Watch the Skies’ A.I. Dubbing Sets Dangerous Prescedent
As someone who is quite open to watching international cinema, I ended up rolling my eyes at the opening sentence of a Variety article announcing the US release of Watch the Skies, originally known as UFO Sweden:
A foreign language action comedy is headed to U.S. movie theaters this spring, but audiences won’t have to groan about subtitles.
It turns out that a company named Flawless A.I. has used generative A.I. technology to dub the Swedish science fiction comedy into English, perfectly matching lip movements. This new version of UFO Sweden, which I doubt I’ll ever solely refer to under the title of Watch the Skies, is set to be released to 100 AMC Theatres in May, distributed by XYZ Films. As someone who saw and enjoyed the film at the 2023 Toronto After Dark Film Festival, I am left disappointed that UFO Sweden won’t be getting a proper North American release in its native language.
Watch the Skies is the Latest Example of US Audience’s Fear of Subtitles
It is no secret that the casual North American cinemagoer has disdain over the concept of “reading a film.” Staying within Sweden, 2010 saw the North American releases of the original adaptations of Noomi Rapace‘s star-making roles in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. However, the trilogy only received limited releases and plans were already underway for David Fincher’s English-language version, which came out in 2011.
It is a similar story to many other popular foreign language films, which will either receive an English language remake or be dubbed into English, the latter often having unintentionally comic results. That said, not all English dubs are bad, as is the case of the celebrity-filled dubs of many of the Studio Ghibli releases.
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Watching the featurette detaining the process of “visual dubbing” UFO Sweden into Watch the Skies, admittedly the results are impressive. The film’s cast was brought back to record their dialogue into English and the technology would visually match this dialogue with the footage shot back in 2022. However, as is always the case with new technologies, the question should be not if you could flawlessly dub Watch the Skies into English, but rather if you should.
The interviews with the film’s producers in the behind-the-scenes clips talk about how the Swedish language is a barrier and how visual dubbing would allow Watch the Skies to be more accessible to audiences. However, I am left bothered by the testimonials from test audiences in the clip, who say that they would love it if this process was used for other international films. As such, this technology would be setting a dangerous precedent, which puts international cinema in danger of being gentrified to appear just like North American films.
I fear that Flawless A.I. is going to roll back the progress made in recent years to better accept International Films. One of the lessons from Bong Joon-Ho’s winning multiple awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture, for Parasite is that there is a whole world to discover for those who overcome the “one-inch barrier” of subtitles. However, for some, this seems to be a barrier to be fixed with technology, rather than accepted for what it is.
