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| • | Newest Major Reviews: | . | • | This Week's Most Popular Reviews: | • | Best-Selling Albums: | ||
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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) |
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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you want to hear half a dozen of Zimmer's usual gang produce African war music that is short on coherent theme but long on instrumentation. Avoid it... if the prospect of Lebo M's performances being the highlight of the album makes you shudder. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
The majority of the dozen or so national critics who blasted Zimmer's score in Tears of the Sun did so because it was "distracting" or "irritating." For those who have heard Black Hawk Down and The Power of One and are trying to imagine a rough combination of the two, it would be easy to hear how such a pairing would be tricky to handle. Zimmer pulls it off, but at the expense of risking a score that is practical rather than impressive. If one was to determine why Zimmer's scores have been become more elaborate works of art recently, rather than the simple, functional film scores he built his career on, the conclusion could easily be reached that Zimmer is simply trying too hard to be stylish. You can't force style into a film score; it is something that will flow naturally out of a strong composition with the right instrumentation. And yet, Zimmer pulls out all the stops to feature top international voices, several of his best Media Ventures colleagues, huge instrumental ensembles, rock band elements, and obscure ethnic instrumentation in arrays that no human has heard before. The culmination of this immense effort is a score that overwhelms in its size and occasionally its passion, but lacks a central heart or spirit. The frustration for Zimmer fans in cases like Tears of the Sun is seeing Zimmer go to such extraordinary lengths as a musical director of all these efforts, just to hear an aimless score in the end. When all is said and done, Zimmer's coordination of magnificently edited sound couldn't save the film from being a theatrical disappointment, or even save himself from scathing criticism in the context of that film. From the perspective of the album, Zimmer's work is a more cohesive one than Black Hawk Down. You still get the feeling that a different person is writing each track (which, in this case, is nearly true), and thus, a truly consistent mood is absent. The score has some horrific cues that are barely listenable and several additional cues at a level of minimalism below anything heard in The Thin Red Line. These juxtaposed styles, with instrumentation switching between the cues, causes the much of the score on album to be difficult to follow. The saving element, ironically, is Lebo M, whose co-written cues with Zimmer at the end ("Cameroon Border Post" and "Kopano Part III") provide some excellent, intense action music and a pleasant (though endlessly repeating) song that we'll likely hear at Zimmer concerts for years to come. These final two cues are more simple and powerful compositions by Zimmer --not stretched by the need for that extra creativity-- and they are among the best of Zimmer's work in this decade. The score finally shows its heart and character at then end, and while it saves the album from mediocrity, it can't pull the first three-quarters of the score up to its level. The "stylish" Zimmer is slowly replacing the raw talent we once heard in the ten years previous to Tears of the Sun, and one wishes that he would simply relax, drop the endless cameo appearances by other artists, and write a solid, singular score with cohesion for a major motion picture. In the meantime, Tears of the Sun provides an example of an overachieving score that stumbles over its own massive ensemble of artists. ***
Insert includes the lyrics by Lebo M, extensive credits, and a list of performers. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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