Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Actors aren't mumbling, they're speaking how real people speak. Trust me, screen actors have more stage training than ever -- they know how to enunciate but if they do, the director tells them to stop because they seem like they're giving a fake theatrical performance rather than being a slice of real life. But if it translates into me not being able to understand them, that’s less realistic, because in a real-worl…
To the contrary, it is realistic -- no, you wouldn't understand them in real-life either. Movie speakers aren't slurring anything, as any audio engineer could easily prove to you. My mother complains about how she can't understand anything when there are Irish or Scottish or even northern English characters in a show. Decades ago, in an American TV show those characters would have been speaking an understandable Amer…
Yes, I absolutely would, because, in practice, people speak in a way that others can understand them, or else they have to quickly adapt. (If they’re not comprehensible, there will be a contextual reason why.)
>Movie speakers aren't slurring anything, as any audio engineer could easily prove to you.
That wasn’t what I was saying. My point was that conveying sound through speakers has inherent differences from a person actually being there, and our ears/auditory processing are optimized for the latter, taking advantage of things that aren’t present with speakers. So playing “the same” speech is going to be inherently less comprehensible, requiring some kind of compensation.
These brilliant sound engineers, as judged by actual audiences, are turning comprensible speech-situations into incomprensible ones, some way or another.
>My mother complains about how she can't understand anything when there are Irish or Scottish or even northern English characters in a show.
That’s a separate issue, whern there are genuine cultural differences with between the listener and the situation. That’s not what’s happening in Tenet.
> But that's what subtitles are there for.
No, it’s not. Most sound engineers would consider it a failure if someone had to use subtitles for their own dialect, and most cinemaphiles consider the presence of subtitles to be a failure in itself, and everyone agrees that having to read off the screen to follow worsens the experience.