5 Movie Details You Missed If You Only Speak English
Through the magic of cinema, we can travel all over the world: Cutiz’s Casablanca, Kurosawa’s Japan, Affleck’s Boston, etc. That sometimes means hearing a language other than English, which shouldn’t be a problem for modern audiences that are increasingly comfortable with subtitles, but they’re not always provided, even when necessary (especially by Affleck). It turns out we’ve been missing a lot by remaining monolingual in a polyglottal cinematic universe.
The Thing
John Carpenter’s 1982 ode to practical effects would have been over a lot sooner if someone at the American research station spoke Norwegian. Before he’s shot by Donald Moffat, the gunman who chased the thing-dog to their camp tells them, “Get the hell away! It’s not a dog! It’s imitating a dog! It’s not real! Get away, idiots!” To be fair, when you’re dealing with an armed dog killer, “pause to hear them out” isn’t usually a winning strategy.
The Da Vinci Code
Likewise, The Da Vinci Code wouldn’t have wasted quite so much of our time if Dan Brown hadn’t been so confident in the American public’s inability to understand basic Italian. For much of the novel and film, Bishop Manuel Aringarosa looks like the villain, but he wouldn’t if we knew that his name literally translates to “red herring.” That’s just the kind of subtlety Brown reliably delivers.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
There’s a hidden and only slightly racist Godzilla joke in the first bad Jurassic Park movie. As a group of businessmen flee from the T. rex tearing through downtown San Diego, one of them shouts in Japanese, “I left Tokyo to get away from this!” This does imply that InGen and Godzilla exist in the same universe, so T. rex. vs. Zilly when?
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
Speaking of mild racism in San Diego, anchorwoman Veronica Corningstone and her friends probably wouldn’t have chosen Escupimos en su Alimento for their girls’ night if they knew what the restaurant’s name meant: “We Spit in Your Food.” It was the ‘70s, though, so it wasn’t like you could just look it up, and any Spanish speaker they asked would hopefully keep the bit going. That’s what you get for not speaking Spanish in Southern California.
Wonder Woman
When the Wonder gang meet up with smuggler Chief, he appears to introduce himself to Diana, switching to the Blackfoot language to do so. That means only the 5,000 or so people in the world who speak Blackfoot knew he revealed himself to her as Napi, a trickster demigod in the Blackfoot culture. That’s an impressive amount of work for something only a relative few people will understand, which is coincidentally also what we said about Wonder Woman 1984.
