We'll just pass him there / Why should we even care?

[spheralunaris]

So, kind of late to the game with this and really shouldn't be spending my diminishing free time writing this up (sister's crazy wedding in India coming up, deadline for first dissertation chapter, panic all around about future job prospects....), but I finally got around to seeing the first Iron Man movie

Comments

[ochre54]

I'm kind of shocked you're the first person to mention anything about this. At the very least it's extremely sloppy writing. How do you have an organization where no-one speaks the same language? Now I am imagining that they've somehow discovered the Babel Fish, a la Hitchiker's Guide.

I googled, and after a pretty thorough search, this is all I found:

imdb accepts the movie's explanation:

Incorrectly regarded as goofs: The Afghan people speak in Arabic which is wrong. In fact, Afghan people speak in Ordu, Pashtu and Farsi, not Arabic. However, Yinsen tells Tony that the group that captures him speak many different languages. So any Afghan people talking in a different language than their own is plausible.

http://modernmuslimwoman.com/2008/05/iron-man-culturally-sensitive-review.html

This one is for The Man Who Would Be King but has some comments about Iron Man: ... )

[spheralunaris]

Wow, I had just assumed someone in fandom somewhere must have written about this already in detail and I was just repeating old news

[mangaka_chan]

I haven't seen Iron Man 1 in full (though one of my friend is a big fan of the movie), but Hindi? Uhg... o_0;;

And after looking up The Mandarin I have a bad feeling about the third movie (a Chinese-Mongolian-English super villain who posses alien technology? I have a feeling current Chinese-US political tension will make its way into this movie).

[ochre54]

Nope. Fandom, falling down on the job. :(

I kept running across subtitled versions of the movie (Arabic, Hindi, Farsi, etc.). I wonder how it translated?

So... laziness: they hired actors who could speak other languages and told them to say something terroristy... because they couldn't research for themselves? I wonder if any of it is just actors saying ramdom nonsense in angry voices.

Crack: they thought an international terror ring should have cells that reflect the values and diversity of the organization.

Or squirrely self-preservation: if the terrorists speak ALL the languages, then Hollywood has plausible deniability when someone (inevitably) accuses them of being racist.

[moonshadowmagic]

Someone lent me the dvd and I watched it, once. Being somewhere in the average American viewer demographic ("forgot most of the Spanish I learned in school") and not able to identify any of the languages you mention, I happily concluded that I didn't particularly like the movie without the benefit of knowing any of this.

So I'm glad someone has done what I couldn't, and come up with an actual reason that isn't "eh."