Product: The Idiot (4 DVD Set)
Rating: 3.0
Impact!
This is an excellent adaptation of the Idiot emphasizing more the comedy of manners than the tragedy. The tragic aspects of the story don't build well throughout the plotline and appear almost melodramatic. In spite of its better qualities, nothing of value can be said for the English subtitles, which are by far the worst I've ever seen.First off the subtitles sometimes run their beginnings and ends off to the left and right sides of the letterbox image, so when dialog is rapid you get a whole set of sentence fragments. Then the countless spelling errors are so bad (the 'be' of to be spelled as 'bee') that you momentarily lose all sense of what's happening while you ponder some meaningless stray word. Sometimes the middle of a sentence will have an untranslated Cyrillic word stuck in the middle. But the crowning moment of bad translation has to be when General Ivolgin has a stroke. His son yells out, "Stroke!" He says this correctly in Russian and any translation of the book itself says the same thing. However these subtitle writers decide the son says, "Impact,!" as if he had been hit by a massive mortar shell. Awful!I hope they spend a quite considerable longer time adding subtitles to Bortko's Master and Margerita.