You're Not Crazy, Movies Are Getting Darker and Harder to Understand
How often do you sit down to watch a movie and then find the experience frustrating? It happens a lot for me, especially with newer movies. Either it can be really hard to see what is happening on screen (remember that Game of Thrones fiasco?) or it can be difficult to understand what anyone is saying or both! If you’ve felt that way, you’re definitely not alone. I was perusing YouTube recently and came across a couple of videos from Vox that help explain what the heck is going on.
First, we’re going to talk about movies being darker. In the video essay by Ed Vega, they explore what’s changed. One of the big reasons movies are getting darker is because of how they’re being recorded. More and more movies are being filmed digitally instead of with physical film. This shift has allowed for various changes in filmmaking such as not needing to put a lot of light in scenes to make sure that the film in the cameras can catch the scene. This means that the extra darkness is what the filmmakers are intending for us to see. The video goes into much more detail and is less than 7 minutes long, so I highly recommend watching it.
Next, let’s take a quick detour to discuss why this darkness can really be frustrating. In short, the answer is that no two screens are the same. Filmmakers use professional monitors calibrated to meet their exact needs. Also, most of those filmmakers are most likely working to make their films look best in theaters that use fancy projectors and screens. They also have typical lighting environments. When you watch something at home, you probably don’t have a professional monitor, perfectly calibrated TV, exact lighting environment planned for, etc. The movies are not typically designed to be watched at home and they can’t account for every different TV; there are way too many for that to be a reasonable expectation. You can adjust the settings on your TV though and calibrate it using various tools and that may help. If you’re lucky and have a new TV, you may just have the Filmmaker Mode that you can use to get your TV as close as it can be to how the filmmaker wants the movie to be seen. Here’s more from Phil Edwards of Vox.
Finally, let’s talk about the audio in movies. I find that a lot of dialogue in more modern movies sounds muffled and hard to understand. It’s also a lot quieter than action scenes. You turn your speakers up to hear the dialogue, but are then deafened by an explosion. Or you can't hear the characters because of all the gunfire in an action scene. This is frustrating and has led many people to start turning subtitles on for all their content just so they know what’s going on. Vega explored this aspect of films as well and talked with a professional dialogue editor, Austin Olivia Kendrick, about this. What we’ve learned is that advances in technology and microphones have basically led to this. Lav mics are easy to hide and typically allow for more natural sounding and feeling dialogue. However, this also means that actors don’t have to project as much. In addition, sound is mixed differently for a theater, with 128 tracks for Dolby Atmos. However, home theater systems aren’t designed for that many. Home setups usually only have between two (stereo) to seven channels and sometimes with an additional sub channel. That means that those 128 tracks have to be condensed into much fewer tracks. Basically, you can buy better speakers and hope they help, see if your speakers or TV have speech enhancing technology, or just leave those subtitles on.