It’s no bold suggestion that streaming has gone a long way in ruining the theatrical experience; with a much wider plethora of films and shows to watch from the comfort of your own home, folks just aren’t plopping themselves in front of the big screen like they used to.
Perhaps the hidden MVP of the age of streaming has to be subtitles, the saving grace of media consumption for many. We all have that one friend that absolutely cannot watch anything nowadays without subtitles, and with audio mixing becoming worse and worse these days, who can really blame them?
One of the biggest culprits of inadvertently gaslighting audiences’ audio processing ability is Christopher Nolan, whose latest film Oppenheimer – the high-profile box office king to Barbie‘s box office queen – has more than a few scenes that will leave viewers wishing they had a rewind button, and for the wrong reasons.
It’s the latest in a long line of Nolan movies that have instances of dubiously decipherable dialogue, and even his most staunch proponents may find trouble defending the filmmaker for this. Nolan’s okay with that, though; in a recent interview with Insider, the Oppenheimer mastermind revealed that the reason for this is that he intentionally never gets his actors to do ADR in any of his features, preferring to use the raw audio captured in his footage; a purely artistic choice that Nolan doesn’t mind being criticized for.
“I like to use the performance that was given in the moment rather than the actor revoice it later. Which is an artistic choice that some people disagree with, and that’s their right.”
Or maybe this is just Nolan’s sneaky way of getting us to buy the Oppenheimer DVD when it gets its physical media release so that we may take it home and rewatch it with subtitles. If that is the case, his ploy certainly worked on me, the fact of the movie being just that good anyway notwithstanding.
Oppenheimer is currently playing in theaters.