During the stay-at-home order, I decided to do a Jane Austen retrospective and read all of her books. When I was done reading them, I decided to watch the film adaptations.
When I arrived at Sense and Sensibility (1995, dir. by Ang Lee), something really bothered me.
I have always watched movies with subtitles. I'm only 31, but my hearing kind of sucks from 15 years of playing football with constant hits to the head and a whistle being blown in my ear and resonating throughout the helmet. I have trouble hearing people talk in real life if there's background noise, and I have trouble with dialogue in movies. I can still hear what's being said, but I like having the subtitles there to make sure I don't miss any plot points that are spoken by a character.
I rented Sense and Sensibility on Amazon Prime, and the subtitles do not line up with the dialogue at all. Not only were most sentences abbreviated in the subtitles, but entire words and phrases were changed. Just one example is when a character said, "He arrived from London two nights previous," the subtitles said, "He came from London two night ago." It was like this for just about every line. I have a hard time remembering any line that was a perfect match between the dialogue and the subtitle.
It really bothered me and took me out of the movie. At first I assumed it was because a lot of the dialogue was spoken quickly, but I watched Uncut Gems on Netflix, and that includes a lot of characters speaking quickly and talking over each other, and the subtitles managed to keep up with the dialogue pretty much 1:1.
I can only assume it's because the dialogue in Sense and Sensibility is mostly lifted from the book, so it's spoken in Regency Era English. But I don't want the Simple English translation of dialogue in the subtitles. I want them to reflect what is being said in the film.
It bothered me even more because I knew that the movie won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, so I wanted to see the screenplay reflected in the subtitles.
I know this happens a lot with non-English films. I watched Parasite with a native Korean speaker who also spoke English, and she clued me in on all the instances where the subtitles didn't match what was being said on screen. But I didn't think it could be this bad with English subtitles in an English-speaking film.
I mainly just want to vent, but has anyone else run into this problem with other movies, and has it affected your opinion of the movie?
Submitted June 12, 2020 at 04:54AM by moulderininthegrave https://ift.tt/2N2UMTj