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Accents and Mumbling Actors
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It Has Become Habitual for Me
Key Takeaways
- Subtitles are essential for understanding accents and mumbling actors, ensuring no dialogue is missed.
- Modern sound mixing prioritizes music over dialogue, requiring subtitles for clarity.
- Subtitles aid in learning new words and are crucial for watching foreign films in their original form.
About five years ago, I started watching movies with subtitles. Now, it’s difficult to watch any film without a stream of text accompanying every line of dialogue.
While some of this is habit, some content makes subtitles essential. Here’s why I now use subtitles any time I watch a movie.
1 Accents and Mumbling Actors
Perhaps the biggest reason why I and so many others refuse to watch movies without subtitles is because we don’t want to miss a single line of dialogue, whether it is crucial to the plot or not. I’m a picky movie watcher, so I tend to fuss over minor details in the movies I decide to watch. This obsession becomes a problem when I watch movies with regional English accents. But that’s just one scenario where I am more than happy to turn on subtitles.
It is also true that some actors tend to mumble through their lines, making it extremely hard to figure out what they’re saying. For example, Christian Bale in the Batman Trilogy, Andrew Lincoln in The Walking Dead, and Tom Hardy in almost everything, just to name a few. I believe these actors whisper their lines into their mic to get the idiosyncratic voice of the gritty, world-weary character, but it also means I need subtitles to follow the dialogue.
2 Modern Sound Mixing
Another culprit for hard-to-hear dialogue is the sound mixing in modern movies. The audio in these movies is engineered to place much more emphasis on background music. For some reason, explosions and Ludwig Goransson’s compositions have taken precedence over what the actors have to say. This situation is further exacerbated by the variety of listening environments available today, from smartphones to cinema-level sound systems.
To enjoy these movies, you either have to buy new speakers, increase the volume to neighbor-disturbing levels, or turn on subtitles. Being who I am, I choose subtitles every time.
3 Learning New Words
I also turn on subtitles to pick up words that are strange or new to me. I’m not a native English speaker, but I’m sure even native speakers will be thrown off by words that are not in the common lexicon.
If you’ve seen series like Better Call Saul, Sherlock, and Frazier, watched the classic Shakespeare movies, along with a decent selection of sci-fi movies, then you know what I’m referring to.
4 Watching Foreign Films
Subtitles also come in handy when I watch movies that are in a language other than English. Some of the best movies I’ve watched this year are German, French, and Indian. Dubs aren’t bad, but you’re most likely getting a second-rate experience.
With subtitles, I get to enjoy the movie in its original form without missing a beat. Good subtitles support a rich, diverse taste in movies, and I’m here for it.
5 It Has Become Habitual for Me
Perhaps, the most important reason why I still watch movies with subtitles on is because it has become a habit for me. It feels like something is missing when I watch with no subtitles. Some people claim that subtitles are distracting, but that has not been the case for me.
The only major problem with subtitles is that they can be too revealing and spoil a major plot line before it is shown on the screen. However, that is never an issue with good subtitles, and it is quite easy to fix out-of-sync subtitles.
The benefits of subtitles keep me hooked on the feature. Who knows? Maybe one day, I will complete a movie without subtitles, but I’ve yet to find any convincing reason to do so.
