MovieChat Forums > Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning (2005) Discussion > Finnish humour

Finnish humour

posted 15 years ago by winden80
7 replies | jump to latest

So me and 4 friends were having a movie night and we found Starwreck, it looked alright and the cover said it had a rating of something like 8 on imdb (it's apparently gone down a bit since then) so we rented it. Now first of I have to say that it looked good, I've seen movies with much worse special effects, and as far as the acting goes well you can't really expect that much from amateurs but the humour? What exactly was funny in this movie? The five of us didn't laugh a single time throughout the entire movie. Well actually that's not true we laughed one time towards the end but apart from that it was probably the least funny film I've ever seen. I don't know if it's just that we're not five years old anymore and don't find people tripping all that funny but I think that maybe there was a problem with the translation. We saw the movie with english subtitles (as we were 2 swedes, 1 italian, 1 portugese and 1 mexican) and maybe the punchlines, as well as the jokes, were lost in translation? A lot of people have apparently found this movie to be very funny and even discounting those who know the people involved in the project and the five year olds of the world it just seems we missed something. Is the movie funnier in finnish?

[–] VladimirK 15 years ago

I noticed what you mean about the subtitles.
There was quite alot of things that weren't spelled correctly, but they didn't even feel as if they were supposed to be spelled incorrectly.

[–] SkyLynx_vtx 14 years ago

You lose a lot if you are not familiar with the two shows getting spoofed there: Babylon 5 and Star Trek. I'm myself not too familiar with Star Trak and feel I missed some jokes on that side. But still it was nice and funny film to me.

[–] kkhsiivonen 14 years ago

The biggest problem is the fact that it's meant to for extremely narrow audience - finnish scifi nerds. A lot of the humor is something you just can't understand if you're not finnish, or haven't lived in Finland for years (surprisingly language isn't that big of an issue). second biggest problem is the simplicity of humor. Even if you are in tht marginal group who can understand it, you'd notice it's still just adding banality in "larger that life" situations.

Back when the film came out, it was highly respected as what it represents (years of enthusiastic labor), not as what it is. Later it kinda lost the hype, and the movie stayed.

[–] smirre44 14 years ago

I dunno, I'm Norwegian and I found it funny. Although admittely I am a huge Trek and B5 fan, so that helped a lot. I had to look up some of the things that were supposed to be funny, stuff like the crackpot chief engineer who Pirk called on a couple of times, apparently his accent was supposed to be the joke. You wouldn't get it unless you were Finnish or looked it up on the internet.

[–] b.dickens 13 years ago

Well, I'm not Finnish (I'm Dutch) and I found this movie to be very funny. It's an excellent spoof of both Star Trek and Babylon 5 and all the jokes are spot-on.

If you're not a fan of either Star Trek or Babylon 5, or both, yes I assume the movie loses a lot of its appeal...

[–] Vansnitchzel 9 years ago

The humour is very finnish in nature. Comedy isn't really in the actual dialogue, but how it's delivered. *beep* is a hilarious character, also Pirk getting annoyed is really funny.

Check out In Bruges or Rowan Atkinson in Blackadder. Both are brilliant comedies and have quite similar humour in english.

[–] Shaolin_Apu 9 years ago

The humor is very local, it is often found in some small stresses on words, choices of words and using of special idioms. All that would be quite impossible to translate.

Some examples:

In the near end, the CPP Potkustart is heavily fired upon, Pirk utters in some weirdo tone "löylyä riittää" - he is referring to some old man who loves extreme sauna going.

Also, when Pirk enters the bridge, the sexy female officer is wondering if the man really is the Emperor himself. Once she has gotten the response, she says only "just" which sounds like some kind of sarcastic approval.

Captain Karigrandi refers to a juice commercial...

Reality television spoils fiction.