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Days of Thunder: (Hans Zimmer) Capitalizing on the
runaway success of
Top Gun several years earlier, director Tony
Scott and producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer placed actor Tom
Cruise in race cars rather than jets and enjoyed a lesser degree of the
same attraction from mainstream audiences. Similar character
confrontations based on generic stereotypes plague both films, the depth
of the narrative shallow enough to avoid interfering with the main
features: hunks and machines. Cruise plays an upstart racer seeking to
break into NASCAR and, in so doing, makes expected enemies and
unexpected friends. A surprisingly deep cast floats the picture despite
its obvious flaws in the screenplay, though such issues were typically
ignored by the throngs of auto racing enthusiasts who loved
Days of
Thunder because of its only marginally masked connections to real
life racers and events in the sport. The project was an opening volley
in the eventually fruitful collaboration between the director (and
producers) and composer Hans Zimmer; in subsequent years, it became
customary for Zimmer and then his assistant, Harry Gregson-Williams, to
write the music for Scott's movies. The balance between score and songs
in
Days of Thunder was more favorable towards the score than had
been in
Top Gun, with upwards of an hour of original material
written to intermingle with the predictable pop songs that eventually
comprised the commercial album release for the 1990 venture (Zimmer
co-wrote one of them, "The Last Note of Freedom," with Billy Idol).
Collectors of the composer's music have always maintained interest in
hearing a retail score-only offering for
Days of Thunder, though
if the composer has his way, it will never happen. Zimmer, who sometimes
finds himself arguing against album releases of his own music, is
particularly harsh on his output for this film. In 1998, he stated,
"I've done some truly bad scores and
Days of Thunder is one of
them," and when pressed about why there is no album for that score, he
reprised those sentiments by saying, "...because there wasn't any good
music in it." Regardless of his poor opinion of many of his early
scores, Zimmer's fans continue to appreciate the hard rock tone that he
explored in
Days of Thunder, even if his ideas for the film would
mature into better incarnations in other projects. Although the composer
was just starting to dabble in orchestral recordings at the time,
Days of Thunder, like many of his other notable works in the
early 1990's, is completely synthetic.
Stylistically, in retrospect,
Days of Thunder
sounds like a direct cross between the bad-ass attitude and electric
guitar-dominated style of
Drop Zone and the easy-going romantic
sensibilities of
Green Card. It offers nothing spectacular for a
veteran Zimmer collector when looking back at it, but the composer
really is too hard on himself in regards to the effectiveness of the
score. While it may be difficult to recommend its rare album release
(more on that later), there's nothing inherently wrong with either
Zimmer's approach to the topic or the quality of his result. Albeit
generic compared to its successors,
Days of Thunder is a
functional and occasionally entertaining score. A satisfying theme with
rock ballad-like progressions anchors the score, heard on Jeff Beck's
wailing electric guitar solos in some of the score's victorious moments
(such as the end of "Car Building," the beginning of "The Crash," or the
end of "Victory Lane"). The ripping explosions of hyperactivity in the
slapping percussion and rambling keyboard rhythms established by Zimmer
in the first half of the score typically refer to fragments of this
theme. Of arguably more interest is the softer, new age keyboarding of a
wet ambience that Zimmer uses to address the relationships in the film.
Perhaps more dated in its tone, these portions either foreshadow
progressions to later be heard in
Green Card ("Drafting") or
The Lion King ("Dawn" and "End Titles"). Most of the application
of Zimmer's faux woodwinds and faux piano are pretty standard to his
sound of the 1980's, though at least he manages to largely avoid
repeating elements straight from
Rain Man. The only really
interesting technique that he applies specifically to
Days of
Thunder is an altering of pitch within notes in the keyboarding to
simulate the sound of passing cars, a neat effect (though somewhat
challenging on album). Overall, it's not as bad a score as Zimmer
claims, but its success for the listener is either tied to an affection
for the film or for the composer's early hard rock mannerisms. As
previously mentioned, no retail score album exists for
Days of
Thunder. Pieces of it have floated about on bootlegs and promos (and
even in Zimmer's concert arrangements), but the usual "First Born
Records" bootleg label for many early Media Ventures recordings contains
47 minutes of the score in perfect sound quality (outside of some studio
noise during a transition in "End Titles") and has long circulated the
secondary market. It's missing some music (including Mark Mancina's much
sought contribution to the final scenes), but will be sufficient for
most listeners. Expect some redundancy, but the highlights will make
Days of Thunder worth the search for devoted Zimmer
enthusiasts.
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| Bias Check: | For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.09 (in 80 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.08
(in 253,581 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
