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Comment by jrace | Hacker News Reader

This is the part that bothers me:

  "I think in the case of Mr. Nolan, with ["Tenet"], the characters have a mask, and he wants to keep the original sound because I think for him it's more real," he says. Presumably, that mentality also extends to "The Dark Knight Rises," in which Bane's mask muffled a significant percentage of that character's lines.

---If that is the case, that the director does not want us to understand the dialogue then why make it so important to the story? Why make it so dialogue heavy then?

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I tried to watch Tenet at the cinema and had to walk out after a minute or two and get a refund. The sound was cranked up insanely loud. I don't know if the people who sat through the full running time were at risk of hearing damage but it certainly felt that way to me, and that is not something I care to risk.

The staff said that the requirement to play it at this volume had come from the distributors and ultimately from the director, in response to complaints of inaudible dialog. No idea if that's true but they also said they were now getting loads of complaints about the volume and having to refund tickets, unsurprisingly. What a ridiculous mess.

Anyway, I eventually watched at home with subtitles and it seems I didn't miss much. Michael Spicer summed it up beautifully [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/s2FXfFeRtJo

I watched Tenet at home with subtitles, and had no problem with it. Between wife going "what are they saying?" halfway thru many movies, and getting kids to read fast, subtitles are just left on all the time now. I'm a bit annoyed at my own propensity to stare at them instead of the action, but it's better than "wait, what?".

The film was horrible. I watched it with 6 people at home and everyone hated it, for good reason. It's peak Nolan-thinks-he-is-artsy.

Nolan would be a decent film maker if all his movies didn't think they were a solid two notches smarter than they actually are.

I’m sure it was damaging, honestly. I have to think most professional sound mixers have lost part of their hearing, because the standards for “good audio” are far too loud. For example, IMAX, which is supposed to have technically well calibrated sound in the theatre, clocks around 95db in the especially loud parts, and over 80db for large portions. This is after watching Dune in two different IMAX theaters and checking my watch’s audio level sensor :)

But Tenet is probably the loudest I’ve ever heard in a theatre. It had to be more than 90db for large parts of it.

And then I attended a wedding reception with a DJ recently, and it was over 90db for the whole two hours in a small-ish hall. Imo, that’s unacceptable.

In both of these experiences, my ears hurt bad. I can only think that the people making the decision to go this loud have already had their hearing damaged enough that they don’t think it’s loud enough. Well, why don’t we fix the problem by not busting people’s ears in the first place!

Maybe we should start suing folks who try to damage our hearing? Or get some legislation to set a cap on the average and max db allowed at various events? I’m not really sure how this problem will get solved.

And don’t get me wrong, I love immersive audio! I really enjoyed a lot of Dune’s soundtrack and mixing. I’m just shocked that immersive audio today basically means “turn it up to 90db to kill their ears” and not “let’s have a really meticulously mixed and nicely balanced experience.” But that enjoyment ends when my ears hurt.

I just don't get it, why is that allowed?

There are clear guidelines on how many decibels for how long damages ears, and noise is simple to measure.

I've been to concerts which were ear-splitting even up in the bleachers. It's just crazy to think how loud it would be right at the stage.

I just don't understand how venues don't get sued into oblivion, and I wish they would because it's too goddamn loud to enjoy.

For Tenet specifically, lots of dialogue without masks was still nearly inaudible on my home theater, while gunplay was deafening. It's not a mask issue, or at least not exclusively - it's an audio mix issue. There are scenes with just two unmasked people that were inaudible to me without having the background sounds painfully loud.

What you describe is infuriating. Many shows suffer from the same issue that even background noise obscures dialogue of main characters that is crucial for the story. It got so prevalent and so annoying that I started to vote with my feet.

If in the first few minutes I have problems hearing the dialogue, I just stop watching, leave a 1-star review with a comment that the audio is incomprehensible and ask for a refund in case I paid for watching. Hopefully, the others would start doing the same and the trend will go away.

I had the same problem. A fairly high end 5.1 system and I was unable to hear most of the dialogue. I have no idea what was going on in that movie, but I could hear the firing pin hit the primer in crystal clarity.

Tenet was just unintelligible; we ended up just turning it off. It had nothing to do with masks (we couldn't understand the non-masked sections either). It was purely sound mixing and a bad call from Nolan.

I won't be seeing another Nolan film until he changes his mind on the importance of voice quality, as I like to enjoy movies and not strain to have any idea what is going on. His choices in sound quality and mixing completely breaks any sense of immersion for me...if they were outstanding plot-wise I would possibly struggle through. But without that sense of immersion, they're just not worth watching imho, as his films are all about the immersion factor.

FWIW a couple of friends of mine really enjoyed tenet watching it in the cinema

They all wanted to rewatch it so we saw it in my home cinema and I put on subtitles, and everyone agreed that once they could actually understand the dialog, it was not a very good movie at all…

I've long claimed that Transformers movies would be greatly improved by having untranslated, non-subtitled Japanese dialog.

I'm not even sure that would have helped Transformers: The Last Knight.

TLK looped around to being enjoyable for me. Sanity buffer overflow.

is the dialogue that important in a batman movie? they are more dialogue heavy than most superhero movies, but I don't think it hurts the experience that much to miss some words here and there.

I wonder if there's a parallel worth making to music. some kinds of music (eg, metal subgenres) feature vocals that are basically unintelligible unless you look them up. it can be nice to know the lyrics, but it's not essential to enjoying the music.

I dunno, Batman spans the gamut from "campy bang pows" to "lite morality plays" -- not quite to the extent of, say, Joker, but some of the Nolan Batmans were way more existential and dialogue/monologue-driven than the older Batmans.

Maybe a more similar distinction would be the X-Men/Wolverine movies vs Logan, where the latter is a more introspective take on the character, and so the story is relatively more important than the action sequences.

I'm not trying to shit on nolan's batman movies; they are definitely a cut above most superhero fare. I'm pointing out that dialogue is only one of the ways in which the content of a movie is expressed. superhero movies are an easy example; you can deduce a lot about the plot just be observing who fights whom in what order. there are also subtler cues like body language, lighting, costume design, etc. some visual content (eg, belter creole in the expanse) has deliberately unintelligible dialogue. as long as it's an intentional choice (or at least a known tradeoff), it can still work.

Yeah, but with the Nolan Batmans in particular, I rewatched them again at home with subtitles on and got a way different (better, IMO) experience than the unintelligible garble at the theater.

When I first saw Batman Begins, I didn't at all understand that there was some connection between Henri Ducard and Ra's al Ghul (both played by Liam Neeson)... was really confused why Batman's apparent friend/mentor suddenly became the villain, and then somehow a bunch of other villains showed up and wanted to do something to Gotham (but couldn't understand what). At first watch, all I got was that "Batman went through some hard shit before Gotham". It didn't at all prepare me for the plotlines of the subsequent movies and none of the characters made sense until I could rewatch it with subtitles on.

My understanding is that Nolan chose that unintelligibility for some artistic reason, but as a moviegoer, it just means I miss most of the entire plot of his movies. That's especially the case when you combine unintelligible dialogue with fast dark scenes... just a lot of blurry fists and wheels that's incredibly hard to keep track of.

Also Interstellar... first time I watched it, all I really got was "corn farmer goes to space and gets betrayed". None of the intricacies of the Bookshelf of Time™ got through because it was all unintelligible. Argh.

Understanding every word seems to be a personal preference and if that is someones preference don't see a Nolan movie. Most of his movies fool around with timeline, visuals and speech to create some disorientation. Memento would be a screaming example of that. You could find the dvd chapter order and watch it linearly if you wanted to. But that would seem to me to completely avoid the purpose of the movie.

When I watched Tenet I had to let parts of my thinking go and just let it wash through me as it went without constantly trying to think too hard about what was happening. Dark corners were later illuminated, some weren't, but ok. My wife couldn't handle the start of it as there was too much not understood. I thought it was great and worth another watch.

For other movies, as discussed in the piece, there is more going on with dialogue quality that isn't intended. That's the real shame.

Part of what made Momento great was discovering that the timeline was backwards, you were just as confused as the main character...that was the point.

Agreed that it was meant to be confusing. What I found cool was there was a forward and backward plot line and you had to piece it together and just run with it as it went. Lots of people didn't like it. I thought it was a really good use of editing to create an effect.

Right? In such a world where people can't understand each other's voices, wouldn't they use hand signals and other gestures? That's how his movies would look if realism is the real goal (and not just laziness or a lack of care).

Dark Knight Rises also just plain clips when the explosions + soundtrack get too loud on the Front Left/Right tracks. During the rooftop fight with Catwoman/Batman/Bane henchmen for example. It's like somebody just increased the gain after the master was done without caring for proper limiting.

In Nolan's case, it's simply because he's a poor filmmaker.

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