Or the contrast between Willis' gruff, new york cop way of talking and Rickman, who was so dignified and proper... Would that dichotomy show up in text? Accents do not exist on the page and would go undetected to someone unfamiliar with the language.
I agree subs loose something, but you do still watch subbed movies with sound and differences in tone of voice are noticeable even if you don't speak the language. You still lose some subtleties of light accents or word choice, but the big things are noticeable, like actors speaking with foreign accents or speaking faster/slower or louder/softer than usual, etc. In fact this is one of the biggest reasons I think subs are better, because dubs often lack these tonal inflections that give context to the words. Even with a weak translation you can mentally accommodate to the tone you're hearing, which isn't possible with a dub.
Just to be clear, I'm only advocating listening to dubs for animated films because of the unique way the genre bypasses many problems usually associated with dubbing. Even then it has to be a good dub. I personally make an exception for Jackie Chan films because they are silly , and the awkwardness of the dubbing only adds to the humour for me.
In regards to your point though, I'm of a mixed opinion. Watching films for the Far East Bracket I often wonder how accurately I am actually interpreting the tones I'm hearing. There are many occasions where it feels like what I'm reading in the subtitles is a few orders of magnitude off of what I'm hearing in the films. For instance, a character may sound quite forceful or severe in their reaction, when by what I've read the conversation has not felt like it had reached that level of intensity. Initially I would chalk that sort of thing up to the subtitler not doing a good job, or it being a badly directed scene regarding the tonal continuity. Now though I often wonder if it's simply a characteristic of some languages. Many of the films we watch for the Far East Bracket are done in tone languages. There are emphasis, intensity and pitch changes which, as I understand it, have nothing whatever to do with the emotions of the speaker, but it is simply a matter of how certain words are pronounced. And then there's the rhythm of the sentence structure, which can be so different to how a line will read in English. A definitive word might land at opposite ends of a line. It can make it quite a struggle for the subs to harmonize with timing of the dialogue in those cases. I've watched some films that have been oddly bumpy that way, and I wonder if it's a combination of these factors. Then of course there are other films where the subs are so harmonized to the dialogue they disappear from your consciousness.
That's why I'm a bit mixed. In my experience I'm not always able to trust my ear. Not that it's ever driven me to listen to a dub as an alternative. I just accept something was lost in translation and move on.
Do you relate to any of that?