gweilo8888

For some reason, I absolutely cannot read that without pronouncing it as "Creepy Teepee", even though I know perfectly well how Crêpe is pronounced.

Loads of dialog was inaudible in Dunkirk. If you're even slightly hard of hearing, there's very little point even trying to watch Christopher Nolan's films any more. And the messed up thing is that Nolan sees that as a good thing. In interviews he's suggested that you shouldn't be able to hear dialog easily. Thing is, if I am sitting trying to figure out a line in a movie and whether I missed something significant, I've already missed the five lines of dialog that followed. It takes me out of the experience, and it's bad filmmaking, which sucks when the film is otherwise incredible.

Edit: I just thought of a nice analog to this on the visual side of the equation. What Nolan does by constantly burying dialog under the score and FX is the auditory equivalent of Michael Bay's need for motion in every visual. Both are done because the director feels it makes the film more impactful, and on some level it truly does, initially. But it quickly starts to feel overdone and annoying, and really they'd both be better directors if someone would just step in and take their overused favorite toy away.

He wants to grab the audience by the lapels and pull them toward the screen

Sadly, what he's aiming for and what he achieves are polar opposites. Making me miss dialogue when I don't know whether or not it is significant does not draw me further into the movie experience. it takes me out of the movie and puts me back in my seat in the theater, frustrated at missing the following several lines of dialog while I struggle to replay the inaudible mess in my head.

I loved Dunkirk. I hated the audio mix, which made the movie a worse product for me, as someone with only somewhat less than perfect hearing. I shudder to think what it's like for someone with significant hearing issues.

Except that as a viewer you don't know whether or not it was relevant, important dialogue, unless you can actually understand it. When Nolan intentionally squashes the dialogue with sound effects, he makes his audience stop thinking about what's happening on the screen for a second, and sit trying to figure out what they missed instead, which takes them out of the movie experience instead of drawing them into it as he is trying to.

The police in Hong Kong are alleged to be very corrupt

And sadly, nowadays the ICAC that was brought in to fix this problem has itself become totally corrupt, leaving it powerless to fight police corruption.