Yesterday after work, I decided to watch the movie ‘Logan Lucky’. The film has a stellar cast, brilliant crew and good reviews from both movie goers and critics. I switched on the television, opened the Amazon Prime Video app and started watching the movie. With a guitar strumming in the background, I started watching the pre-credits for the movie, which was followed by the words, ”When you asked, how I been…”, which was sung in a beautiful voice. That voice belonged to John Denver and the song he was singing was ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ – a brilliant song.
A couple of lines later, the loud sound quality changes to that of a radio’s. I know the movie is now beginning. The first words I hear are “Jo Kahani shuru hothe hai jaise…”. The words spoken are in Hindi. Since it is a Hollywood film, I knew it was a Hindi dub version. I went to change the audio for the film and I was met with a surprise – there was no English audio for this film, only Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.
I was shocked, but more than that, I was irritated. It is good that there are these many language dubs available for people who do not understand or follow English, but where is the original English audio? The whole point (for me anyway), was to watch the film and listen to Adam Driver’s and Daniel Craig’s Southern accent in this crime-action flick. If I wanted to see the Hindi film ‘Dil Bechara’, it would irritate me if I saw the audio options available for the movie were only English, French and German.
So I started searching if there were any other movies that had this issue. After hours of scouring, I found just one another, ‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’. During the scouring I realised one thing – most of the English/Hollywood films available had 4 possibe audio options, which were English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. But only for ‘Logan Lucky’ and ‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’, we got the three non English options.
So from this, I understood that this was most likely a simple mistake. Either some programmer or UI/UX editor didn’t completely check the options available in these movies and now we are stuck with these options. I hope someone from Amazon Prime Video will read this article and hopefully fix this. Till then:
‘Logan Lucky’ and ‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’ are both streaming on Amazon Prime Video in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu languages only in India.
(By the way, there could be other films with similar issues and we could have missed them – just like Amazon Prime)