Unreadable subtitles

[Actor]

I started watching the movie Carlos on the Sundance Channel. The dialog is partly English and partly in other languages (mostly Spanish, I think). I'm monolingual. The parts that were not in English were subtitled in white. The problem was that a lot of the subtitles were against light backgrounds that washed out the letters. The move is about five hours long. After about an hour turned it off because I could no longer keep up. Most of the non-English dialog was unreadable, and I assume there was a lot of exposition there, which I was missing.

Carlos is only one example. I've seen other movies with the same problem. Don't the people who make these films care about their monolingual viewers?

Tora! Tora! Tora! also has white subtitles in the Japanese language scenes, but they always stand out, even when the background is white. Apparently the producers cared.

[Davideo]

Maybe the filmmaker wasn't responsible for the subtitles. It may have been the distributor who acquired the film for exhibition to their target country. I've seen quality subtitles done so it just boils down to who's doing it as quality does vary...just like audio dubbing of foreign material which can be horrible.

[Actor]

Maybe the filmmaker wasn't responsible for the subtitles. It may have been the distributor who acquired the film for exhibition to their target country. I've seen quality subtitles done so it just boils down to who's doing it as quality does vary...just like audio dubbing of foreign material which can be horrible.

If you'll allow me an analogy, that's kind of like saying it's not the farmer's fault the food taste's bad, it's the cook's. I don't care. I'm not going to eat the meal.

Somewhere along the line between the cast and crew who made the film and the ultimate consumer (me) someone was more interested in a fast buck than a quality product. Since the actual dialog is in eight different languages: English, Arabic, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Japanese and Russian, I don't see how the filmmakers could possibly have not known that the vast majority of their viewers would be relying on the subtitles to keep up with the story. I doubt there are very many people on the planet who speak all of those languages. In other words, I'm saying the filmmaker should have been responsible for the subtitles. I'm aware that standard practice is to turn the subtitling over to another company but the filmmaker should still have maintained some control over the quality of the job.

IMDb says the film was made in France and Germany, so maybe French and German speakers got better subtitles.

The film looks really interesting and won a bunch of awards but I doubt I'll ever see it. I certainly am not going to try and learn an additional seven language for the sake of seeing one movie.