ALL SCI-FI

[Maurice]

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I don't see a topic for this, so I thought I'd start one.

This an astonishingly good film. Instead of a monster in search of a story it's a good story that features a giant monster. It's the closest thing in spirit to the original 1954 classic Gojira. Forget the big budget American takes on the monster; this is the real deal.

The plot, in a nutshell, concerns postwar Japan suffering a sort of national PTSD as personified by Koichi, a pilot who avoided his assigned duty as a Kamikaze, and who blames himself for the deaths of almost all the men on a fictional Pacific Island because he feared firing his landed plane's weapons on a local dinosaur-like monster called Godzilla.

On returning to postwar Japan he finds everything destroyed, his parents dead, and suffers all sorts of survivor's guilt over his inaction. Then, a few years after the war, just as he starts to rebuild his life, atomic testing has mutated Godzilla into something far larger that threatens Japan itself. The arrival of the monster drives Koichi to seek redemption, alongside other former Japanese servicemen who band together to fight for a real cause as opposed to the pointless war they were part of.

Reportedly the film was made for a mere $15 million US, which is about the same budget as Everything Everywhere All at Once.

I watched it on Netflix in Japanese with English subtitles. This was the original theatrical release in color. There was also a limited release titled Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color in black and white.

The 2nd theatrical trailer is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvSrHIX5a-0

The Minus Color trailer is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbMziMMkGEo
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"The absence of limitations is the enemy of art."
― Orson Welles

[Bud Brewster]

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Wow, Maurice! Thanks.

The trailer is spectacular, and I look forward to watching the movie.

________ GODZILLA MINUS ONE Official Trailer 2


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Maurice]

I just saw there was already a topic about this film, though the posts in it were about it coming up and not a reaction to the film. Maybe they can be merged?
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"The absence of limitations is the enemy of art."
― Orson Welles

[Bud Brewster]

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The problem has been solved, Maurice. Thanks for catching the little glitch in All Sci-Fi.

Today I learned that Godzilla Minus One won the Best FX Oscar! And also that it is available it dubbed English. The dubbing is being highly praised!

I can't enjoy dubbed movies because I don't read very fast, and the "macular degeneration" effecting my right eye makes captions and subtitles hard to see.

Besides, I like to watch the faces of actors as they deliver their lines — not all that appearing/disappearing text at the bottom of the screen.

Add to this the fact the specific word in a sentence which is emphasized can determine what the speaker really means. Like this, for example.

"You think my wife loves you." (No emphasis. A simple statement.)

"You think my wife loves you." (The husband is referring to the fact that the listener is the only one who believes his claim.)

"You think my wife loves you." (The husband is challenging the man's baseless claim. It's just an opinion on his part, not a fact.)

"You think my wife loves you?" (The husband is surprised by who the listener thinks love him.)

"You think my wife loves you?" (The speaker firmly believes his wife cares nothing for this joker!)

If you don't speak the language of the actors, you have no idea what words they might be emphasizing to make their meaning clear! And that's part of why I don't care for subtitles.

The Godzilla Minus One English Dub Has Everyone Saying The Same Thing


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Maurice]

I'm on the opposite side of the argument when it comes to subtitles v. dubbing. The problem I have with dubbing is that the voice actors are reinterpreting the on-screen actor's performances and often shading them differently. With subtitles I don't lose the audible portion of the on-screen actors' actual performances. I'd rather have the subtitles tell me what the words mean but hear the actual actors intonations tell me the feelings behind it.

I'm not saying this preference applies for everyone. If someone prefers dubbing far be it from me to pooh pooh that.

Dubbed or subtitled, translating languages is a tricky business.

Over the years I've had to work with people in Hungary, Romania, and Japan, etc., and I've head to deal with localization companies to translate texts for games and apps into at minimum the FIGS languages (French, Italian, German, Spanish) and sometimes upwards of a dozen. When you do that you quickly learn how difficult it is to translate things from one language to another. A silly example being one translation group translated "gear" into "equipment" when we meant a "cog". So I ended up adding a "context" field to each row of the spreadsheets we put the texts into and where we could explain what the text meant in addition to what it said, and sometimes we'd say, "An idiom/expression in this language similar to _____."

A lot of concepts don't translate easily, epsecially idiomatic things. The Criterion release of Kurosawa's Sanjuro translated one line in the subtitles as "We can't move like this, like a centipede." But a very old trailer also on the disc translated the same line as, "You're following me like a trail of goldfish dung." The dung version is almost certainly more accurate to what Mifune says in Japanese, but does that translation of the joke land easily with English speakers? Or do the translators think Kurosawa is above a ribald poop joke?

And Japanese can be a very punny language, and translating that is hard to do. For instance, you know why Luigi is named that in the Nintendo Mario games? In part because 類似 ("ruigi") in Japanese pronunciation is phonetically close to "Luigi" and it means "similar"; so Luigi = similar to Mario...except he's in green. You can't really translate that.

And some things simply don't translate, especially culturally specific expressions which have no direct or even figurative equivalent.

The one place subtitles suffer is in that lengthy dialogs have to be simplified to be readable on screen.
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"The absence of limitations is the enemy of art."
― Orson Welles

[Bud Brewster]

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Maurice, what a wonderful posts!

I learned more about language translations and audio dubbing than I could possible process at the ripe old of 76 (as of August 16, 2024).

Sadly I must confess that when I'm watching a movie while trying to read the subtitles, I'm completely incapable of detecting subtle clues about how the actors are delivering their lines in a foreign language while following the quick appearance of the text at the bottom of the screen!

For example, is the actor saying — "Darling, do you love HIM?"

Or — "Darling, do you LOVE him?"

Obviously there's an important difference!

So, your amazing ability to read subtitles while detecting the voice inflections of actors speaking in a foreign language so that you can understand how the dialog would sound in English . . . is something I'm incapable of!

I'm envious of your remarkable ability.

I'll just have to be satisfied with poor dubbing which fails to present completely accurate dialog . . . but which at least doesn't confuse this poor old man while he's just trying to follow the plot.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Maurice]

Speaking only for myself, I'm not concerned about emphasis and shading of specific words of phrases, but rather the overall emotional weight of the performance. Good dubbing is difficult to do.
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"The absence of limitations is the enemy of art."
― Orson Welles