movies

These mfers want a hard "Hark!' and maybe a couple"Tallyho"

From the article:

The choice is a striking departure from the unwritten Hollywood rule of characters in historical epics employing British accents — from The Ten Commandments to Ben-Hur to Gladiator to HBO’s Rome. Obviously, The Odyssey characters speaking the various dialects of Homeric Greek, Attic and Hellenistic Koine wouldn’t make for a very accessible film. But the modern British accent is traditionally considered universally pleasing and “just foreign enough” to convey a timeless quality (even though it’s only existed in its current form for 250 years or so).

The trope is so consistent and familiar that even fantasy shows set in other worlds, like Game of Thrones, use British accents. In perhaps the most amusing example of Brit bias, the English accent was used in HBO’s 1980s-set Chernobyl rather than subjecting viewers to five hours of Russian accents (the limited series’ director, Johan Renck, rather bluntly explained, “[The Russian] accent on film is tremendously stupid”).

The article is kinda confused, people don't have a big issue with the accents, it's more that the things they say sound modern. Tom Holland saying "My dad's coming home" is weird, but shouting "LET'S GOOOOOO!!!" when leading an army completely took me out.

Go full Mel Gibson!

Wait, wait... no definitely not. Don't ever go full Mel Gibson.

As opposed to at last speaking with some prose, this is based on a poem after all. Matt Daemon yelling "Let's goooo!" into battle is just silly.

Passion of the Christ had entered the chat

I wouldn't mind them hiring some kind of historian/linguist to train actors to speak in what an ancient Greek accent might have sounded like if they were speaking modern day English.

I don't remember the name of the movie, but I remember a similar concept with a historical film about the USA's founding.

When an English language movie is set in the past in a non-English language country, formal British accents or mid-Atlantic accents are traditionally used. The more formal speech helps set the tone and creates an immersive feeling that this isn’t taking place in the current time and place or vernacular.

The Google AI summary actually does a decent job of citing the different reasons since this question has come up before. Do a search for something like “why do modern movies use English accents to invoke the past”.

Anyone remember Kevin Costner’s American accent in Robin Hood? Now it’s a whole movie of Costners!

I would rather have Americans acting in their own accent that butchering someone else's. Even if they do an okay job, sometimes it can feel like they're concentrating so hard on maintaining the accent that their performance loses its depth and starts sounding like line rehearsal.