 |
Pirates of the Caribbean on DVD
• "a soundtrack workout" • Dolby Digital 5.1 EX More DVD info... |
|
|
Pirates of the Caribbean on DVD
• "a soundtrack workout" • Dolby Digital 5.1 EX More DVD info... |
 |
|
 | |||||||||
| • | Newest Major Reviews: | . | • | This Week's Most Popular Reviews: | • | Best-Selling Albums: | ||
| . |
1. Nim's Island 2. The Life Before Her Eyes 3. Horton Hears a Who! 4. Leatherheads 5. The Spiderwick Chronicles | . | . |
1. Moulin Rouge 2. Gladiator 3. POTC: Curse of the Black Pearl 4. Star Wars: A New Hope 5. Edward Scissorhands |
6. Pearl Harbor 7. Schindler's List 8. Titanic 9. Braveheart 10. Home Alone | . | . |
1. Varèse Sarabande 25th 2. The Last of the Mohicans 3. Legends of the Fall 4. Schindler's List 5. LOTR: Return of the King (Set) |
 | ||||||||
|
|
|
Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you seek a sampler of themes and rhythms from Media Ventures score, and especially their first big score, The Rock. Avoid it... if you hear synthesized cellos in your nightmares, and you despise the use of volume rather than style in Media Ventures scores. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
With one music supervisor, eight composers, nine orchestrators, three conductors, and Zimmer serving as the "Overproducer," you immediately get the impression that this is a frightening Media Ventures job. The result of this combined effort? A monumentally disappointing mess of a score. Stop for a moment and consider the days when a single man would write, orchestrate, conduct, and produce a score. Now imagine two-dozen people trying to do the same thing all at once, and the product is a useless, meandering collection of stock action cues and no cohesive elements of any significance. Badelt's coordination efforts serve as a sampler of Media Ventures cues from the last seven years, with hardly any original ideas, no deviation from their norms, and no indication that they took Pirates of the Caribbean seriously enough to give it a personality of its own. The Hollywood Studio Orchestra, whose involvement on the project is advertised, is drowned out (or simply doesn't perform) in every single cue, leaving the abrasive programming of the Media Ventures synthesizers to accomplish the scoring task by volume rather than class. It is a collection of ideas that expired years ago, a time capsule of The Rock that has been repackaged with a variation of its theme and combined with less than a minute of pirate-oriented music. Outside of orchestral string performances in the sixth and ninth cues on the album, the score is a pounding array of the usual rhythms and synthesized orchestra hits that we have come to expect from these people. If you hear synthesized cellos in your nightmares, then be aware that they are relentless in Pirates of the Caribbean, chopping through extremely overused rhythms by the Media Ventures artists. Brief respites of thirty seconds or so in length break up these non-descript action explosions, leaving a person scratching his head and wondering if this music really does make Gladiator sound like a masterpiece. The most disgraceful part of the shouting score for Pirates of the Caribbean is that there is really nothing swashbuckling about it. If you remove the tepid little thirty-second jig from the start of the opening cue, then this score could easily accompany a movie about alien attacks, police force raids, or any other militaristic setting. It immediately begs the question: Did none of these two dozen men at Media Ventures actually walk across town and get on the ride at Disneyland? Certainly, Zimmer and Badelt both made their journey from Germany to America long enough ago to spare a few moments on the classic ride in Anaheim. If they had, they would have heard the kind of jolly bayou swing that the real tale of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" combined with its action music. The entire concept of the jig, and the jolly rhythms that accompany the free spirited nature of these pirates, was lost on Badelt, and thus, you get this ridiculously out of place, harshly modernized interpretation of the genre that has nothing to do with the original concept. The mark couldn't have been missed to any greater extent. Thus, the lack of soul, spirit, and spit in Pirates of the Caribbean is a matter of a massive failure in construction rather than instrumentation alone. A decent pirate score can be produced from their electronics, and we know this because Hans Zimmer himself wrote the more appropriate Muppet Treasure Island several years ago for Disney. While that score was able to benefit from the silliness of its characters, it still exhibited the "yo ho" spirit that is necessary in the genre. It is possible, perhaps, that a change in instrumentation would have sufficed instead, for every score collector knows that John Debney's Cutthroat Island stands as a classic because of the mere scope of orchestral power behind its swashbuckling rhythms. Even this summer, Harry Gregson-Williams' score to the animated film Sinbad used the real orchestra and it combined with snazzy, though stereotypical pirate rhythms to a very effective end. In the end, however, Badelt and his associates would completely fail to take a cue from the style of these works for Pirates of the Caribbean. Instead, Badelt takes a cue (or two or three or twenty) from non-pirate related Media Ventures stock material. The themes that do appear in this score are not strong enough for the genre, nor do they exhibit any swing in rhythm themselves. Instead, it is a combination of two Zimmer themes (from The Rock and Gladiator) that is offered, and when the resulting theme is performed in a slow, triumphant presentation in the third minute of "One Last Shot," you even get a piece of recognizable James Horner dramatism in the last two notes of that theme. That cue is also an example of poor engineering or editing of the music, for its volume is so great that it causes distortion in a few places. Minimal distortion can also be heard in the atrocious "Swords Crossed" cue, an insufferable piece of music complete with electric guitars, which may indicate that the distortion is due to simply a bad combination of sounds rather than faulty mixing. The album, as a product, suffers from badly rearranged tracks, although it also fails to include some of the more derivative cues from the film (indeed, the score could have quoted even more Zimmer themes from the past had a lengthier album been pressed). It is difficult to recommend this score to Zimmer fans even though it is so similar to The Rock and Drop Zone in theme and style. For those people, Muppet Treasure Island is a more talented effort. It is definitely to be avoided by the vast majority of film score collectors, for it will frustrate you with its total lack of respect for the genre. Questions need to be raised about the talents of these Media Ventures artists; their unpredictability is causing them to become a shaky choice for studio producers. Media Ventures offshoot Harry Gregson-Williams, on his own, accomplished a swashbuckling score that was 20,000 leagues ahead of what Badelt and his several associates produced for Pirates of the Caribbean. The arguments of these artists, as well as anyone who might defend this work, mean nothing if they haven't compared this piece of trash to the music of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride at Disneyland. For Heaven's sake, someone, do your research! *
Insert includes no extra information about the score or film, but the names of nearly everyone involved with the project are given pirate-related nicknames. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
