The Benedict Cumberbatch – Jodie Foster starrer, ‘The Mauritanian’ released on Amazon Prime Video in India, last night (June 1st 2021). This highly anticipated legal drama has been a much-awaited film by many Amazon Prime subscribers in India and many would have given the film rave reviews, if it wasn’t for one silly mistake from Amazon Prime Video’s part – Their subtitling. This mistake has slowly created a buzz online, with Twitterati going slightly crazy over this subtitling issue. So what is this problem?
Ironically, the film has some very good submitting. For all the English parts, that is. Whenever English is spoken, you get perfect English subtitles. But this legal drama is based on the true story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian man who was held for fourteen years (from 2002 to 2016) without charge in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, a United States military prison. As the dates indicate, this is about Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and 9/11.
Because of this, a good portion of the film is spoken in languages which are not English (Arabic being one of them) and sadly those parts do not have subtitles at all. Again, none at all. Not even, bare minimum subtitling. Usually, an OTT giant, the size of Amazon Prime Video would not make a mistake this big, even if the final product given to them doesn’t have any subtitles. Known for their meticulous quality checking, especially for subtitles like other OTT giants, we expected Amazon Prime to procure some version of the subtitles for us to work with, from the film creators themselves. But we gave the streaming platform too much credit.
For now, we can view ‘The Mauritanian’ on Amazon Prime Video in India. Beware, however, for literally no subtitles during non-English conversations within the film.
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