I've been looking over my large collection of fantasy films, trying to figure out what exactly made me like some and dislike others. What caused me to write this post, however, was watching Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman in 'Season of the Witch', a movie so bad I couldn't make it to the halfway mark.
What I found when I looked everything over was that I absolutely cannot stand seeing a medieval setting with actors using American accents. It flat out doesn't work for me. Yeah, I know that British accents were not the same way back then, but a good British accent, at least from an American perspective, adds a touch of old-world authenticity, whereas an American accent kills the movie dead.
Try to imagine the Lord of the Rings movies with every character speaking in our flat American phrasings! Ugh! At least the American actors in LOTR and Game of Thrones alter their accents enough to make them passable.
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11 hours ago
Sean Connery playing a Russian sub commander? Brits get it wrong too.
ReplyDeleteToo true, Martin. No Russian should be played with that kind of accent! I also wouldn't want to see British accents on feudal age Japanese either. I am only talking about the standard European-style feudal fantasies.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great post, Ted. I feel the same way. As you pointed out, British accents would have been different way back when -- and in fantasy it shouldn't matter, should it? -- but it just sounds so wrong in an American accent. And Australian, and Kiwi, and all the "new" countries. And I say that as an Australian...
ReplyDelete@ Martin. Agreed! What the hell were they thinking with Sean Connery? Great actor, but so, so wrong as a McRussian!
HA!
ReplyDeletei'm not sure what i think about this. i gotta say, though, no put-on accent is better than a poorly done accent.
Season of the witch is not good. Although, it reaches the heights of not bad(ish) in last few action sequences. Weirdly they even made one of the English actors use an American accent.
ReplyDeleteHave you seen Black Death? Very simillar theme and storyline, but much better.
Hahaha. So true, Ted.
ReplyDeleteI agree. A british accent transports an American not living in GB to the past fairly well.
ReplyDeleteLee, I haven't seen Black Death. I'll have to look for it eventually.
ReplyDeleteDepends on the fantasy setting. As someone pointed out, I'd rather no accent than a bad one.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm hoping to see Black Death eventually!
Did you hear the NPR piece a few years back where a historical linguist did a reading of Shakespeare to show how his poetry actually did rhyme. He used a Nantucket accent and words that seemed completely unrhymeable rhymed perfectly. It was pretty amazing.
ReplyDeleteI was about to ask what you thought of Game of Thrones, but then you answered that.
ReplyDeleteI almost never notice the Kiwi accents in LOTR, except for some of the Uruk-hai. And it's made up for by the excellent voice-acting of all the main characters, especially when speaking elvish, or Gandalf speaking the tongue of Mordor.
Well, "phrasing" does matter to me in the sense that I don't want to hear people saying "okay", or other words that didn't exist until the Industrial Revolution. I consider that different from the matter of an accent though.
ReplyDeleteI get awfully tired of all the British and Scottish accents in fantasy. Gimli's accent in LOTR, in particular, is hard for me to stomach.
British accents worked for me in HBO's "Rome", even though no ancient Roman would have a British accent --- because Americans process it as "aristocratic". The "aristocratic" sound worked well in that instance, because the Romans' accents would have seemed aristocratic to most people of the time, since the Romans ran the Mediterranean world in the depicted time period. So the British accents didn't harm the immersion, and may have even helped it.
But in a world like LOTR, or even GOT, where it's integral to the setting that it is NOT a thriving, stable, empire --- NOT a well-oiled political machine with an unquestioned source of central authority --- "aristocratic" accents just detract from the immersion of the experience. They make the world seem like something that the author didn't want it to be; what good is that?
No matter what the film, I'll take a British accent over an American one anyday. Including Sean Connery as a Russian.
ReplyDeletesiebendach, since Tolkien was British and he always claimed he was creating an English mythology, I always read his work with such accents anyhow. To me the American accent simply sounds awful in historical movies, unless they are US history. I agree about Rome.
ReplyDeleteIs it worth pointing out that there is no such thing as a British accent? Britain is England, Scotland and Wales. Therefore, any genuinely 'British' accent would sound very strange indeed.
ReplyDeleteI raise this partly out of pedantry, but mostly to make the point that in any given country, there will be differences in accent that are appropriate for different settings. One of the curious things in Game of Thrones is the effect that Sean Bean's northern tones have in making his character sound slightly more rough edged. Of course, it then creates the weird situation where all his character's children speak with a completely different accent to him.
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