Two points to @sobek.
This is a drawback when watching at home. I really need to be alone and turn my phone off, to be able to watch a full length movie. It doesn’t happen very often. I do most of my movie watching in hotelrooms, when on layovers.
Forgot about that. Movie theatre popcorn actually taste better… I have, on a couple of occasions, actually bought popcorn at a theatre and brought it back to the hotel to watch a movie in my room.
When I went and saw Dune, the promotional bucket (not that one, calm down) came with free refills. I took a fresh bucket home, and combined with the rotisserie in the air fryer had fresh movie popcorn all week for snacks. It was great.
I despise foley artists for using unrealistic sounds.
I tend to agree with with you… Especially small arms and suppressed rifle fire.
However. I recently watched a doco, Aliens Expanded and there was a section about the weapons. One of the things mentioned about the M41A Pulse Rifle was that they deliberately went with a stuttering/futuristic sound.
And you know what; it worked. I challenge anyone who claims to be a sci-fi movie fan and hears that sound not to know ‘instinctively’ what it is.
PS. Awesome documentary BTW.
Sci-fi stuff I can understand since it’s quite outside the realms of reality. Small-arms combat always drives me nuts because no movie I’ve seen so far replicates the supersonic cracks of rounds flying overhead.
I have seen one. And I can’t for the life of me remember the title.
At the time, when I heard the crack, crack, crack… thud, thud, thud my first thought was that they were actually using live ammo.
The whole sound design in Aliens was amazing - the motion tracker… I can’t have that sound in my phone because if it makes a sound like that when I’m sleeping 
As someone who had never heard a gunshot before I was an adult, I was surprised how rifles looked and sounded in real life when I joined the army.
It was… kinda underwhelming actually.
Hollywood and video games definitely had not prepared me for that properly.
One thing was the muzzle flash (or lack thereof), movies often overdo it.
The other was the sound. Hollywood loves their “dakkadakkadakka sounds”. The MG3 machine gun that I shot sounds more like “brrrrrBANG” (1200 rounds per minute). Same for the G36, it is way more silent than I thought, and if you put it on auto is has a “brrrrr”, too, because of 850 rounds per minute.
And those bangs sound much more “dry” in real life.
Another thing that I noticed when I was behind that cover near the target on the range (what is it called in English?):
If you are far away (in my case 300 yards or so) you don’t hear a “bang” nor necessarily hear that whizzing sound. There is just a “pop” when the bullet hits, and then afterwards you hear a (rather silent) bang.
If you are talking or in a loud environment you might not notice getting shot. That realalization was scary.
Very few movies get it right.
I think I can count on one hand the times I went to the movies in the last decade.
Top Gun : Maverick
I also went to see the Little Mermaid, don’t judge. I used my AMC points.
That really is a distinctive sounding weapon…
No judgement. I still think Pixar’s Coco is one of the best movies visually and thematically. Loved seeing it in the theater.
Zero judgment from me too. I think it looked positively amazing.
A small part of me wished they kept closer to the original story but I also admit it’s dark AF…
OMFG, Going through divorce and watching that movie is legitimately one of the hardest thing I ever did. I sobbed like a child for too long - once away in my room, later that night.
Top Gun Maverick in IMAX. with the volume levels specifically unmanaged is still hands down the best experience Ive had in a long time.
By unmanaged, I mean no one went to the booth to turn volume down to the corporate suggested levels.
The beauty of seeing it with a bunch of navy guys we all asked the manager to make sure the volume was not turned down.
And yes. they do “manage them” if tooo many ppl feedback that it was too loud, they will turn them down.
I saw TGM one last time before it left theaters and you could tell there was about a 30% cut in the volume, even more in the low end.
Hopefully The Never Ending Story is dark af as well.
?!
There’s a new Neverending Story?
The original is dark enough already.
Artax…
Christopher Nolan films are notorious for subjectively lousy sound mixing.
The issue is his idea of how a scene where dialog is “unimportant” is done.
In 99% of the movies out there, when you’re meant to feel something while a lot of business is going on, they will mix the voices down and the music up. You instinctively know as people are shouting with nothing audible that the particulars of what the actors were saying on the day was not important.
Nolan leaves the dialog volume alone and turns the music and FX WAY up so they’re drowned out.
This gives the impression that they f’d it up when what he WANTS is for you to not pay attention to their words but the emotions and such for the scene.
I would call it the greatest weakness of his style. For a filmmaker that is so good at so much, this is his Achilles’ Heel.
For other directors, the issue is “naturalistic” acting. Film started as stage on screen…actors on stage, project both their voices and their bodies. Film came along and you could move more naturally, but sound at first was still poor enough they would speak clearly, loudly, and often slowly.
As sound has improved, the actors have dialed down their voices to where they are often muttering, whispering, or mumbling their lines. Then instead of toning down the other sounds to help, they’re mixing the rest of the stuff at the same 80’s level behind it.
Result: WTF did that guy say??? As a result, I have been watching every movie or TV show made since about 2010 with captions on so I’m not constantly rewinding it to catch it. If I can read it, there’s no missing it. I can still watch all the older stuff without them, though.
Bro, that killed me as a kid, If I gotta live thru Artax dying again, I’ma cry like a mofo.
Honestly, Morla coming at the camera was scarier than Gmork.
I hope they go more with the Novel’s story vs the old disney version.
As long as they dont do what Disney did w/ Parts II, III, and IV Movies… Embarrassing.
In March 2024, Michael Ende Productions, in association with See-Saw Films, announced plans for a series of films based on the book.[33]
I know most of this is age. But in large part because I couldn’t watch TV without subtitles, I took a hearing test. Left ear is normal. Some mild loss in the right. It’s them, not me. It’s also my Sonos sound bar. It has no voice amplification functions. Only a “night” function which, to my ears, does nothing. Music is way too loud in nearly every modern offering. My wife and I have been rewatching the Sopranos. No subtitles! THAT’S how sound should be done. Bada Bing!
Agreed on Nolan. The famous corn field scene in Interstellar can go fornicate itself. It is the most flagrant smothering of dialog in modern film. Fortunately, I could not care less if Timothee Chalamet can change a tire or Murph can fly an Indian drone so nothing is lost.
So I’m not the only one that watches with subtitles on cause dialog is usually always lower than SFX and Music… 