It is full of localization errors.
1. Early in the movie, the CIA agent asks the child a question in broken Romanian. She answers in perfect Russian. Moldova was both Russian and Romanian but the language spoken is a Romanian dialect. In any case, nobody speaks perfect Russian anymore.
2. Later in the movie, everyone has perfect Romanian. Nobody speaks like that in Moldova.
3. It is no surprise that it is filmed in Budapest and set in Moldova but the problem is that they look nothing alike Budapest is one of the most recognizable European capitals and it is in Central Europe, not Eastern Europe. This means that the style, the designs, most elements, are different.
4. Moldova also happens to be one of the poorest countries in Europe according to Numbeo so I don't see how they can develop superweapons.
I haven't paid close attention but I think they got the physics part wrong too. Now, for 70% of the world that doesn't live in Europe nor has visited Europe, this means nothing at all. They could speak in Mandarin and it would have been the same thing. However, as someone who knows Romanian and some Russian, it was a "WTF" moment. The same can be said with the border - last time Moldova had a border with Russia was during the URSS, when, as far as I recall, Moldova was part of it.
There are many WTF moments and I'm curious about the state of aggregation. I understand that it is a sci-fi movie but you can invent stuff only so far.
reply
share
markus-huru
8 years ago
I find it hard to understand why they have to pretend it's a different city, especially when they play it in a city that immediately reveals where they actually are.
25 minutes into when they leave in the convoy and filmed from the air, they drive past St. Stephen's Basilica (church). Why not simply let the movie take place in Budapest when it's where they are filming it?
reply
share
Batigol84
8 years ago
The little girl spoke Slovenian, as did the CIA agent later on - maybe also at the start of the movie but she was butchering the language so much that I had a hard time understanding anything and I was born in Slovenia. The girl on the other hand spoke almost perfectly so I went to check her imdb profile and it turned out her mother is from here which explains why she got the accent and everything right. Also, even the script had them (little girl and her brother) say that they're from Slovenia ("Slovenca sva". What they were doing in Moldova is anyone's guess though, but I got the impression that the director tried to show them as locals which makes no sense.
reply
share
racnauj
8 years ago
producers, casting directors.. etc will always do that. get people from all over the place and make them act as something they are not. i'm colombian and that 'narcos' series is a perfect example.
reply
share
dragon_fly83
8 years ago
The little girl spoke Slovenian, as did the CIA agent later on
yes, emily mortimer speaking slovenian sounded like it had russian accent, i know, because one russian who now lives in slovenia, sounds a lot like that...
basically she didn't pronounce it correctly so it sounded very weird & funny
not that i mind, but why were the characters slovenians, and not moldovan?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR76xcQ5lPA
reply
share
FMinus
8 years ago
The children were speaking perfect Slovene, which is quite different from Russian.
reply
share
MartinP666
8 years ago
Not that is matters that much for the story of the movie, but Hungary is indeed generally considered part of Eastern Europe - especially from an east/west perspective. I.e. definitely more Eastern than Western Europe.
This has more to do with history and politics than with pure geography, and since Hungary has a history of being a communist state of Russia and the Soviet Union, it clearly qualifies as an Eastern European country.
reply
share