I picked up the GHOST IN THE SHELL 2: INNOCENCE disc at Kim's Video tonight. I checked it out at home and noticed that the English subtitles are actually closed captions, i.e. they identify speakers who aren't immediately identifiable by putting the speaker's identity in parentheses. E.g. "(Woman) Help me."

More importantly they put sound effects in parentheses as subtitles, e.g.:
(people shouting)
(electronic beeping)
(faint footsteps)
(crash)
(explosion)
All appearing when those sounds are first heard.

This is incredibly distracting.
I checked to see what subtitle options there are. There are 4:
1) English
2) French
3) English (subtitles for the director's commentary)
4) French (subtitles for the director's commentary)

Interestingly, the French subs do not have speakers identified or sound effects described. Too bad I don't speak enough French to follow the movie that way.

(There is no English dub track.)

So it seems to me that someone mistook an English closed caption track for subtitles.

Has anyone encountered this before? Is there some explanation for it? Is there anything I can do about it?

Did I get a defective disc? Is this a French edition that somehow got imported to Kim's Video? I checked the labels and everything and it sure looks legit, with a DreamWorks logo.

I'm going to try calling DreamWorks tomorrow. I need to see this for a review and I'd hate to complain about this in the review if it's the result of some kind of mistake.

ADDENDUM: Okay, after posting the above, I went on Amazon.com and checked the viewers' comments and they all complained about the same thing, attributing it to a rush job by DreamWorks. I wish I'd thought to check Amazon.com first.

Aaargh! How annoying!

Thanks for the heads up - glad to find out before I ordered it (which I will now not be doing).

As a Hard-of-Hearing individual, I tend to have either subtitling and/or captioning on all the time, so I can speak from experience when I say that this is a common problem with DVDs either domestic or foreign. It seems that many studios producing discs intermingle the meaning of Closed-Captioning and Subtitling without any clue as to what either should mean. For myself, I would rather have the Captioning, as I need to know when a noise or off-camera voice is heard on the soundtrack, so although your problem is exactly the opposite, I do sympathize with what you mean.

My director's cut of MY SASSY GIRL is the same, and it truly is odd to be reading "bang bang bang" as a subtitle.

From what I'm read, it does seem the regular English subtitle track was left off. Hopefully it will be corrected.

The only DVD I own that has "caption subs" is the Canadian DVD of IRREVERSIBLE. But luckily there are only a few instances of descriptive captions on that disc. The ones for INNOCENCE seem to be worse.