Deaf Girly and subtitled Star Wars

HAPPY NEW YEAR PEEPS!

Feels like ages ago that I was getting ready for Christmas and now it's all over... *sniff

One of the best pre-Christmas things I did was go and see the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie with subtitles.

However, before I was allowed to go and watch it, FJM insisted that I watch the first three Star Wars movies – he's banned me from watching the Prequels – so that I would understand who everyone was and note all the references.

And so we devoted a rainy December day to ploughing through them one by one. I have to admit, I was a bit worried I'd hate them... but actually I loved them. It was great seeing a young Harrison Ford and mercifully, most of Luke Skywalker's moaning was out of my frequency (God, he's annoying in the first movie isn't he?). Sadly one other character who was out of my frequency was R2-D2 – the cute droid. I couldn't hear any of his bleeps and whistles and, although the captions showed when he was making a noise, it obviously couldn't convey the frequency or rhythm of them. And FJM felt that this was important.

So he did something amazing. He interpreted R2-D2 for me, in all the movies. He transposed the bleeps and whistles to a frequency I could hear and let me know when he was sad, nervous, happy or angry. And it was brilliant. It brought what would have otherwise been to me a silent character and really made the movie. It was also highly entertaining watching FJM do this *beams.

In the new movie, there's BB8 and FJM had promised to do the same, but amazingly BB8 had a much lower 'voice' so I could hear him alright – but hearing him nervously go somewhere, or bleat angrily made me realise how much FJM had helped me in the first movies by giving R2-D2 a voice.

There's more – according to FJM, the subtitles in the new Star Wars were also very informative. They told you who was speaking. Helped you identify characters easily and even made one section of it – giving nothing away – much clearer than it would have been without them.

I enjoyed it so much, that I am going to see it again at a showing this month. And this time around, now I know the storyline, I will be able to relax a bit more and enjoy the general feel of the film rather than staring transfixed at the subtitles. I'm intrigued to find out if I will notice anything I missed last time.

There's just one thing more worth noting about the new Star Wars movie and that's how many cinemas showed it with subtitles and how many showings there were... LOADS!!

I honestly had my pick of local cinemas – and it doesn't seem to be too difficult to go and seeing it again.

If only cinemas would do this with more movies. OK, so the demand was obviously much higher for Star Wars as seemingly the whole country went to see it, but if they can do it with Star Wars, then they should do it with other films.

Here's to 2016 and hoping they do...

DG
xx