You're Not Helping!

I recently sat down to watch Stargate with the kids.  It has been a long time since I watched it, and it hasn't aged particularly well, but the kids like Star Wars and I thought it'd be something new and different for them.

For those who don't recall the plot line, it follows an Egyptologist who gets mixed up with a secret Air Force project to reactivate a device unearthed in Egypt in the 1920's or 1930's that they think will facilitate long-distance space travel.

There is a fair amount of subtitling in the movie.  The opening scenes follow French archeologists working in Egypt, so all the initial dialog is in French with subtitles.  Later the Egyptologist and his Air Force teammates travel to a distant planet where everyone speaks a dialect of Egyptian, including the supreme alien overlord that they have to overthrow.  Any time the natives or the alien are on-screen everything has to be subtitled.

Of the five youngsters viewing with me, only two are proficient readers, and dialog can go by pretty quickly, especially if you have any interest in anything else happening on-screen.  Because of the crowd's limited reading skills I started reading the subtitles out lead early in the movie.  I thought it would be helpful.

A minute or two into a particularly dialog-dense section of the alien planet scenes my four-year-old turn to me mid-narration and with great exasperation exclaimed, "Dad, stop reading!  I can't hear the movie!"

I think she knew what I was doing - she knows enough to recognize a few words on her own, so she was aware that those words on the screen had some sort of meaning.  I was intrigued that despite the fact that what I was saying was very much applicable to the movie, it was not a vital part of the movie she was watching.  Admittedly, Stargate is rated PG-13 (I did some selective editing with the fast-forward button through some sections) so it's not really geared for her intellectual level.  Even so, she was engaged by much of what was going on, including - apparently - the non-English dialog.

She didn't have to understand the meaning of what everyone was saying because she wasn't really trying to take in the whole movie the way I would.  On the contrary, her goal was to take in the overall experience.  If people want to speak in another language then we should let them, and not worry so much about what it is they're saying.

It makes me wonder what else is going on in their young brains that I might never glimpse without inadvertently ruining some experience while trying to be helpful.  Pretty fascinating stuff, I bet.