I mention that not to pick on him but rather to empathize, because I imagine the face I make at him is the same face our own John Sciacca makes at me when I admit that I just don’t like Dolby Atmos—at least not for movies. That might seem strange given that I’m on record as lauding the format—with its overhead speakers and innovative use of audio objects instead of channels—when applied to video games. You haven’t really played Overwatch until you’ve heard Pharah scream, “Justice rains from above!” from above your actual head. 

The weird thing is, I love Atmos with gaming and generally hate it with movies for pretty much exactly the same reasons. And to understand why, you’re going to have to do a little homework.

Take a lawn chair out into your front yard and sit in it with your back to the street. Your neighbors may give you strange looks, but this is for science. Just run with it.  Now pull out a book and start reading it. At some point, a car might drive by behind you. If the book is decent enough, chances are you won’t even notice, unless you live on a street so remote that passing traffic is an oddity. 

Keep on reading until a plane or helicopter passes overhead. Your concentration immediately broke, didn’t it? OK, maybe not if you live near an airport or airbase, and you’re used to planes flying overhead. But for most of us, if something flies overhead, we’re gonna drop the book and look upward. 

Atmos is a lot like that for me. It triggers something in my primate brain—a fight-or-flight mechanism, if you will. I’m reminded of vervet monkeys, who have different words in their rather complex vocabulary for “python” and “eagle.” If a monkey shouts “python,” nearby members of its tribe scan their surroundings. If the cry is “eagle,” on the other hand, they drop what they’re doing and run for the nearest hidey hole. 

And Atmos generally does that to me. There’s just no denying that sound coming from overhead is hardwired into our brains as something we have to focus on. In a video game, that can be critically important since these virtual worlds often contain threats coming from every direction. Hearing that a baddy is attacking you from overhead can be the difference between virtual life and death.

But unlike video games, movies aren’t sandboxes. Our focus is on a rectangle of space right in front of us; someone else gets to decide where our eyes turn. It’s an inherently horizontal experience, and while sounds coming from the sides and behind don’t violate that experience, sounds coming from overhead do. As with our daily lives, anything that happens outside of that horizontal plane is somehow distinct, different, and disconnected.

That can actually be kinda cool with movies like Ready Player One or others that live or die purely on audiovisual spectacle. Heck, it’s even great with movies like The Last Jedi, where the overhead sound effects generally work to add ambiance and a sense of space, not vertical sensationalism. But such mixes are few and far between. For the most part, Atmos serves only to distract me from the narrative experience. And just to be clear, I’m not saying John or anyone else is wrong for liking that effect. I’m merely rebelling against the increasingly pervasive notion that if you don’t have an Atmos-capable sound system, you’re somehow doing home cinema wrong.

Try to seek out an Atmos demo before you decide if this “immersive” audio technology is right for you. And if it’s not—if tried-and-true surround sound does the trick—don’t feel like you’re selling your movie-watching experience short. I mean, as long as you’re not just watching movies in stereo . . .