Reminds me that explosions in space in Interstellar were silent (as they should be).
I hope this kind of thing catches on. If a movie shows a distant explosion and its sound is heard at the moment of the explosion, you don’t really think about it. But when they treat the sound accurately, it really grabs your attention.
I loved the detail in Interstellar where the audio from EVAs is muffled, like you're hearing what the occupant of the suit would be. The Expanse also does this to some degree.
Pretty sure that awful Sandra Bullock movie Gravity was quiet as well. Except that they made the awful choice to have Sandra Bullock screaming, moaning, and making all sorts of groans which came across as stupid and melodramatic. If she had been calmly radioing "Houston, vehicle breakup. Houston, pressurization loss. Houston, emergency EVA" it would have been better.
So, you'll notice that humans had that sort of flattened affect you're looking for in Kubrick's 2001, but he placed it in contrast to HAL, which for most of the film is the only character who communicates with an emotive affect.
You need some emotion, some performance. Kubrick got that and managed to achieve this in 2001 by combining the emotional austerity of spaceflight with an artificial intelligence who, in an inversion of expectation, is the emotive one. Then he exploited this for the climax, the loss of HAL's personality, being.
Lacking a HAL like element, especially in a film that has one actress, you can't make the humans dull, you need some emotional experience to attach to. In the context of Gravity, that means dramatic calls and the sounds of her human presence. People don't go to the cinema to listen to an ATC feed.
Probably because they insisted on not using any CGI and doing everything with practical effects instead. I think this is an absolutist take and I would have preferred they used a bit of CGI were it's warranted. Like that nuclear detonation for instance. I couldn't explain why, but compared to the archive footage of nuclear explosion, it just felt wrong.
I hope this kind of thing catches on. If a movie shows a distant explosion and its sound is heard at the moment of the explosion, you don’t really think about it. But when they treat the sound accurately, it really grabs your attention.