To be honest, I thought that this score was a wonderful improvement over Batman Begins, which I consider to be one of the biggest let-downs I've ever heard. In the original, I felt that the 2-note theme was very childish, and even more-so when you notice that only twice in the entire film did the chord actually change when that second note hit. I also thought that Howard's gorgous work was not allowed to really develop and I truly would love to hear what he would have done with the action stuff. Now, I just got out of the theater after finally seeing the movie and thought that the score did a wonderful job of not... trying so hard to attract attention to itself. Within the movie, it seemed effective. The James Newton Howard moments, while still much more sparing than I'd like, are still brilliant. On top of that, Hans actually took some time to play with previous material instead of doing a verbatum cut and paste when quoting it, and that's one thing I've been waiting for him to do for a while. While I don't consider this score to be "great" by any means, it is much better than I expected.