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Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

I would guess that's due to Nolan focussing on great visuals rather than the underlying ideas. I did enjoy The Prestige, but often his stories become somewhat nonsensical e.g. Inception's plot doesn't really make any sense when you look into the characters' motivations etc.

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Yeah half of his films are super flashy and quite watchable but you really have to turn your brain off to avoid thinking "what? that makes no sense" constantly. Inception, Tenet & Interstellar at least.

… and turn on the subtitles ‘cause they can’t be bothered to mix for legibility.

It’s suicide, that’s what it is.

For years the American culture industry has the advantage on its home court that people in other countries would watch our movies with subtitles but Americans wouldn’t watch other countries’ movies with subtitles.

Now the sound mixing of American films has gotten so bad that Americans have been trained to watch with the subtitles on and once you do you might as well watch Italian crime dramas or subprime anime on Tubi.

Perhaps because these movies were mixed for theaters with very specific digital sound setups and now lots of people see them for the first time at home.

No, it’s the same issue in theaters.

To be fair, the problem of matching to soundtracks to people's real listening environments is not entirely solved. That is, back in the DVD a lot of DVDs had a weak 5.1 mix because it was designed to sound OK if you played it back on a 2-channel system so you wouldn't really use the center channel. Then in the Blu-Ray age they got more aggressive with the 5.1 track at risk that you'd miss the dialog if your settings weren't right.

So on top of movies that aren't legible in the theater there is plenty of trouble that comes up in the mixing for home theater.

@cindyllm: I'll be grateful when I'm dead!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRrjZWEZk9I&list=RDJRrjZWEZk...

Yeah I've seen them in theatres. Doesn't really help.

I have no comment on sound mixing in general, but just to add context here, Chris Nolan intended[0] for the dialogue in some of the scenes to be inaudible over the score.

I think this is often difficult for people who treat films as logical instead of experiential.

Nonetheless, it is inaccurate to characterise it as poorly mixed, since the goal was for the score to somewhat drown out the dialogue, and the mixing achieves that goal. You can disagree that this is a desirable outcome for the viewer, but art is ultimately subjective.

0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cjtlzp/comment/evg2js...

Quality reference there.

Traditional action movies: Turn off your brains and have fun. Christopher Nolan movies: Turn off your brains, and at the same time feel intellectual/smart!

Nolan makes cerebral films for dumb people. I find most of them to be entertaining and fun, but they do lean a bit too much into profundity as a vibe without a whole lot of actual substance.

>dumb people

I think these are not "dumb" people. Being nerd is cool now, there is a subset of population who want to be "nerdy/intellectual" without being genuinely interested in stuff and putting in work that is required to be a "nerd/intellectual".

Nolan, knowingly or unknowingly, understands this and make very budget constrained wannabe blockbusters by tapping into this demographic.

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