by Weston Thomason

Created on: April 08, 2009

Movies are supposed to give you a feeling like you are there, but it is also to be an enjoyable experience. If going to see movies or just watching movies in general wasn't enjoyable, then why would anybody do it? Before captioning was discovered, people had to listen very carefully so as to not miss what was said by actors. Captioning gives the viewer the opportunity to hear it all. Not only that, but sometimes the actor is hard to understand.

What makes a movie good isn't the movie itself, but rather how the viewer likes the movie. Take for example the movie critics who claim that certain movies are bad and you seem them a week later and you feel that it had to be one of your favorite movies of all time. People all have different views on the way they would like to go about their movie experiences. There can be many good reasons contributing to why movies should not be captioned, but there can be just as many if not more reasons for why they should be. Some people are deaf or just hard of hearing, during scary movies some people cover their ears so the loud noise doesn't make them jump, or maybe the viewer didn't really want to go to the movie and prefers to read. All of these reasons don't seem like big deals to most, but to the ones that they pertain to, they are.

Watching movies at home: You are watching a movie at home and suddenly your phone rings, but the movie is getting to a good part so you don't want to stop it. So what do you do? You might tell yourself, "Push pause and answer the phone, lazy" or you might put the movie on subtitles, mute the movie, and answer the phone. This way you can keep your positive movie experience going without possibly missing an important phone call. Also, if you are one of those people that cannot concentrate on a movie when other people and/or animals are making so much noise around you, captioning helps remove some of the noise-induced stress.

Watching movies at the theater: When watching a movie at the theater, the screen is probably large enough to ignore the captioning if you have to. To be completely honest, if the captioning at the bottom of the screen can bother someone to such a great extent, they aren't really that into the movie. If you are interested in a movie, you don't want to miss anything. So you don't waste your time looking down at the captions. No, you keep it on the action and the captions become just a side reference. For the people that like the captioning, they learn how to read the captions and watch the movie at the same time. That does sound like a unique skill, doesn't it.

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