Dutch Oppenheimer audiences are having the same experience as German Die Hard fans. In the original English language version of Die Hard, the terrorists speak German. Well, at least they’re trying: Alan Rickman and Co. bark legendary off-key phrases like “Karl… shoot the window!”
What does this have to do with the new Christopher Nolan movie? A fairly large (language) error has crept into the atomic bomb biopic, which puts the fake USA flags in the shade by far. Even more interesting than the error itself are the many different possible explanations.
Next error discovered: Which Oppenheimer scene is it about?
Cillian Murphy plays physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who is assigned to develop the first atomic bomb for the United States during World War II. Before Oppenheimer gathers his team of scientists to work on the weapon of mass destruction in the desert, Christopher Nolan explains his CV to us. It also leads to the Netherlands via Göttingen in Lower Saxony.
Oppenheimer is to give a lecture at a Dutch university. Everyone expects the New Yorker to speak English. But no, the brilliant scientist speaks in surprisingly fluent Dutch. The audience is amazed – in the lecture hall and in the cinema.
Highly Recommended Oppenheimer Review
Cillian Murphy is said to be responsible for this and other passages 30,000 Dutch words banged their skulls in just one weekend — instead of antique shopping with his co-workers in Santa Fe, says Robert Downey Jr. Sounds impressive.
The problem: What Cillian Murphy says in the original version of the film obviously has little to do with real Dutch. “Anyone who has seen the film and speaks Dutch knows that it wasn’t Dutch”writes the Dutch Metro Nieuws .
Fake Dutch? How the Oppenheimer bug was discovered
Shortly after Oppenheimer launched on July 20, Dutch Nolan fans stormed Twitter and wondered about it “wrong dutch”.
For the audience from the Oranje Nation, Oppenheimer’s speech and some dialogues sound more like German. Partly is also from “drunken German” the speech. If you listen carefully and have perhaps been to Amsterdam or heard interviews from Dutch footballers, the pseudo-Dutch can also catch the eye of a pair of German ears.
I’ve seen Oppenheimer in the original version and in German: the scenes sound completely different. While the Dutch sentences sound almost too good in the German dubbed version, the presentation in the original version with Cillian Murphy’s voice has an indefinable sound. It could also be Portuguese.
What has happened there? How did Oppenheimer’s Fantasy Dutch come about?
How did the error come about? There are 3 different explanations
Explanation 1: Cillian Murphy had a bad Dutch teacher
As already mentioned, Cillian Murphy was studying Dutch for the film. But how actually? The British actor received support from Dutch Oppenheimer cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Murphy said before the theatrical release. Hoyte van Hoytema read the quantum physics speech, Murphy recorded what was said with his smartphone “and then I listened to it for about 3 weeks. I still remember it in Dutch.”
Universal
Oppenheimer
So Cillian Murphy didn’t really study Dutch. He only memorized those sentences that he has to use in the film. He compared sound and pronunciation with van Hoytema. But is Hoyte van Hoytema really a suitable Dutch tutor? According to his own statements, the man has not been in his parents’ country for 20 years. “I have a Swedish wife and a Swedish daughter. I feel adopted by Sweden.” With such a cosmopolitan life, you can sometimes lose the feeling for your mother tongue.
Explanation 2: Nolan cut up the Oppenheimer speech to the point of meaninglessness
In the Netherlands, false Oppenheimer Dutch is a big deal and has already been widely inspected. Language expert Sylvia Johnson, who works for an online learning platform, has developed her own theory. She suspects that Nolan or his film crew randomly deleted words from Cillian Murphy’s speech to tighten the scene.
As a result, the few remaining sentences are not grammatically correct. “Combined with a heavy accent, this can lead to many Dutch people do not recognize their language”, says Johnson. In addition, there is the complex topic (quantum physics), which makes it difficult to understand what is being said intuitively.
More on the subject:
Explanation 3: Oppenheimer’s Dutch is not supposed to sound good at all
A generous approach is also being discussed on Dutch social media, which interprets the lazy Dutch in favor of Nolan and embeds it in Oppenheimer’s linguistic biography. The German coloring in the pronunciation of the Dutch lecture pushed the fans to the German roots of the physicist. His parents come from Hanau in Hesse. Oppenheimer learned Dutch – just like Cillian Murphy! – in a short time. The result: a mixture of accents from English, German and a tiny bit of Dutch, which we also hear in the film. Cillian Murphy therefore speaks 100 percent authentically. Although that doesn’t explain why some of his sentences don’t make sense.
Conclusion: There is no definitive explanation for Cillian Murphy’s fantasy language in Oppenheimer. A mixture of all three explanations is most likely.
The Dutch Oppenheimer fans have to live with that somehow. Just like German Die Hard fans.
Oppenheimer has been in German cinemas since July 20th.