Why You Can't Hear The Dialogue in Tenet

[Music] [Music] as i've watched and read people talking about tenant it's become almost a meme at this point that many pieces of dialogue are difficult to hear or almost completely unintelligible this problem has been developing for a while in nolan's work and it seems to have really come to a head with tenant but what's going on here christopher nolan is working with massive budgets and is one of the most critically acclaimed blockbuster directors working today so it's very unlikely that this is just shoddy filmmaking or an oversight so there must be some reason why nolan's films sound this way and that's what i'm going to examine with this video is nolan doing this intentionally and if so is that a good creative choice thank you once again to mubi for making this video possible i first remember hearing complaints about the intelligibility of nolan's dialogue during the release of the dark knight most of the complaints centered around bane's mask muffling his dialogue now we come here not as conquerors but as liberators to return control of this city to the people at this point i have to mention something that actually makes discussing this topic fairly complicated i can show examples from these films but the examples i show aren't going to accurately represent what it's actually like to listen to the film in a theater i gave him a humor setting so we'd fit him better with his unit he thinks it relaxes us a giant sarcastic robot because our sound systems are different at home and in most cases the films are actually remixed for home release so if you're listening to one of these examples and you're like wait a second i can hear every word they're saying fine it might be because you're listening on headphones or better sound system or just because the mix of the home release is different from the theatrical mix and theaters themselves are variable in how they sound just because you went to the theater and could hear every line of dialogue fine in one of these movies doesn't mean that if you went to another theater you would hear the same thing but i'll talk more about that later for the dark knight rises while the bane thing was annoying to a lot of people it didn't seem to really detract from the movie too much if anything people disliked it for other reasons but the complaints resurfaced with nolan's next film interstellar this time the complaints were louder and more common and people felt like they were missing key pieces of dialogue there were some complaints about the dialogue in dunkirk but it's not a very dialogue heavy film and so again it didn't seem to be a big problem but then last year tenet hit and rather than improving the problems seemed to have escalated at this point it seems like even some people who are fans of the film are open to acknowledging that some lines were difficult to hear and saying some of the dialogue was unintelligible is a pretty uncontroversial opinion about tenet [Music] what's going on here why is this happening well i think there are two key things that are contributing to this problem after interstellar the complaints about the dialogue were so numerous that nolan directly addressed the issue in an interview with hollywood reporter we made carefully considered creative decisions there are particular moments in this film where i decided to use dialogue as a sound effect so sometimes it's mixed slightly underneath the other sound effects or in the other sound effects to emphasize how loud the surrounding noise is it's not that nobody has ever done these things before but it's a little unconventional for a hollywood movie this scene from on the waterfront is a great example of the kind of technique that nolan is talking [Music] about [Music] and this scene from terence malik's tree of life is another great example in both cases the filmmakers clearly feel like the image sound effects and facial performance are more important than hearing the lines of dialogue and they're emphasizing those elements by taking away the audience's ability to hear what's being said nolan is clearly trying to use this technique in several places an interstellar like this one you don't sound so bad for pushing 120. [Music] i don't agree with the idea that you can only achieve clarity through dialogue clarity of story clarity of emotions i try to achieve that in a very layered way using all the different things at my disposal picture and sound in theory i think this is a totally valid technique for example if i turn up the music [Music] in sound design you're dealing with two things the actual intensity of the sound and the intensity of a specific sound relative to the other sounds in the mix by drowning a sound we're used to being able to hear out with another it implies an intensity to the second sound that may not be there naturally when i watched interstellar i saw it in 70 millimeter imax that would be an important detail later but when i saw complaints about the sound afterwards i was confused i didn't really understand what people were complaining about yes i had difficulty hearing a few lines but like nolan pointed out i assumed it was intentional and that those lines weren't important at the time interstellar came out i pretty much accepted this explanation but tenet tenet was a different story for scenes like this where you can't hear some of the dialogue you can't hear isn't really important this is clearly nolan intentionally obscuring the dialogue nolan is playing with sound in an interesting way in this scene bringing the vocals of the freeport attendant to the surface only when he's really giving a key piece of information from their private planes of course and to be honest i get what he's trying to do here and i kind of like it but that explanation doesn't account for a scene like this here the dialogue is pretty important exposition and when i listen at home with headphones on i can make out what they're saying but when i saw this in theater i could barely understand a word of what they were saying and that brings us to the second component of this issue can i recommend the taylor i'll manage you british don't have a monopoly on sniper you know [Music] when it comes to picture and sound not all theaters are created equal some theaters have much higher quality top of the line sound systems and on top of that how good the sound is in an individual theater depends on how well aligned and calibrated the sound system is in an interview with indiewire nolan said this we made the decision a couple films ago that we weren't going to mix for substandard theaters we're mixing for well-aligned great theaters so when filmmakers are mixing the sound of the film they make decisions based on how they want the film to sound creatively but they also have to make decisions based on maintaining clarity across a variety of different quality levels and theaters nolan however is saying that he's focusing solely on crafting the experience for top of the line theaters so a line like this [Music] might be inaudible in a poorly aligned theater not because christopher nolan doesn't want you to hear the line but because he's only paying attention to whether or not that line is clear in a well-calibrated well-aligned top-of-the-line theater so every time he's pushing the intelligibility of the audio to its edges he risks losing clarity in all of the theaters that aren't perfectly aligned when i saw interstellar i saw it in 70 millimeter imax so i got to see and hear the film the way christopher nolan intended but when i saw tenet i saw it at a lower end local theater whose projection and sound quality are subpar even compared to other smaller theaters and watching tennis i really had a hard time understanding a lot of the dialogue you first so what's the solution here is nolan making a valid creative choice or does he need to change his ways making the choice to make some dialogue unintelligible is a valid creative technique that any filmmaker is welcome to use but a filmmaker declaring their intent and the audience perceiving the intended effect are two different things i'm not saying the audience is always right but if a large portion of your audience is repeatedly misunderstanding your creative intent you might want to re-examine how you're using that technique if audience members are confused about whether or not they're supposed to be able to hear a line of dialogue they'll be thinking about that and not about the effect nolan is trying to get across basically how intense the emotion or sound is in that scene one of the big differences between the on the waterfront clip and some of the places where nolan is using this technique is that in on the waterfront it's very clear we're not supposed to be able to hear this line and because of the way the story is constructed we already kind of know what he's saying in nolan's films it's not always clear if the dialogue that you can't hear is important or not i don't think confusion is the effect that nolan is going for and so if most people are perceiving it that way he's essentially trying to produce a certain effect and failing that said sometimes audiences are too conservative and are shocked or confused by new techniques when they're introduced to them but eventually assimilate that into their understanding of film language but this is a complicated issue because it doesn't end there we have to examine the other aspect if no one says trust me if you can't hear a line of dialogue it's because i intend for you not to hear it and then turns around and mixes his films in such a way that in a lot of theaters you can't even hear the dialogue he intends for you to hear audiences are going to lose trust in his creative voice i didn't get to see tenet in imax so it's hard for me to know if it was actually any clearer in a better aligned higher end theater but it seems to me that nolan is alienating a large portion of his audience in order to make the experience as good as possible for a very small group of people the crazy irony is that in my video about tenant i argue that christopher nolan has a big problem with exposition and when i watched tennant in theaters because i couldn't hear a lot of the dialogue i missed a lot of the exposition and i almost enjoyed the film more than when i watched it at home and could turn subtitles on and could read every word because in my opinion a lot of the exposition actually hurts the experience of the movie but even though those lines may not truly be necessary if you feel like you're supposed to be able to hear them and you can't it makes watching the film a little bit uncomfortable and i'm generally a fan of filmmakers pushing boundaries artistically but if the way they're going about pushing those boundaries causes the audience to reject that technique instead of broadening their view of what is valid as a part of film language then it feels counterproductive it's easy to give supremacy to the artistic vision of the filmmaker but sometimes artists even successful ones make bad creative choices ultimately it's nolan's right to make the creative decisions that he wants to make and it's the audience's right to stop seeing his films if they're bothered by them and it's the critic and everyone's right to discuss what makes for a good and bad experience watching a film as we all collectively bargain about what makes a good film i doubt nolan will change his ways and in the book the nolan variations he makes this comment i actually got calls from other filmmakers who would say i just saw your film and the dialogue is inaudible well i love that nolan is trying to push the boundaries of what's possible with sound and i think it works in some cases i think it's probably time he took a note from his peers mubi is a hand curated online streaming platform that has an excellent selection of movies a verna hertzog documentary from 2019 that i haven't seen yet called nomad in the footsteps of bruce chatwin is dropping on mubi next week and i'm very excited to check it out because i'm a big fan of hersog's work every day movie handpicks and adds a new film for you to watch and they have a lot of cool stuff coming out this month sundance 2021 just happened and movies running a series of favorites from past sundance festivals this month the variety of stuff they have available is really great and i find myself discovering things on mubi that i wouldn't find any other way not long ago i watched a concert film they have called tripping with nils fram that was a really entertaining watch mubi is one of the best streaming services for exploring the world of cinema and you can try it now for 30 days when you go to mubi.com thomasflight get your extended 30 day free trial by clicking the link in the description below or going to mubi.com thomasflight thanks again to mubi for sponsoring this video and thank you to all of you for watching special thank you to my patrons and i'll catch you next time

Channel: Thomas Flight

Views: 1,793,700

Keywords: Video Essay, Thomas Flight, Nolan, Tenet, Sound issues, Tenet Sound issues, Tenet Sound Problems, Tenet can't hear, Tenet dialogue problems, can't hear dialogue tenet, Interstellar sound problems, Nolan sound Mixing, Sound Design, Tenet video essay, Christopher Nolan Sound, Can't hear nolans films, Can't hear tenet, Christopher Nolan, Tenet Sound, Dunkirk Sound, The Dark Knight Rises Sound, Bane Voice

Id: SIgznB0-ICo

Length: 13min 54sec (834 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Jonny_man_23]

In the first scene you showed with the tour guide giving Neil the tour, you aren't supposed to hear the dialogue clearly.. or at least it shouldn't matter in that scene since it's useless info for the audience. It was a stylistic decision to have the music be the focus there.

[u/ijaak]

yea it's harder but it is posible to understant, even I am not native speaker.

[u/WelbyReddit]

Maybe I fall into the category of not having too much of an issue with it because I didn't see the theatrical release.

He mentions they remixed stuff for home. I watched mine on digital GooglePlay and it wasn't bad. So I never got to experience the bad version.