Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
The history of cinematic sound, told by legendary sound designers and visionary filmmakers.
A competent and informative documentary for cinephiles, Making Waves benefits from access to legendary practitioners like Walter Murch, Ben Burtt, and Gary Rydstrom, whose interviews elevate the material. However, the film follows a fairly conventional talking-heads-plus-clips documentary structure, limiting its cinematic ambition for a film ostensibly celebrating cinematic craft. The subject matter is genuinely underexplored in documentary form, lending it some novelty, but the narrative arc is straightforward chronological history without a particularly strong throughline or memorable conclusion. Cinematography is serviceable but unremarkable for the format.