I was recently watching the Sixth Sense, which prompted me to wonder if I’m the only one that feels like some movies feel truly impossible to follow everything in the story without captions. For this movie specifically, Haley Joel Osment’s character was difficult to hear in his particular speech patterns and hushed voice.
I know Tenet is infamously not-great with it’s sound design that this could be another example.
What are some of yours? Tell me I’m not the only one.
Set the volume to 100 when people are talking. Quickly set it to 5 when there’s a gunfight. You need to bounce between 5 and 100 all the time to make the movie tolerable.
What’s the deal with this sound design? If I keep the volume at 5, I’ll miss 90% of the dialogue. If I keep it at 100, the movie will shatter my ears, and then I’m permanently done with movies. What exactly are the sound engineers trying to achieve here? Why are movies designed to be so unwatchable?
I don’t understand either why the sound mixing is so bad on TVs. Makes me just want to down-sample everything to stereo.