Guest Column- Tom-Yum-Goong vs. The Protector: Lessons Learned in Translation

Caleb Stokes is our guest writer for today with a great article about film translations! Enjoy!

Ever since the Bruce Lee invasion of the 1960’s, the “kung-fu” film persists as the most stable genre market in the ever-expanding international film community.  Notorious for the Shaw Brothers production model (the brothers were known to write, cast, shoot, and distribute two-hour movies in less than a week) and the laughably poor quality that resulted, Hong Kong films and other Asian action cinema have nevertheless had a tremendous impact on Western culture.  These influences range from the predictable, as seen in popular action movies such as The Matrix, to the downright obscure: the entire discography of the Wu-Tang Clan, for example.  However, after decades of fruitful interaction, the relationship between East and West represented by the kung-fu film is changing.  No case sums up this shifting dynamic better than the multiple versions of the film Tom-Yum-Goong by rising-star Tony Jaa.  The differences in editing between the Thai and American versions of the film illustrate a disturbing trend currently spreading through global cinema distribution.

Robert Ebert once wrote the following regarding one of Tony Jaa’s films: “It was 107 minutes long, and approximately seven minutes are devoted to the plot” (Ebert).  It is true that while Jaa frequently serves as writer, director, producer, and star in all of his films, the young Muay-Thai master’s primary concern remains with his job as Fight Choreographer.  The movie in question exemplifies a typical Tony Jaa story.  The conflict usually involves some sort of stolen item (in this case, a pet elephant) and one young man’s quest to return it.  Of course, things go horribly awry — often in absurd ways — and Jaa must kill his way across the majority of Southeast Asia in order to save the day.  Romantic relationships, deep psychological themes, and the most rudimentary of character development usually get cut in favor of more time devoted to the film’s primary focus: namely, watching Tony Jaa jump very high in the air and knee people in the face.  This lack of plot characterizes many martial arts films, but the minimalism of a Tony Jaa original is so extreme that any change in the editing of the movie, as found between the Thai and American versions, put into stark contrast the different priorities of two cultures.

Some of the changes made in the adaption of Jaa’s film for American audiences admittedly improve the work.  For instance, the film’s title change from Tom Yum Goong (which is Thai for a type of soup) to The Protector better reflects the story of one man’s quest to save his pet elephant.  Improvements are also seen in the story itself.  When Jaa’s character gets kidnapped by a psychotic cab driver upon landing in Australia, the Thai version offers no explanation for the subsequent car chase.  Thankfully, added scenes in the American cut make it clear that the cabbie really was a hired assassin out to kill Jaa all along.  Perhaps most noticeably, English subtitles in the Thai version remain atrocious despite the noble intentions of providing access to Western audiences.  A typical translation from the Thai version would be the ridiculously muddled line, “I were wanting you them to kill” (Tom).  Regardless of their culture of origin, any honest film critics must admit that Tom Yum Goong does gain some benefits from its American re-edit.

However, the slight improvements gained by the American re-edit are in no way worth the resulting loss and misrepresentation of the film’s characteristic Thai culture.  Most surprisingly, much of the original movie’s humor doesn’t make it to Western audiences.  A fake Jackie Chan cameo, an scene satirizing Western product placement, and a hilarious chase scene on a Segue were cut entirely from The Protector.  This brutal cut leaves a movie about a man trying to save the elephant he loves without any much-needed, tongue-in-cheek comic relief.  Jaa may not be the perfect filmmaker, but the action star is aware that his films only operate on a certain level.  He has no qualms about pointing that fact out for the sake of humor, and yet this fact is literally lost in translation.

Perhaps even worse than the re-edit’s overly serious tone is the damage done to the film’s historical context.  Jaa’s hero hails from a jungle village of traditional elephant mahouts, or handlers.  In Tom Yom Goong, a CGI battle sequence explains that the villagers are descendents of a band of Muay Thai fighters trained to protect a war elephant’s vulnerable spot: the belly.  While this school of martial arts never actually existed, Muay Thai and elephant mounts have been used to protect Thailand’s people since the invasion of Alexander the Great.  A mahout’s relationship to his elephant constitutes a sacred relationship in Thai culture, and the elephant itself inhabits a symbolic place within the country’s interpretation of Buddhism.  However, despite this plot points potential for fruitful cultural exchange, the CGI sequence that explains the villager’s origins is left out of The Protector.  Perhaps the special effects were not of the quality expected by American moviegoers, but the loss of the mahout scenes deals the movie a near-mortal blow.  The main character’s prowess at martial arts has zero explanation in the English-dubbed version; Jaa is merely, inexplicably impossible to kill.  Furthermore, the loss of explanation for the man/elephant relationship greatly dulls the primary conflict, leaving Westerners to wonder why someone would risk death and maim 100’s of triad henchmen over one baby elephant.

The most pervasive injury done to Jaa’s vision by the translation of Tom Yum Goong into The Protector manifests in the most cliché manner possible: dubbing.  For nearly four decades, the dubbing of foreign films has long been the number one gripe for international film critics and fans alike.  Dubbing English voices over the performances of foreign actors can dull the performance of even the most skilled thespian, and this theatrical atrocity is almost entirely responsible for the kitschy-space martial arts films have always inhabited in Western culture.  Moreover, American distributors such as Miramax often attempt to save money by cutting what they consider to be “minor” characters from the film, thereby saving themselves the salary of another American voice actor.  Such editorial arrogance further damages the integrity of the film’s plot, resulting in films like Tom Yum Goong going from 113 minutes in the original cut to an incomprehensible 87 (The Protector).  This rationale was even used to exclude the special features from the American DVD, denying all interested parties access to an intriguing look inside the burgeoning Thai film industry.

The plight of Jaa’s American translation is merely one telling example of a larger, frighteningly-blasé attitude towards Asian cinema in general.  Anthony Chatfield accurately sums up the problem in his reporting for Helium.com:

The cutting of foreign films has been going on for years. It’s basically the American studio executives deciding for the American people what they will and will not understand.  So they take a perfectly amazing film and cut out vast quantities of the story and remake the film in a manner more suitable to the short attentions spans and fickle nature of a nation that doesn’t like to read at the movies. (Chatfield)

While Chatfield correctly asserts that this practice is quite old, evidence shows that such ethnocentrism is on the rise.  Consider Martin Scorcesse’s The Departed, which condenses the Korean trilogy Infernal Affairs down into a single two-and-half hour epic devoid of a single Asian actor.  Japanese horror films such have Ju-on have been remade shot-for-shot at enormous expense, producing american-ized bastardizations like The Grudge, a film which even hired the same cast and crew as the original film; the only noticeable changes were that the actors were taught their English lines phonetically and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character was haphazardly added to the plot. The relentlessness of American reinterpretation reached a nonsensical peak with last year’s Death at a Funeral, a shot-for-shot, line-for-line remake of a British comedy whose only change was replacing a white, English cast with an African-American one.  If the nationalistic arrogance that perverts the films of Tony Jaa and countless other filmmakers is not stopped, the idiocy presumed of the American film-going public will soon become a self-fulfilling prophecy, leaving our nation forever isolated from the rich artistic exchange experienced by other countries around the world.  American cinema cannot afford such close-mindedness, and American movie-lovers should resist supporting such policies with their ticket money.