“First and foremost, anything you’ve heard about the sound in that packed-to-the-rafters 70mm IMAX screening at the TCL Chinese Theater Thursday night is absolutely true. Take a proprietary IMAX sound mix and speaker configuration that can be pretty inferior and add in the fact that Nolan’s mixes tend to be muddied historically (then consider that for some reason the system was turned up to 11) — it was a recipe for disaster.” — from Kris Tapley‘s In Contention review of Interstellar, posted this morning.

“I couldn’t understand full stretches of dialogue and the IMAX of it all with the pitch darkness of the celluloid (too dark, I’d wager), it just wasn’t settling.

“My second look was in a smaller studio lot screening room on 35mm with a traditional mix and maybe five or six other people in the room. Night and day. And that’s just on a technical level. Going back also allowed some of the clunkiness of the narrative to settle in a more satisfying way. It was just nice to see it again after knowing what it was, and this mystery box mentality sort of precludes that for many critics.”