Why Dialogue Is So Difficult To Understand In Christopher Nolan Movies

Christopher Nolan has long been criticized for his sound design, which makes it difficult to understand the characters’ dialogue, and that problem has continued with Oppenheimer. The director’s newest movie follows J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American physicist who led The Manhattan Project and created the atomic bomb. While Nolan is one of the most remarkable and beloved filmmakers of this generation, he often draws criticism for the way the sound is mixed in his movies. The dialogue in Nolan’s films is mixed low and made hard to hear over the movies’ scores and loud action sequences, which has weirdly always been an intentional choice of the director’s.