10 Movie Scenes That Unexpectedly Confused Audiences

Name a more iconic duo than Christopher Nolan and aurally incoherent dialogue.

After Nolan received pushback for Bane's (Tom Hardy) mumbly dialogue in The Dark Knight Rises and the at-times overpowering sound mix in Interstellar, he went full "hold my beer" with the "adventurous" sound mix for his 2020 film Tenet.

Right from the sci-fi epic's opening siege at the Kyiv Opera House, dialogue is incredibly difficult to hear clearly, due to both Ludwig Göransson's (admittedly awesome) musical score booming over the chatter, and The Protagonist (John David Washington) wearing a mask which heavily muffles what he's saying.

Given that this opening sequence is key in setting up the rest of the movie, it left many viewers infuriated that they had no earthly idea what the hell was going on.

Good luck trying to understand that the Protagonist tells his target, "You've been made. This siege is a blind for them to vanish you," especially if you first saw the movie in a cinema without the benefit of subtitles.

Nolan has famously defended his "impressionistic" approach to sound mixing, even calling moviegoers "conservative" for, you know, having the gall to desire clearly audible dialogue, the heathens.

Thankfully Nolan at least appears to have chilled out with the dialogue-obfuscating sound mix on his latest film, Oppenheimer.