hire a linguist

Rating: 6/10 (8 March 2016)

I'm not sure what the point of this movie was. You never really find out exactly what happened. You're sort of left wondering what the point of the last 92 minutes was.
The main problem with this movie was that they tried (and failed) to write it in an older dialect of English and failed miserably, because, despite being filmed in Toronto which has at least 2 universities offering a linguistics program, they failed to ask a linguist how to speak the English properly.
They used the word "thou/thee/thy/thine" as opposed to "you/your/yours" throughout the movie. The first problem with this is that this movie is happening after the Brits invading North America. The term "thou" died before this. The second problem with this is that they used the term incorrectly. The word "thou" is the singular second person pronoun, whereas "you" was the plural second person pronoun, or the singular polite second person. If you speak French, the word "thou" is the equivalent of the word "tu" and the word "you" is the equivalent of the word "vous". At one point, William says to his children, "All of thee stop that!" and even a week later I am still cringing. Other wrong parts, is that for some reason, we assume the first settlers must have spoken present-day British English (even though there is no "one" British English), when in reality, North American English, specifically Canadian English is, is more like Old English than any dialect of British English. One major part of this was the the characters took part in the deletion of h's and coda r's. Do you know how we know the first Brits to come to North America pronounced all the r's and h's? Because we in North America still pronounce all our r's and h's. What, did these people think Brits had stopped pronouncing r's and h's long before they came to North America and that somehow the sounds reappeared in North American English? The other problem is they went all Shakespearean style in their talking. Shakespeare not only happened 200 years before the time of this movie, but it was written in poetic prose meant to be like candy to the ears and did not reflect how people actually spoke. How would you feel if people 500 years from now looked at our poetry and assumed we all talked in ridiculous rhymes like that? The whole movie was an ear sore. Next time either hire a linguist, or just talk normally.