Suggestions on Understanding speech in the movie theater

@jim_lewis Agree about the movie. It was a superb history lesson. One of the best movies I have seen. It was like walking through a book. My wife(who is Japanese) and I took lunch with us to the screening. Despite my so called bad hearing, I could hear it fine. Some of the “bangs” made me jump a mile, and the bass was travelling through seat into my chest.

I missed a lot of the movie because of bad sound. It might have been the theater. The speakers sounded like they were overdriven. The dynamics were hard to take. I’ll watch again when it streams.

I have trouble seeing any movie as good history. At best it distorts real situations by cutting out something that can be depicted on screen. That’s ‘at best’. I have a particularly hard time with the scenes around poisoning the apple, which even the book says might not have happened. I can’t imagine a thinking person throwing a poisoned apply into normal trash.

We streamed using our android box…

I was very disturbed watching the movie. Did watch it to the end.

DaveL
Toronto

@philbob57 said:

I have trouble seeing any movie as good history.

@DaveL said:

I was very disturbed watching the movie.

We’re venturing into “SOCIAL” territory here as opposed to understanding speech in movies. It would be a lot of preparation to see the movie, but two excellent, very long Pulitzer Prize-winning books are The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (won General Non-Fiction Pulitzer) and American Prometheus by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird (Biography Pulitzer). The first book is one of the best books I have ever read. It’s the whole enchilada of the historical events in Europe and developments in 20th-century physics that led to the making of the atomic bomb and its use and examines the background of many of the scientists involved in making the bomb. Rhodes explains everything about the Manhattan Project, including the nuclear physics, in very clear layman’s terms. The scientists making the bomb weren’t naive; they knew it would be a terrible weapon but were driven by desperation in what they saw as a race against the Nazis to make it. They thought it would make war unthinkable, and there would have to be a world government, at least for nuclear arms, to control the future possibility of nuclear armageddon. We didn’t quite make it there, but at least we have SALT and nuclear non-proliferation treaties that most of the world follows.

Having read both books, I thought Christopher Nolan condensed an incredible amount of stuff, almost all accurately, into a very short time frame. My wife has read neither book, and she said without me gossiping to her about Oppenheimer’s life as I read American Prometheus, she would have had a tough time understanding exactly what was going on in the movie. I would think it would be even harder for a hearing-impaired person who doesn’t have excellent corrected word recognition. It might spoil the movie, but reading the Wikipedia entries for the film or either of the books, instead of the very long books themselves, might help you understand the film more, especially if you are severely hearing impaired and likely to miss key dialog in key scenes.

The very final scene in the movie wasn’t historically accurate, but it was so beautifully and artistically done. The whole way Nolan built up the drama and led the viewer back to that scene depicted earlier in the movie was totally awesome. We’re all Prometheans now, at least regarding the possibility of being tortured by the gods for our release of knowledge.

@RobHooft , Yes, I can relate to this. My wife is Japanese, and while speaking very good English, she some times struggles to understand TV and Movies because of fast speaking and dialects. Hence, we mostly use subtitles. I am a native English speaker, and now enjoy the subtitles, as although I listen to the speech, sometimes it is not clear, and often very fast, and the subtitles, being a tad after the actual speech, reinforce what I heard, or think I heard.
I thought my hearing of speech was not “too bad”. But when I did the speech test with an Audiologist, I realised how much I guess the words, often wrong. Audio said I rely on the speech context to guess the words.

Must be the Oppenheimer movie, when i went to my local library to borrow the book, American Prometheus by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird, I am 120 on the wait list.

@OldGed said:

Must be the Oppenheimer movie, when i went to my local library to borrow the book, American Prometheus by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird, I am 120 on the wait list.

American Prometheus is certainly an in-depth biography of Robert Oppenheimer, thoroughly documented through his FBI surveillance during much of his life and the undoubted assurance of many of the notables he associated with that they were going to be part of history, so they kept diaries and preserved the letters they wrote, etc. Many were still alive to be interviewed by Martin Sherwin in the late '70s and early '80s.

But I thought overall The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, also a Pulitzer Prize winner, was the more impressive book. It fleshes out Groves, Fermi, Teller, Szilard, Einstein, and the historical context of everything much more than American Prometheus. For example, in the movie, Enrico Fermi developing the world’s first nuclear reactor in a big room under the University of Chicago football stadium, unused in WWII, is a very quick snippet, whereas Rhodes described the effort to get the world’s first atomic pile to go critical in detail. American Prometheus and the film pay scant attention to the downwind effects of the Trinity Test and to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but The Making of the Atomic Bomb also details those things.