect to me but native speakers consider him “pretty good for a foreigner”. He’s Austrian.
Christian Slater has a very clear accent in Heathers but he’s not supposed to be a native German speaker.
Or even worse, having to dub a movie, and the lip flaps are not matching up with the mouths. CinemaSins will give an infinite amount of dings for that.
What would the order (in the language of the day) have been, something as simple as “archers” or “archers, release”? “Release arrows?”
“Archers make ready” meaning they place the arrow in the bow but do draw, and possibly aim, might make sense.
We might never know, but they probably didn’t even do these commands anyway, it doesn’t make sense when you think about it. There would likely have just be a command to begin the attack and then each archer would loose arrows repeatedly at any target they thought they could hit.
Archers weren’t always on top of a wall. There might have been friendly infantry in front of them, and the archers firing above them into an advancing foe. You’d want someone who can see the range giving the order to ‘loose’ when the range was right, and then you’ll want to make sure they stop shooting so they don’t hit your own side. Can’t have the archers firing at everything that moves all the time.
Are we saying they never lit their arrows on fire before the invention of gunpowder?
Using ‘fired’ for launching them at the enemy doesn’t really make sense. It isn’t like they said ‘arrowed’ for when they launch a regular arrow.
Homestar Runner is not historically accurate.
We also don’t say trigger when you shoot a gun. Imagine someone yelling fire in a period piece and someone lighting fuse on a cannon and it going off seconds later. Or lighting a firework/bomb and waiting like 20 seconds per foot of length. Not nearly as climactic I’m guessing when it comes to immersion.
Fire (flaming) arrows never existed in most battles, having to put a large fuel source on the end to try and prevent them just blowing out when airborne meant the arrows would have a much shorter reach. It was also pointless because it wouldn’t just light people on fire anyway, they were wearing metal plates, not straw. Fire arrows are another thing movies greatly exaggerated. In reality they were only used in very specific situations where a fire could potentially be started against some siege equipment or by firing them into a village with thatch roofs etc.
I am talking about arrows which are lit on fire, not gunpowder arrows. Which even then, only handful of situations are listed out the how many thousands upon thousands of battles bow and arrows were a part of throughout history?
From the Wikipedia entry for “flaming” arrows:
Flaming arrows required the shooter to get quite close to their desired target and most will have extinguished themselves before reaching the target
I will add flaming to my original reply, but I have seen both used interchangably for the same thing.
Archers also didn’t usually shoot upwards to arc their shots. It loses power, reduces accuracy, and makes it more likely for them to hit armor, not less.
If they’re using indirect fire they certainly would. Such as shooting over friendly formations.
Guess what you also didn’t usually do?
It’s not that it never happened, but generally speaking it was a bad idea. You’d only get archers using indirect fire at long ranges.
There are however accounts of infantry kneeling so the archers can fire over them. Otherwise archers would be employed in skirmish lines in front of the main formations and then fall back into the main body as the lines approached.
Yeah, but raining thousands of arrows on to an approaching army is intimidating as fuck
Just need a supply train of camels to keep your archers stocked
Using modern english phrases to convey meaning to modern audiences is usually fine to me, as long as they don’t reference modern history or events. but what really pisses me off is movies like “The Great Gatsby” that take place during the 1920s and have JayZ and Lana del ray playing at a rich person’s party
Yeah, We Will Rock you wouldn’t have even been written during A Knights Tale, so unrealistic.
