Buy it... if you're curious to know where the action truly started for Hans Zimmer, Black Rain being the composer's first entry into a genre that eventually developed directly out of the sound heard in this score.

Avoid it... if you have no interest in hearing Zimmer's intuitively smart but not particularly well refined merging of Eastern solo instruments with his comfortably familiar rock-influenced tones.

Zimmer

Black Rain: (Hans Zimmer) A popular cops versus gangsters film of 1989, Black Rain led to director Ridley Scott's unequivocal denouncement of filming in Japan, claiming after being forced out of the country during the shooting of this movie that high production costs in that country are prohibitive. The story is one of standard intrigue for the genre, tackling the subject of the Yakuza and all of the violent traditions associated with the Japanese mafia. Two New York cops are witness to a power struggle within the Yakuza in a local eatery and arrest an ambitious, ascending mob boss after he assassinates a representative of his competition. Upon losing this villain after escorting him to Japan for trial, they create trouble for Japan's police force and, after the gruesome killing of one of the Americans, Michael Douglas in the lead role takes matters into his own hands. The title comes from the Yakuza's belief that the counterfeiting of American dollars is revenge for the "black rain" caused by the nuclear attacks of World War II. Despite it production hiccups, Black Rain earned almost ten times its budget worldwide, snagged a couple of Oscar nominations for its sound, and forever changed the life of the composer of its score, Hans Zimmer. The German (via London) had appeared suddenly in the mainstream with Rain Man the previous year and was about to receive even greater recognition with Driving Miss Daisy. Zimmer had aspirations of coming to Hollywood and writing big action scores like John Williams, but he did not have the classical training and was only familiar with orchestration through his friendship with composer Stanley Myers. At the end of the decade, Zimmer was, sometimes with the assistance of Shirley Walker, beginning to explore orchestral accompaniment to his comfortable synthesizers which, to that point, had emulated an organic, symphonic sound well enough to suffice. Black Rain represented the composer's first foray into the genre of action, and Zimmer wasn't sure if his techniques would suffice for the picture. It didn't help to have a completely unsupportive producer on the project. Stanley Jaffe famously shouted to Zimmer at a Paramount screening of Black Rain that the composer's score was the worst piece of music he had ever heard, at which point the composer claims to have fainted. Pressure from Jaffe and/or Paramount caused Scott to butcher Zimmer's score in the picture. In fact, little of what made the film is recognizable from the commercial album.

Zimmer has always been humble about his position in the industry, deferring credit for the best Digital Age action scores to the likes of Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, and James Horner. In addition to that uncertainty, Black Rain was something of a production nightmare for Zimmer, and he acknowledges that its eventual success was the result of originality that resulted from his own lack of experience. He later recounted, "...by the time we got to the dub stage, I was just living in fear. We were battling the system." What he could not have predicted was just how influential his music for the film would become, not only in leading to and informing his later assignments, but also in emulation from other composers. The irony of Zimmer's approach to Black Rain is that it really wasn't radically different from John Carpenter and Alan Howarth's sound for Big Trouble in Little China. Both scores utilized keyboarded samples and drum pads with the assistance of stereotypical Eastern solo elements (and both had now dated songs on their albums that are frightfully similar). For Zimmer, his trademark action sound of the 1990's is mostly derived from seeds of ideas heard in Black Rain, and although this score would have its most prominent influence on Backdraft (and thus, everything that developed out of that score), pieces extend all the way to The Last Samurai and Batman Begins. The basic ingredients of Black Rain are all familiar in retrospect, too, beginning with the keyboarded samples, distinctive electric guitar, slapped drum pads, and metallic percussion effects. Walker's assistance manifests itself in fuller string accompaniment. The exotic woodwinds proved to be standard in Zimmer's early 1990's output. Some of the more soothing, treble-inhabiting keyboarding (which sometimes imitated plucked oriental tones) would develop further in the composer's light drama and romance scores to follow. The cool, somewhat restrained electric guitar representation of Douglas' character would blossom in Days of Thunder. Thumping bass, pairs of hits, and broad swooshes deep in the bass region are a precursor of Crimson Tide. The string applications foreshadow Backdraft, especially the minute or so at the end of the commercial album's "Charlie Loses His Head" cue, a sequence that Ron Howard was so infatuated with that it eventually, after much toil and miscommunication between the composer and director, was reprised almost identically for the ultra-dramatic fire scenes in the 1991 drama.

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Thematically, Zimmer handles Black Rain with a few ideas that mostly play to American notions of compassion and kick-ass attitude. The score's primary theme of friendship is best heard in "Nick and Masa," though a secondary action theme in "Sugal" serves as both an action motif and a convenient piece for the Japanese elements to chew on. The blurring of lines between the oriental woodwind tones and the electric guitar in the background of that cue's mid-section is a particularly enjoyable aspect of theme's development. A somewhat vague, minor-key theme for the film's key villain is conveyed early in "Sato" and doesn't really hold the interest like the other themes do. The dissonant passages of pure ruckus from Zimmer are highlighted by the actual beheading portion of "Charlie Loses His Head." For the scene that immediately follows, as Douglas' cop is seen comforted by the woman he meets in Japan, Zimmer reinforces his friendship theme with satisfying contemporary keyboarding. Interestingly, the composer's most stereotypically oriental subtheme exists for this female character, though its most stirring string performance doesn't exist in the suite on the commercial album. The roughly 22 minutes of music on Virgin's commercial product is a continuous suite of major cues condensed into four tracks. Casual fans of Zimmer and the film should be satisfied with this material, especially when accompanied by the composer's rock song performed by Gregg Allman, "I'll Be Holding On." Note that the version of that outstanding song on the album does not match that which opens the film. A bootleg version of Black Rain that has long circulated the secondary collector's market offers over 70 minutes of Zimmer's music. While much of that music is redundant, especially in short cues that simply drone with ominous keyboarded bass or sporadic drum hits, there are a few cues from that presentation (which sounds decent and is absent sound effects) that should be added to the commercially available suite to form a more representative, 30 to 35-minute album. These additional cues of interest include the sorrowful "Joyce's Theme" and the American bad-ass attitude of "The Final Confrontation," the latter hinting at the ballsy sound of Drop Zone. Zimmer has often commented that it's somewhat amazing (and even baffling) to see his music for Black Rain become so influential, and to an extent, some head-scratching is merited. It's a good score, but not particularly refined or impressive in its sum. No matter your opinion, it's an important work in the history of Digital Age film music, and it deserves appreciation and even study at the very least. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.09 (in 78 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.13 (in 244,629 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.