I won’t add spoilers, but the colour palette of
RED forwards and
BLUE backwards
Would be a good way to see it again and work out what is happening in any shot. The lighting was all geared to tie in with this device. The tags on soldiers was the obvious mention, but this device was prevalent from the outset and I wasn’t looking for it.
The opera bit was unintelligible as far as dialogue went, and the end was such an onslaught that I had little time to pick out what actually happened.
Let’s just say that the crucial act (door/key) happened and I had no clue how. I could infer what took place but I didn’t “see” it literally as it was lost in the editing as my eyes were struggling to pick out what I should be looking at.
RP was excellent but I don’t think the lead was a good fit. Well worth seeing, though, on a big screen. You have to pick the best option for sound, so it’s imax or Dolby atmos really (it’s mixed to be heard on the best kit).
There seems to be a lot of reports of poor sound quality for Tenet. From the soundtrack overpowering the dialogue to the dialogue just being plain muffled/incomprehensible. Surely the aim should be to sound good in any cinema.
Nolan tries always to use the live sound take, and this can be much poorer quality than what they do in most films, which is to rerecord any slightly dodgy dialogue.
The artistic merits of this are arguable, but hey, he knows what he’s doing and he’s unlikely to listen to you. I guess he feels you don’t need to hear every single line perfectly, live conversations are like that after all.
Anyway, I think it’s a fucking amazing film and a work of genius.
There is a fair bit wrong, but that’s being picky.
Subtitles and re watch will help. From reading it does seem it is intentional. Loud bangs should muffle dialogue. So it’s true to life rather than made for ease of hearing.
I do the technical side for our local film club. The arts centre has a pro tech guy and he’s pretty good, but he asks me to sit and listen and decide on the volume level before each screening. It’s tricky. Too quiet and people literally can’t hear the dialogue. Too loud and the dialogue can max out but the ‘background’ still has headroom, so it comes up and swamps the speaking. I’ve had complaints from the audience about both these things happening. In the end I’ve tried to settle on getting an equal number of ‘too loud’ and ‘too quiet’ complaints for each screening. If the soundtrack is at all challenging then it will only work if the overall level is just right for you. Every cinema makes its own judgement about that level.
You could well be right there. I only know they have at least some control because I was once at a Cineworld screening where someone got them to turn the volume down.
I think the muffled dialogue thing regarding Tenet, is over-stated. I missed maybe a couple of words out of the whole film. I never felt I was struggling to hear. And I generally do struggle to hear people talk when there’s background noise. My ears aren’t great.
Aside from that I thought it was excellent, although for me it wasn’t at the level of Inception, which is one of my favourite films. I’m looking forward to a second viewing though. I saw it on IMAX, but actually in retrospect I didn’t think seeing it at the cinema is essential. It didn’t have the enormity of Inception or Interstellar. If you have a decent home-cinema setup, you wouldn’t be short-changed waiting for the blu-ray release.
