From Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post, “Critic’s notebook: ‘Interstellar’s’ sonic soup or: How auteurs diss their audiences”:
So far, viewers have been surprisingly forgiving of the directors who get off on toying with their eardrums and expectations: Having already earned almost $150 million at the box office, “Gone Girl” is on its way to becoming the most commercially successful film of Fincher’s career. “Interstellar” is tracking similarly well for Nolan. It’s gratifying that what easily could have been generic blockbusters are being tackled by filmmakers of distinctive, even risk-taking vision. But they should have long since realized that the choice between pleasing themselves and pleasing their audience is a false one. Push-me-pull-you is a perfectly legitimate artistic gambit, but pleasure — and plain old comprehensibility — deserve to be part of the game as well.
For a while I thought I was the only person who found movie dialogue incomprehensible much of the time. I blamed it on middle age and failing hearing (The remake of True Grit was one of the worst. Jeff Bridges sounded like he was trying to talk as fast as he could with a mouth full of marbles.) On the other hand, the special effect’s noises and music scores are often overwhelmingly loud. It’s nice to see that I’m not the only one who has problems with movie sound.
Someone should do a quiz of the audience’s ability to recognize dialogue, and then post the results on Rotten Tomatoes. “20% of the audience failed to recognize half of the dialogue.” You aren’t alone.