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Pearl Harbor: (Hans Zimmer) It's disappointing to
see so many dumb Americans manipulated by Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael
Bay's ridiculously inept 2001 romantic epic
Pearl Harbor. It's
obvious what Bruckheimer and Bay had in mind. The tandem behind
The
Rock and
Armageddon took a look at James Cameron's
Titanic and decided to emulate its exact formula: 3 hours of
sappy romance against the backdrop of a significant historical event.
That way, you get the young female audiences to watch it repeatedly
while their boyfriends are enticed enough by the explosions to oblige
them. The problem with this equation for
Pearl Harbor is that
nothing about its production could compete with the appeal of
Titanic, and while the film did expectedly well with the intended
target audiences, it was appropriately hacked to death by critics who
wasted 183 minutes watching this trash. The terrible script by
Braveheart writer Randall Wallace reduced the love triangle
between two pilots and a nurse at the outset of the war to a series of
cliches and frustrating over-simplifications that are laughable more
often than not. The script's handling of the actual attack reduces it to
only 35 minutes in length, dragging on mercilessly for an eternity of
epilogic material after the bombs stop falling. This insipidly stupid
film also attempted to apply the
Titanic formula to its music.
The production had famously used Hans Zimmer's "Journey to the Line" cue
from
The Thin Red Line very impressively in the early trailers
depicting the arrival of the Japanese aircraft over Hawaii that fateful
December morning, and the composer was teamed up once again with the
Bruckheimer/Bay duo with expectations soaring high. Could his score
compete with James Horner's Oscar-winning juggernaut from 1997? Could
the use of Faith Hill for a romantic ballad in
Pearl Harbor
compete with Celine Dion's Oscar-winning 1997 song? In short, no. But
that doesn't necessarily mean that Zimmer can't compete with Horner
favorably on any given day (though, considering their equal problems
with re-use, Horner is superior in most circumstances). It simply means
that
Pearl Harbor, as an overarching production, is no
Titanic, and the artistic failures of Zimmer's work here are
linked inextricably to the film's much larger problems.
With only a few weeks remaining before the red hot Zimmer
(still glowing from the success of
Gladiator) and his team of
many Media Ventures assistants and arrangers were supposed to turn in
the finished draft recording of the score for the highly anticipated
Pearl Harbor, the composer was still uncomfortably laboring over
the theme that would exist as the centerpiece for the score. In
February, 2001, he stated "All I can tell you is right now as I'm
sitting here is I've been sitting here for three days trying to write a
great theme. I think all of that should be in capital letters: A GREAT
THEME. That's what you do at the beginning of these projects. You sit
there and you try to write The Great Theme. It's very elusive. It
tortures me and it tortures everybody around me. People don't even go
near this room while I'm writing The Theme. And I haven't found it yet,
so of course I'm in a complete panic, just like always." While he was
already on the right track to finding the theme that would eventually
dominate the score, he continued to joke about the process. "I always go
through this stage. I don't have any time," he said. "I on purpose
haven't looked at the calendar because that would be too terrifying.
It's bad enough trying to write The Theme. It's even worse to try to
have reality creep into this process. Reality is definitely the enemy in
this case." Interestingly, if you were not aware of the rushed
circumstance of this score's creation, admittedly caused in part by
Zimmer's toil with the composition of the main theme, then it's easy to
criticize it as an overly-simplistic and inadequate effort. With so much
time spent in agony over the creation of the title theme, and not enough
time to boost the merits of the rest of the score, the listener and
movie-goer will get exactly what is to be expected: a great theme and
nothing else. The entire score seems stuck in the conceptualization
stage, needing another month of orchestration and fleshing out into the
full beauty that the film undoubtedly required. To Zimmer's credit, the
heart is there, but the body is severely lacking, causing the music to
sound underscored and poorly orchestrated for an undersized performing
group. Perhaps this is the result of what happens when you work for the
type of director that unleashes you to create the music unbothered until
the editing process begins.
This score is fascinating for what it does both right and
wrong. So focused on the romantic title theme for the film was Zimmer
that he completely lost the larger historical context. And yet, the
result of his effort is one truly attractive theme provided in
countless, redundant variations that make for a delightful listening
experience on album. The tone is a lighter rendition of Zimmer's
brooding
The House of the Spirits, which relied on a similar
style of augmenting orchestral elements in a mix that makes them sound
slightly synthetic. Part of that distinct sound by Zimmer relates to the
overwhelming bass presence in his works and part of it is due to the
relative simplicity of his constructs; both are detractions for those
looking for any semblance of intellectual complexity in this work. The
"great theme," which hits you immediately in "Tennessee," is indeed
quite romantic and emotionally charged in its basic progressions (which
share similarities, ironically, to the aforementioned "Journey to the
Line" structures), and its lengthy repetitions throughout the score make
the rather short album a very pleasant background experience. The
slight, synthetic edge to the mix of the score makes the lead piano
sound like a keyboard (and perhaps it is), and this dense tone causes
the album to play like a Vangelis new age and film music hybrid, with a
few flairs of typical Zimmer melodrama thrown into the mix. The truly
baffling and greatly unfortunate aspect of
Pearl Harbor is that
it has absolutely nothing patriotic, warlike, or time-sensitive about
it. The super-romantic aspects of the
Titanic score were at least
balancing Irish, classical, and new age elements in a mature mixture
that, while driving some listeners nuts, did address every angle of the
plot (a lot of source material was helpful to this cause as well). The
music for
Pearl Harbor has nothing really tied to the historical
context in any of its overwrought romantic capitulations. It could
accompany a
Free Willy film without much alteration. Neither of
Zimmer's trusty trademarks, including the solo trumpet and the snare
drum, make a significant impact in
Pearl Harbor, with very few
hints of his
Backdraft and
Crimson Tide styles to be
heard. There is no percussive element to represent the initially bloated
and eventually defeated glory of the Americans.
The ensemble for
Pearl Harbor is instead easy on
the ears. Light keyboarding and strings are joined by acoustic guitar
and occasional soft choir. There is no brass worth speaking of in most
parts of the score, with only a few token trumpet performances
represented in "Heart of a Volunteer" on the album. Outside of a strong,
but still inadequate percussive rhythm accompanying the Japanese
preparations for flight, the ethnic side of the score is also very
underdeveloped. It is impossible to consider the ethnic portions of
Zimmer's score for
Pearl Harbor without recalling the acclaimed
and highly effective Jerry Goldsmith score for the last (and greatest)
film ever portraying the events of the attack,
Tora! Tora! Tora!.
These films and their scores obviously handle the topic from complete
different angles, with
Tora! Tora! Tora! approaching from the
stance of a straight documentary. The Goldsmith score was ethnically
precise and lacked any romantic or upbeat sequences because of the
simple, but seemingly forgotten fact that the Americans were so
thoroughly whipped that day that there was little to be proud of.
Zimmer's modern score gets so caught up in the romantic hype of the
character drama that it therefore loses both the ethnic edge and
dramatic scope needed for the topic. Zimmer provides no sense of loss,
no sense of shock, no sense of anger, no sense of anything that the
attack survivors were actually feeling. This score gives you no
impression that something important, an event that would shape an entire
generation (and the only attack ever launched upon American soil), is
the backdrop for this story. It is music that could have also
realistically worked well in significant parts of
Backdraft,
The House of the Spirits or even
Gladiator. The
monothematic nature of the pretty constructs that Zimmer conjured is
another problem with the score; while this extremely consistent loyalty
to the love theme offers a smooth listening experience, it is a somewhat
juvenile method of handling the film. No distinct sub-themes for
additional characters exist, probably because they're already shallow in
how they're written for the production. Generic Zimmer action material
in "War" does nothing to extend the Media Ventures sound in a new
direction, and when coupled with the romance music,
Pearl Harbor
is not a score that would have stood out in Zimmer's illustrious career
if not for hoards of fangirls.
Perhaps the most unbelievable aspect about the score
and album is its reliance on the under-educated ears of modern
audiences. The same could be said about many Zimmer scores of the 2000's
(and the
Pirates of the Caribbean music in particular), but it's
an especially egregious aspect of
Pearl Harbor. Zimmer's music is
in no part what a person would have heard in 1941. Nor is the Faith Hill
song placed in any context (even within the score). This score's total
disregard for the time period in which the story is set will be the
fatal blow for some listeners. The score was reportedly recorded with a
very small orchestra, with the bulk of sound being added by keyboards
across town at Media Ventures. If any one film in the early 2000's
desperately required a fully orchestral score, then a romantic epic
about
Pearl Harbor would be it. Did someone forget that
traditional orchestral bands were actually playing the national anthem
on the decks of the ships as the attack commenced? Perhaps the lack of
proper preparation time caused this situation. Perhaps it is the aura of
any Michael Bay film. Perhaps nobody cared. The loss of the elegant
female vocals in the score, including those late in "Tennessee," is
evidence of haste or incompetence in the mixing process. As for the
Faith Hill song, it was an obvious attempt by Warner Brothers to take
one of its artists and shove a rock song down the throat of a film for
which it doesn't work. The song is fine. Come to think of it, the song
is very good. But do you think that surviving veterans of the Pearl
Harbor attack are going to sit around and listen to it? Maybe none of
these producers ever heard John Williams' "Hymn to the Fallen" at the
end of
Saving Private Ryan, a fine example of an orchestral and
choral tribute to the fallen soldier. Faith Hill does not compare.
Overall, it's important to remember that his music isn't terrible by any
means. It's simply moronic and juvenile for the context. The album is a
very strong listening experience and will likely be a deserving and
frequent listen for many Zimmer collectors. He did indeed accomplish his
task of composing a beautiful theme, but he stopped there, creating an
epic failure, an inexcusable and shortsighted piece of beauty with no
respect for history. It's a score that will be a startling
disappointment for nearly any historian or fan of serious, dramatic
soundtracks. It isn't bad music; it's simply the
wrong music.
Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download
Score as Written for the Film: **
Score as Heard on Album: ****
Overall: ***
| 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 extensive credits and the lyrics to the song, but offers
no extra information about the film or score.
