I was gonna start this post with how completely blown away I was by Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow when I first saw it. The problem with that is that it couldn’t possibly be any further from the truth.
It was one of those rare occasions where I was completely baked, I didn’t have the foggiest idea what the fuck was going on and about half way through it I asked my friend Iris who the hell that Jude Law fellow was and what he was doing in this movie.
Anyway, I watched it again a few days ago with my roomies and I noticed something funny. At about 15m57s they show a bunch of newspapers in different languages, one of which is German. Me being the inquisitive bastard that I am of course hit pause to read it.
It’s amazing how many errors they managed to squeeze in here. First of all there is a typo in the headline (Metallr), “stehlen” (to steal) appears twice for whatever reason and Metallmaschinen should be one word. Clearly, who bestowed such great care on the caption must have done an even more magnificent job with the small print! So I harnessed the power of full HD resolution and took a closer look at the rest:
And I wasn’t to be disappointed: “Schlechte Desends Nach Landschaft” isn’t a sentence, Desends is not a real word, and even if it were it still wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense. And why does it say December 16th when the date in the movie is around March 17th? But the real kicker is the actual text. Schröder, Chirac and Blair – are you fucking kidding me? If you can’t be bothered to come up with some real text… fair enough. But have those people never heard of lorem ipsum?
You’d think that with an estimated budget of 70 million dollars they’d be willing to spend a measly 50 bucks on a German major at the local college to proof-read their shit. But to be fair, the scene lasted a grand total of maybe 2.5 seconds. Why spend any more money on it than absolutely necessary? Because it’s the insignificant details that make things great. It’s when you do something right that you weren’t really expected to get right that people notice it. But there’s always hope for the Extended Edition.
Geeky side note: The second image’s WordPress-id is
1337.
