Part of the issue for me was the audio is mixed so that you can barely hear the dialogue.
I find that with a lot of movies lately
It was worse around 15 years ago.
You want to hear things well, though? You’ll need surround sound system and to turn up the center speaker. That’s where they generally mix the voice audio.
Normally that’s due to poor mixing work. I’m tenet’s case it was a deliberate choice by Nolan.
Ugh, I hate that so much! Especially since I sometimes like to fall asleep to a movie I’ve seen many times before and at the end just drift off to the sound of it.
“Whisper whisper whisper EXPLOSIONS AND YELLING whisper whisper whisper” is probably my least favorite style of sound mixing.
I like to be able to hear the quiet parts without the loud parts bursting my ear drums, thank you very much!
You may want to see if your TV has a “night mode” in the audio settings. It’s basically just an audio compander, (combination of compressor and expander.) It expands the quiet parts to be louder, and compresses the loud parts to be quieter. It destroys any kind of dynamics that the director intended, and can cause some difficulty with intelligibility if there’s lots of background noise, (because the noise is getting expanded too!) But for watching things at night, it’s almost a must for dynamic movies.
Some brands call it headphone mode, because headphone users also frequently complain about dynamic audio too; They turn up to hear the quiet parts, then get their ears blown off during the loud parts.
Sounds like exactly what I need, thanks! I’m watching on a tablet on the bed next to me, but if it’s available on TVs as a mode, it’s probably available for VLC on Android too.
It destroys any kind of dynamics that the director intended
Fuck their intentions lol. Having a huge gulf in loudness is good for two things only: jump scares and Michael Bay type movies trying to impress you with how loud things go boom. Both are just annoyances to me at the best of times and keeping me from falling asleep at the worst.
can cause some difficulty with intelligibility if there’s lots of background noise
That might be a drawback, though. On the other hand, who keeps in a lot of background noise in the first place? Morons and amateurs, that’s who! 😛
Some brands call it headphone mode, because headphone users also frequently complain about dynamic audio too; They turn up to hear the quiet parts, then get their ears blown off during the loud parts.
Yup, I know that all too well as a daily headphones/earbuds user for the last several years, maybe even a decade…
I highly recommend using Nova video player. It’s an android video player specifically made to handle movies and series. It’s got everything you neeed from automatically downloading each movie /episode poster, description, subtitles, got audio boost and night mode. And oh, I almost forgot to say that it’s an open source project and it’s available on f-droid.
It’s a shame that the app is barely known, so if you enjoyed it, please share it.
Will give it a try for sure 🙂
You’re talking about a regular compressor with make up gain. An expander makes the quiet parts even quieter. Compressors compress the dynamic range (which is what you’d want in this scenario), expanders expands the dynamic range.
I’ve heard it’s because it’s mixed for surround sound
Optimized for peak surround sound, allegedly. I have a $5000 system and it still sounds like shit. I can understand it, but it’s shit nonetheless.
Snobby ≠ good, methinks.
Not being able to hear the dialogue is an artistic choice Nolan has been intentionally making since around The Dark Knight Rises. I know that sounds dumb but, I’m not joking. I have been baffled by this choice and have refused to see any of his films until Oppenheimer. Which was a major improvement.
I would NOT call Oppenheimer a major improvement! It was one of my least favorite theater experiences because I couldn’t hear half of the dialogue and the whole thing was way too loud.
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I heard it was mixed specifically for high-end theatre speakers. I think Nolan was just too far up his own ass on this one.
I watched it in Dolby Atmos and still couldn’t understand shit. It was simply very, very badly mixed. I don’t think I’ll watch another film from Nolan.
Yeah Oppenheimer was just bad with audio.
I saw it in theaters and it was great.
It’s frankly amazing that it managed to make it to release. Who the fuck thought the mix was acceptable? Scene 1 I had no clue what was happening because I couldn’t hear! Ridiculous.
Who the fuck thought the mix was acceptable?
That would be Christopher Nolan, who I believe is trolling people with his sound design choices at this point
I watched in on a plane and didn’t have the audio issue I’ve heard everyone talk about.
I did however have the issue of not understanding the flick.
I… “got a copy” and it was fine on my television. I dont even have external speakers (built in speakers). I wonder if the digital release fixed this issue.
I had subtitles on and it made sense
I kept hearing this complaint but when I finally watched it there was only one scene where I couldn’t hear the dialogue (when Neil is scoping out the airport bank vault) and it seemed very much intentional. Did you find this to be an issue throughout the entire film?
Just like modern plots, modern audio editing spoonfeeds the audience: https://youtu.be/XOXJLwzIOoA?si=XY-0mUmwx9_V51Tl. We need to be told each and every detail about the security system in order to understand that it’s extreme, even though those details wouldn’t add to the plot in any way (as I recall, the last thing you can hear is the risk of suffocation - which is the last aspect of the security system that was relevant later on).
Next thing you know, audiences will start complaining that depth of field/camera blur is obscuring in unimportant details in the background.
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Same. The moment you don’t understand the dialogue then it’s not important, that moment it’s about atmosphere. Worked great for me. I enjoyed the sound mixing in this movie!
Nolan has lost the plot and has become one of those directors who loves the smell of his own farts. Can’t hear my shitty audio? That’s your fault! You didn’t understand my ridiculous plot? That’s your fault! Etc.
Hot take, but the one where Matthew McConaughey gets stuck in a bookshelf was ass too. It started out good, but then got way too up it’s own ass with interdimensional nonsense.
I’ll give them that I didn’t see it coming.
The plot was far too convenient. No spaghetti faction no title forces he could just navigate the tesseract like it was walking across the room.
Gargantua is a super massive black hole.
Spaghettification is caused by the gravitational force experienced at your head being different than the gravitational force experienced at your feet. A black hole formed by a dying star is in the neighborhood of 30km in radius. With a small black hole like that the differences in gravity experience between your head and toes is what leads to the spaghettification.
That’s not the case with a supermassive black hole like the one at the center of our galaxy which is the kind Gargantua was supposed to be. Those can be as large as the sun (700,000km), and that’s on the small end. Some can even be the size of our entire solar system. Because of their enormous size, the gravitation difference you’d experience between your head and toes is negligible.
And as far as navigating inside the black hole goes, that’s actually what Roy Kerr says - the guy that solved the Einstein field equation for a rotating black hole. He says that in the case of a rotating black hole, the singularity at the center is not a single point but a ring. And because of that, spacetime is warped in a way that that would make it navigable. You wouldn’t be able to leave (move back up past the event horizon), but you would be able to stay inside and have some effect on your location through your own force. At least that what he says. I’ll take his word for it since he’s spent a few decades studying it.
As for the bookshelf… yeah, sorry. Science doesn’t say shit about bookshelves inside a black hole. But, you know, it’s a movie. It’s probably a metaphor or some shit. But Christopher Nolan did a surprisingly good job of being accurate with the theoretical science of a black hole. Feel free to continue to hate the movie for saying love is a fundamental force though.
Sources: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole
It is Kwantafyeable
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Lol didn’t proof read dictation.
Spaghetti-fication. No getting stretched out. Which I realize is just an untested theory
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MURPH
And here I thought that Interstellar made the most sense out of many of his movies.
You didn’t understand my ridiculous plot?
Why is it such a sin to cater to a different audience to you? If you don’t enjoy his movies then don’t watch them. He’s one of a handful of screenwriters who does complex stuff, there’s an absolute deluge of lighter stuff for the rest of you.
What would you say to a person who continues to eat fish, even though they hate it and spit it out each time? “Stop eating fish, that’s your fault.”
To offer a different perspective, I feel like that argument works more for something you knew you didn’t like from the beginning, but less so for something you used to like. I don’t listen to bands I don’t like but when an artist I do like puts out a string of albums I think suck, it’s hard not to give each one a shot thinking “maybe this one will be better.”
I tend to disagree with your opinion here. There is a level of objectivity within the realm of taste. I will continue to warn people not to eat pea gravel even if it has a great mouthfeel, for instance.
The plot is less complex than it appears at face value, because at face value most people are lacking the dialogue that despite Nolan’s protestations has a lot of valuable information within it. Is it great art because he makes you suffer for it? Is The Prestige worse because it’s enjoyable to rewatch?
I don’t consider The Prestige to be one of his better works. I like to be left thinking. The Prestige has closure and explanations built in. It’s like the age-old books vs. movies argument: people nearly always say the books are better because books offer the reader agency. It’s not merely because they enjoy looking down their noses at us movie goer mortals - they enjoyed the books more because their preferred interpretation of the words were layered above the literal text.
I didn’t suffer through Tenet, I was completely immersed - which almost never happens for me. I needed absolutely none of the muffled dialogue to figure out what was going on - and I didn’t watch it in a cinema.
And if you hated it and suffered through it, that’s fine too. I don’t get why you have a problem with other people enjoying it.
Christopher Nolan movies are good, they just drag on.
Oppenheimer was exactly 3 hours and 18 seconds.
That just means its rewatchable.
Try the movie Primer and then come back to that. Then watch Primer again. Then mix in a little bit of Annihilation and start over.
Extra points if you’re stoned.
Annihilation is not complicated at all, the whole thing is just a metaphor for various traumas and how we deal with them.
Natalie Portman and the guy go through the trauma of infidelity within marriage, they both come out changed by it, different yet the same, hence the shimmer in their eyes at the end.
The first scientist chick who dies to the bear, she lost her daughter to cancer, completely out of her control, just like hear death to the bear.
The chick that ties them up, she is an ex addict, she dies to self-destruction, the actions she takes directly lead to her death by the bear, just like an addict their own lives.
The chick who plays Valkyrie in Thor, she suffers from depression and self-harming she dies by giving up.
The main scientist lady, she is dealing with cancer too and her own body betraying and destroying her.
There is a reason they talk about the still alive cancer cells from a 100 years ago at the beginning too.
It’s also a great examination of dream logic and waking nightmares. The lack of a sense of time, the sceen transitions contribute to not being aware of how you got somewhere. Everything, even the people, just feel off. When the main character is holding her husbands hands and it’s shot through the glass of water, it makes something ordinary feel weird and threatening.
I especially liked the aesthetic of the transition between a beautiful dream and a nightmare. Like the rainbow swamp at the beginning and suddenly being attacked by the albino alligator.
Annihilation was meant as a break with slightly different mindfuckery.
When I first watched Primer I immediately watched it a second time in the same day.
Why would I watch it multiple times if I didnt enjoy it the 1st time
Post was about not understanding it.
Tenet literally sucks, it was literally an embarrassment to cognitive functions
That’s just like your opinion man
Yes
Literally
i really hate that shit where they intentionally cut the movie in a really shitty annoying confusing way just to make the story ostensibly more cOmPleX rather than just writing something good and relying on its strength like a normal good film
the prestige really pissed me off
The Prestige was one of the most comprehensible movies Nolan ever made…
Essentially the people have the ability to go backwards or go forwards in time. To go back or forward in time you need to go through an entrance, red means forward, blue means backwards. Their weapons and bullets have the ability to do this by themselves. The bad group wants to acquire the original source of this power and rewind the entire earth to undo climate change, the good guys believe this would destroy the world instead of saving it. The protagonist is the creator of the group in the future, but sends his associates back in time to recruit his younger self and put an end to this group. The main way they attack in this movie is by one team attacking at one point in time and another team attacking backwards in time. Eventually, the bad guys get all parts of this source and begin the process to reverse all of Earth, but the protagonist wins in the end. This is when its revealed he recruited all these people in the future to save the world, making the ending also the beginning.
Thank you. Also WTF. I did not pick up any of that and I think I’ve seen it three times.
The movie gets a lot easier to understand when you figure out the red and blue thing.
What pissed me off is that in a time travel movie where the end is also the beginning, the climax should be the opening scene again (the theater assault) but now viewed with more information showing how the whole loop tied up.
Instead we just got some bang bang explosion shit because someone gave Nolan too big of a budget and he he was damn determined to use it after being inspired by his rewind button on his VCR.
I kind of understood it, until the ship scene near the end, when there were two Debickis going FORWARD in time, slightly offset from each other. If they can do THAT, why not do it all the time? Why make people go backwards in time, breathe inverted air, and none of the protagonists have a grasp on what’s going on anyway?
Im pretty sure one Debickis was actually moving backwards it just wasn’t as clear
Wait till you watch Memento
I saw a YouTube video where like 15 guys in some poor country rigged up a bicycle or something to power a projector that displayed a horrible picture of a movie onto the side of a stack of old tires. They were watching Tenet.
Of all the movies to watch that way…
I would have loved to see them be interviewed about it two hours later.
James cameron would kill them if they had watched avatar 2
He wouldn’t just kill them he would hunt them for sport.
And record it in 8k
Underwater
I couldn’t hear any of the dialogue.
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAM
I think Tenet is amazing. Yes, it’s confusing but you’ll manage. If you get the main points, you can enjoy this movie even if you don’t get every detail
I understood everything and it was like being forced to gurgle the gunk in the shower drain
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Tenet was quite boring. I like interstellar and inception a lot more.
Hm i found interstellar really boring. Tenet at least had stuff to think about, even though when you actually did the thinking it only lead to dead ends.
Well at least it’s in space instead of some random cities
Inception is among my all time top movies. I still haven’t seen Interstellar though and I almost don’t even want to watch it either. I like knowing that in the era of shitty movies there’s atleast this one gem I can reach for whenever I want.
I thought Tenet and Interstellar were boring. But that was my main problem with Tenet. I wasn’t confused, just bored.
Call me a dummy but I just don’t want to be engaged in this way as a form of entertainment.
You you have to get the VHS version and watch the whole thing on rewind to understand it.
I really liked tenet and planning to rewatch it again. I watched it at home with headphones and subtitles, so once they sound issue went away, it was a pretty straightforward movie, even with all the time confusion.
I usually don’t watch dubs of shows I can understand in the original.
So anyway. I watched tenet dubbed.
I’m pretty bad at comprehending anything spoken the first time around so I watch almost everything with subtitles. I had no issues understanding TENET (outside the theater where there’s obviously no subs)
After what I heard on the Internet about this movie I was pleasantly surprised when I finally got around to watching it, and I’m not even a huge Nolan fan. The audio mix seemed fine to me (no worse than any other movie I own from any decade). And like inception I think that the big scifi mechanic and plot was well explained; I feel like I got a good hang of it the first watch. Can’t say that about the knives out movies (but I like them too). So overall, yeah, I don’t get where the hate comes from. I’ll watch this again before interstellar.
Personally, I did understand most of the movie, but not the last part.
Then how did you understand the movie?
The last part is basically just showing all the things with inverting yourself and going “backwards” in time instead of forward
To be fair, I had to watch it twice to understand it - i noticed so much more on the second watch through. And for everyones complaints with the audio - use subtitles, a lot of spots where there is inaudible dialogue, especially the art storage scene, is just nothing talk.
Exactly, it was really clear that the dialog was not relevant in that section. It was a standard recon scene.
And for everyones complaints with the audio - use subtitles
I really shouldn’t have to be expected to use subtitles for a movie filmed in the language I grew up speaking and understanding.
Sorry I wasn’t saying “use subtitles, you deaf scrub” I was saying - use the subtitles and you’ll see that the dialogue is not what is important but what you should be focusing on in those situations, the information you need isn’t in the dialogue.
I seriously doubt that Christopher Nolan thought that the dialogue was not important. He’s certainly never made an indication of that which I’ve seen and I’ve never heard of a filmmaker with that goal in mind.
You’re making an excuse for bad sound mixing.
We’re free to disagree friend! From my pov it was fine - not making an excuse, just my opinion - I can understand that not being able to hear dialogue would be frustrating.
I lost all respect for it when they just ignored logic and physics with driving the car backwards/forwards.
Tenet in nutshell, there is a timeline, like normal.
It’s point A in time, you perceive 30 seconds ellapsing, not it’s A + 30 seconds in time, that’s how things work.
Now if you go through that Inverting machine.
It’s point A in do stuff for 30 seconds.
Now it’s A - 30 seconds on the timeline.
There you go, Tenet explained.
