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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

> I rarely watch movies without subtitles nowadays

Thank you. I've been in England for 8 years now and I've become fluent with any type of accent, yet I've still been watching movies with subs at home and it's been a crutch hard to get rid of; it made me second guess my ability to understand spoken English.

I have no issues in real life, or when watching YouTube, but movies, man... there's times I miss some words or I don't understand what's going on and I am unsure if I missed some kind of plot-crucial idiomatic joke whispered 30 minutes ago. And let's not speak of Tenet. Nolan is one of my favourite film-makers, but I hated that movie because I couldn't understand half the dialogue and the plot.

I'm happy to know it's not me, nor my ears failing.

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For me it's not an issue of perception, but sheer lack of working memory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2FXfFeRtJo

This is brilliant. I need to show this to anyone wondering what having a short-term memory issue feels like. I need a whiteboard and subtitles to figure that one out.

Haha, so relatable. That's what it's felt like every time someone has tried to onboard me to a project at work, without giving me a chance to ask (enough) follow-up questions and build up a clear domain ontology as they go.

On top of that, said explainer will complain that their work is "super difficult" and "hard to explain", but then, if by some miracle I can get them to sit still long enough and get up to speed, "miraculously" I'm able to onboard others.

I swear it's not a super-power! I just don't assume a ton of context!

> And let's not speak of Tenet. Nolan is one of my favourite film-makers, but I hated that movie because I couldn't understand half the dialogue and the plot.

This one is definitely not just you... I'm not sure Christopher Nolan himself understood the plot beyond "Inception, but for time machines".

Of course, I agree the plot makes no sense and peolpe that liked that movie just don’t want to admit they didn’t get it.

But since we’re talking about it… it didn’t help understanding the plot that it was by far the poorest sound mixing I’ve ever heard. I had to watch it a second time with subtitles on, only to confirm it wasn’t any better when you could understand them.

There's been a trend over the last 15-20 years as the big US movies have internationalized of reducing dialogue complexity to enable localization (once you notice it, the lexicon and grammar complexity in recent-ish Marvel movies especially is crushingly limited). Maybe mixing poorly (and writing a movie with "you won't really hear or understand the dialogue" in mind) is another strategy to hide that.

That, or a cynical mix engineer noticed that the words don't make the movie any better, so they made an editorial decision to cut them a little (plus, everything was clear enough in their carefully calibrated 22.2 Atmos studio).

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