This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on The Martian, BvS, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117475
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.

-----------------------

Captain America: Civil War (2016) - ***
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Halli Cauthery & Alex Belcher; score technical engineers
Victor Chaga & Maverick Dugger; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman, Andrew Kinney,
Carl Rydlund & John Ashton Thomas; conducted by Gavin Greenaway

The Winter Soldier was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117220

Half a sequel to Winter Soldier and half a third Avengers movie, the second hero vs. hero blockbuster of 2016 was much more of a critical and commercial success than BvS was. With the Russo brothers returning to helm the film, it was no surprise that Henry Jackman returned as well. The pivot away from being a pseudo-political thriller gave Jackman the opportunity to take “a different approach, more symphonic and less electronic than the second one,” which was great for those who were repelled by his intentionally distorted material for the villain of the previous film (though those elements do still show up).

Jackman had somewhat of an impossible task beyond that: score both sides of the conflict without giving away any preference, while also providing quick musical signifiers for new characters Black Panther and Spider-Man without overwhelming the narrative. He generally succeeded, providing the requisite level of large-scale orchestral energy while also tying the film together with a new descending theme of weighty tragedy. “This is Captain America’s movie. However, you don’t want to let the audience know that he’s going to win. What I ended up doing was making a Civil War theme to balance everything out. Even with that, I had to be a bit careful. There was still that danger of making it too much of a thriller or too heroic.”

The downside is that, perhaps owing to the nature of the film and not wanting to musically pick a side, large stretches of the score play like adequate but largely unmemorable ruckus. Still, one has to keep in mind that it’s very easy to focus on what these kind of multi-hero team-up movie scores DON’T do (the music eschews using an established Iron Man theme, for example - though one could point out similar issues with any of the other Avengers scores, never mind that we now have four Thor movies with four different Thor themes), and if you focus instead on what it does well you’ll find a decent hour-plus of music on album.


The Legend of Tarzan (2016) - **
Rupert Gregson-Williams; add’l music & programming by Thomas Farnon, Tony Clarke & Tom Howe;
technical score engineer James Roberson; orchestrated & conducted by Alastair King; ethnic percussion
Paul Clarvis; solo vocals Zoe Mthiyane; vocals produced by Lebo M; thank you to Hans Zimmer

TBTF discovery #26. Another year, another rush-job replacement effort for Zimmer & team.

It was surprising that the film David Yates elected to direct after supervising four straight Harry Potters was this effects-heavy Tarzan remake - and equally surprising was him choosing the relatively-unknown Bulgarian composer Mario Grigorov to do the film’s music. For reasons unknown, a supposedly fully-recorded score was tossed and Hans Zimmer & Rupert Gregson-Wililams were brought in to “save” the movie only about four months before its release date (the two had shared credit on the truly bizarre 2014 flop Winter’s Tale, though Gregson-Williams would eventually receive sole credit here). The swap didn’t salvage the film, but it still presented an intriguing opportunity for Gregson-Williams to pivot into action blockbusters, something a world away from the comedies that had defined much of his output over the last decade. “Before Tarzan I was Adam Sandler’s guy.”

Alas, the filmmakers seemed to want Rupert to provide little more than a safely predictable sound in line with past Zimmer & co. efforts, like what Lorne Balfe had done the prior year on Terminator Genisys and arguably a tradition going all the way back to what was asked of John Powell on Face/Off. The portions of Tarzan that don’t sound like Remote Control duplicates tend to be the portions that sound like Media Ventures duplicates. African instrumental and vocal additions are there but infrequent, and there is very little about the music rooting you in a specific time or place - and, sure, that last point is true of most of John Barry’s music for Out of Africa, but at least that score has distinctive themes. Rupert was more skilled than this, though his 2016 would soon morph into a year of replacements as this score was exactly what another director thought his film needed.


Hacksaw Ridge (2016) - ***
Rupert Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Anthony Clarke, Steve Mazzaro & Evan Jolly;
orchestrated by Gregson-Williams, Oscar Senén & Joan Martorell; conducted by Cliff Masterson;
technical score engineers James Roberson, Jacqueline Friedberg, Edward Underhill & Drew Conley

TBTF discovery #27.

“We didn’t want the music to sound like it belonged to a conventional war hero; he was bearing his faith and no gun. Andrew Garfield’s performance is so powerful I didn’t need to tell people how brave and special a man he was.”

This Mel Gibson-directed tale of a pacifist medic in World War II achieved decent reviews and awards consideration in late 2016 despite lingering disdain over the various scandals in Gibson’s personal life. James Horner had scored several earlier Gibson films and was slated to score this one but tragically passed away in 2015. Composer John Debney, who wrote the music for Gibson’s controversial Passion of the Christ, was brought on board in late 2015. In an interview only a month before the premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Debney spoke about putting the “finishing touches” on the music (a martial “hero theme” remains on his SoundCloud webpage), but for whatever reason his score was tossed and Rupert was brought in. Whether Gibson liked Legend of Tarzan or just liked that such sufficient music could be done so quickly is unclear.

The score ends up being structured similar to John Williams’ music for War Horse - pleasant material before the protagonist goes to war, brutal passages once he’s in the conflict, and redemptive music for the finale. That early pleasant material (”quite conventional”) finds Rupert operating in territory not dissimilar from Thomas Newman or even something his brother Harry might’ve written - warm yet subdued (the horn usage throughout is a nice touch). The war-focused midsection seems to fall squarely in the Remote Control wheelhouse of tense repeated string figures and quasi-sound design. It was a choice perhaps understandable given the nature of the film - “the sound of war was so ambitious sonically and so ambitious technically that I didn’t try and underscore that” - yet also an undeniably modern-sounding move that may come off as predictable and even anachronistic to some (never mind some brassy statements that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Bruckheimer movie). The last few tracks doubled down on stock Media Ventures / Remote Control heroism vibes, with the shakuhachi flute functioning as both a nice accent and an unintended trigger for memories of The Last Samurai.

On the whole, it’s not as if Gregson-Williams didn’t put any thought into the work; he based his “pious theme” for the character’s spirituality on something like 12th century music, wrote passages for solo cellos in unison with a bassoon “a bit higher than we would normally write for those instruments just to make [the character] feel vulnerable”, and even added his own “very high countertenor” voice singing in a some sections “which added another color.” And it was definitely a more interesting musical achievement than his replacement score from earlier in the year. Its main issue is that what’s familiar about the score is ultimately more memorable than what’s new. It’s not as if this musical lineage couldn’t write action music for older war films in a different vernacular - look at what Trevor Rabin had done with The Great Raid and Flyboys only a decade earlier - but that clearly wasn’t what Gibson wanted.

The most successful thing Rupert worked on that year wasn’t even shown in theaters…


The Crown Season 1 (2016) - ***
Rupert Gregson-Williams; main theme by Hans Zimmer; add’l music & arrangements by Lorne Balfe, Evan Jolly, Max Aruj,
Steffen Thum, Tony Clarke & Guy Farley; orchestrated by Oscar Senén & Joan Martorell; produced by Zimmer;
conducted by Johannes Vogel; digital instrument design Mark Wherry; technical score engineer James Roberson;
Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant; Andy Patterson as Gregson-Williams’ technical assistant; thanks to Paul Mounsey

TBTF discovery #28.

With House of Cards somewhat starting to lose its luster four seasons in (even before actor Kevin Spacey’s scandals), Netflix made a new bid for television prestige with its Peter Morgan-supervised show about the rise of Queen Elizabeth and the lives of those both in and around the British royal family, with the show garnering immense acclaim for its cast including John Lithgow’s magnificent single-season showing as Winston Churchill. Morgan knew Zimmer from their time working with director Ron Howard on Frost/Nixon and Rush, and Zimmer would rave to people about the scripts he’d read, but owing to his busy schedule composing as well as touring that summer (and perhaps also thinking that doing episodic television composing was a bit beneath him at that point in his career) he pulled in Rupert. “Hans said it was going to be the greatest thing on TV.” It’s also possible that this was Rupert’s third 2016 replacement score, as Paul Englishby had been announced as composer in fall 2015.

Gregson-Williams described working on the score as initially a challenge, since his instincts were to write something a little more typically English-sounding, imbuing the royals with a sense of pomposity or stuffiness, but Morgan “felt strongly that this wasn’t a royal story; it was really about these strange human beings. He wanted something edgier. I worked on themes for a good month before I wrote a cue. I hated him for it [at the time], but I loved the end result.” The music was a mix of styles, ranging from more chamber-like and austere to rhythming fluttering to passages adjacent to The Thin Red Line or The Last Samurai, with the overall musical tapestry generally adequate as background music and sometimes even elevating the show. Still, the occasional burst of Zimmeresque modern tones could overwhelm the images (Duck Shoot practically drowns an early scene in unnecessary Inception vibes), and it didn’t help matters that Zimmer’s drab title theme was a bit of a dud.

And it wasn’t even the only television score that had “main theme by Hans Zimmer” on its album cover that fall. It is now time to talk about Bleeding Fingers.


Planet Earth II (2016) - ***
Jacob Shea & Jasha Klebe; main theme by Hans Zimmer; orchestrated by Karen Tanaka & Sean Barrett;
produced by Zimmer & Russell Emmauel; conducted by Goeff Alexander; score technical engineers
Hannah Parrot, Jake Schaefer, Emmanuel El-Helou, Jared Fry & Wayne Ingram; add’l instrument design
Jake Schaefer; score consultant Monica Sonand; thank you to Satnam Ramgotra

“A lot of us grow up with David Attenborough telling us about this world. We were conscious that [his] voice was as much to the forefront as possible and [guiding] us musically, especially speaking with Hans about how to approach this. There are moments where the narration is explaining what’s happening, and the music kind of holds still, maybe a tense atmosphere to keep the soundscape uncluttered so you’re able to take in what he’s describing. [Music] has more of an impact when he’s not speaking.”

Zimmer and his business partner Steve Kofsky had originally set up Bleeding Fingers, an ancillary brand for Remote Control, as a collaboration with Russell Emmanuel and his Extreme Music production wing at Sony to create music libraries for TV miniseries and reality shows. After a few years of that, the gang got the opportunity to try out working on a nature documentary with the large-scale series Planet Earth II thanks to Emmanuel having a longtime friend at the BBC. Seasoned score fans were a tad confused why this series was supporting Zimmer’s “proof of concept” for whether his business could pivot to a new genre, as the notable British-produced nature documentaries voiced by David Attenborough in the last 15 years had tended to have expansive symphonic scores by English composer George Fenton (the original Planet Earth, as well as Blue Planet and Frozen Planet). But that choice was less a rejection of Fenton’s approach and more just that Alastair Fothergill, the chief creative force behind those earlier series, wasn’t involved as he had been leading the nature documentary unit at Disney since 2008.

“If one person was doing 10 minutes of bird scenes in one episode, the other person was getting them in the next episode. You take this bird scene, I’ll take this bird scene. Birds are always funny. Comedy music!”

As with The Crown, Zimmer would craft a theme and be in some meetings, but the bulk of the scoring was done by two associates. Jacob Shea was more of a known commodity; he’d been part of RC credits since 2007 and a frequent contributor to Steve Jablonsky’s scores. Jasha Klebe was a fresher face for many score fans. “My grandparents owned an opera house growing up. I studied piano for 15 years and later got an internship at Remote Control. I went through the path of being a studio assistant to orchestrating for Lorne Balfe to working with Hans on his films.” Shea and Klebe got into a bake-off with other Bleeding Fingers team members by doing demo scores for three scenes (not dissimilar from how Jim Dooley competed to win the SOCOM 3 gig a decade earlier), and both were chosen to co-compose.

Shea would later acknowledge there was no point in trying to duplicate Fenton’s earlier material. “George did an amazing score and there’s no way we can outpace him in orchestral brilliance. I like the music George wrote better than my own music, but you can’t out-Fenton Fenton!” So the composition ended up rotating between a variety of styles while maintaining a kind of “epic” Remote Control cinematic feel. “There’s nothing off-limits, from orchestras to synthesizers to weird instruments that are from around the world. Even incorporating sound design elements that they had recorded when out shooting animals into the score.” It was all competent yet unsurprising, and lacking that beguiling “something extra” that made Harry Gregson-Williams’ music from the prior year’s Monkey Kingdom worth returning to.

Zimmer would admit to being impressed by Attenborough’s tenacity at his age. “During the promotion, I just felt knackered all the time. I asked him whether he was going to go home and rest and it turned out he was off to do a dinosaur dig.” And the proof of concept for Bleeding Fingers would pay future dividends, not only because it set up the entity to work on a bunch of nature series in the future but also because it showed Zimmer’s team could adapt to different types of television, which gave the makers of The Simpsons an easy replacement option when they pushed longtime series composer Alf Clausen out the door the next year.

“I have friends that are very excited to watch the series and chill out. When you're high, everything sounds great, everything looks great on the series. Part of our job is to heighten the experience, whatever experience you're having.”


Jason Bourne (2016) - *½
John Powell & David Buckley; add’l music, arrangements, programming, and/or MIDI programming by
Batu Sener, Luke Richards, Logan Stahley & Anthony Willis; sound design by Michael White; orchestrated by
Geoff Lawson & Tommy Laurence; conducted by Gavin Greenaway; thank you to John Ashton Thomas

The Bourne Identity was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=108240
The Bourne Supremacy was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=108507
The Bourne Ultimatum was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=109726
Green Zone was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=111863
Captain Philips was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=116843

Powell: “[Paul’s] favorite score is Battle of Algiers. A lot of it is just a snare drum.”

This legacyquel, coming almost a decade after the supposedly conclusive Bourne Ultimatum, would reunite Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass for another tale of gritty spycraft, though sadly to diminishing returns. Composer John Powell had accidentally written influential music for the original trilogy, to the point that it was hard for him to not hear it in seemingly every other action scene on television, but he had largely stayed away from live action films over the last several years (in part ambivalent over concerns about glorifying violence but also because the music he was asked to compose for them didn’t interest him too much anymore) and hadn’t worked for Greengrass since 2010’s Green Zone, though the latter was probably for the best since he missed out on the tortured composition process for Captain Philips. It seemed at first like a welcome reunion.

Yet Powell seemed to have next to no role in the finished product. Former Harry Gregson-Williams assistant David Buckley was given a co-composing credit, only one track is solely credited to Powell, and Powell didn’t seem to participate in much (if any) press for the movie. Buckley claimed he was caught in the classic trap of a successful film with successful music making the filmmakers want to repeat that music in later ventures; heck, that had already happened on Bourne Ultimatum. “Paul said we’ve got the tunes. I did try to reinterpret things a bit, but there was a limit to how far I could stray. It wasn’t my place to resist the party line.” The end result was a disappointingly dull retread of Powell’s style without any of its heart or wilder action flair. Maybe Buckley should’ve started a Greengrass music support group with Captain Philips composer Henry Jackman.

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Next time: “We know if something's fabricated.”

> Captain America: Civil War (2016) - ***

I found this a bit disappointing. To me, this is the film where the Marvel franchise's lack of shared themes really started hurting individual films. Something like this should have referenced themes left and right, but even the most fun parts of The Winter Soldier don't manifest. It's got highlights, but also a lot of Meh. Missed potential, probably for reasons outside of Jackman's control.

> The Legend of Tarzan (2016) - **

I re-listened to this and was impressed. Not at quality, mind you, at how derivative it is. It has just nothing original to say. It's the most uninspired of post-Transformers muck, and not especially the good stuff from Transformers. How this led to other action scoring opportunities (on the merits of this work) is beyond me. I still want to hear the rejected score. That said, there are some highlights of the guilty pleasure power anthem persuasion, but this score is a solid demonstration of how an overly indulgent album presentation can sink a score. There's a 3.5-star highlights reel in here somewhere, but 1.25 hours? Forget it!

> truly bizarre 2014 flop Winter’s Tale

Kinda surprised you didn't cover this one, it's a quite lovely little score -- though something I imagine Rachel Portman could have written, and possibly better.

> Hacksaw Ridge (2016) - ***

This one I wanna hear what two scores sounded like: Horner's unrealized one and Debney's tossed one. Why Debney's got tossed astounds me, given that his chameleon abilities meant he should have delivered what RGW did (and possibly better). That said, I did enjoy this one, though it also has an overlong album. You know, sometimes you look at a work and say "I get 45-minute vibes off this one" and are irked when it's an hour-plus.

> The Crown Season 1 (2016) - ***

Haven't heard this, but heard good things (and about the show, my folks are big fans).

> Planet Earth II (2016) - ***

Much has been written on Bleeding Fingers as a brand move (it replacing Alf Clausen on The Simpsons especially stung, though I'm not sure if one should blame Zimmer or the showrunners more for that), and the absence of the elegant classical music of Fenton is sore, but I gotta admit the albums are enjoyable. (I was surprised that the pivot away from Fenton wasn't exactly a rejection as much a behind-the-scenes guard change.) Overall a fun album and not an embarrassment, but the quality doesn't really justify the change, I guess. That's a lot of words for "meh" lol.

Also, heh, love that unattributed quote. Hey, if it supports the experience!

> Jason Bourne (2016) - *½

Strongly(ish?) disagree on this one (though I suspected this rating was coming, given your prior comments). This is another case of me having a fondness for this sound, like HGW's thriller style. I can't put my finger on it, but Powell's involvement makes this better than the other Bourne backwash (call me a hopeless fan). At the same time, I was surprised to read that Powell's involvement may have been pretty marginal. To my ears, it still sounds a lot like Powell, so I guess Buckley & co. did an excellent job imitating him. I still wonder whether Powell was attached first and Buckley came on or vice versa (I tried to find what you wrote before but couldn't remember what score you provided commentary on). I know his wife, Melinda Lerner, was in poor health around this time (and died later that year), so that had to have an impact.

That is a LOT of words for a score that I would still only rate 3 stars objectively (and I personally still really enjoy it). I have nothing to really point to, other than I was just entertained for 45 minutes. Maybe it's that it *feels* special, given how rare an album with Powell's name on it is these days (even if his involvement level is debatable).

Incidentally, I hope you're going to cover Powell's oratorio!

--------------------

Love, love, love this series! Each installment is such a treat!

> Kinda surprised you didn't cover this one, it's a quite lovely little score -- though something I imagine Rachel Portman could have written, and possibly better.

The simple answer is I forgot about it.

The follow-up answer is that I probably could've snuck it in but was getting a little fatigued by lesser works at this point (note the absence of Deadpool).

Maybe it'll end up in a catch-up round with the others I didn't get to in the spring. That Thelma and Louise jewel case should be used for something other than collecting dust!

> This one I wanna hear what two scores sounded like: Horner's unrealized one and Debney's tossed one. Why Debney's got tossed astounds me, given that his chameleon abilities meant he should have delivered what RGW did (and possibly better).

It's an interesting quirk in Debney's 'chameleon' qualities as you put it: he is very good at emulating the style of others (Silvestri, Horner, maybe Williams), but he seems to rarely be asked to channel the MV / RC sound - and why would he be, when you can just hire those guys for likely less money?

At the same time, I know other composers have spoken about the challenge of getting so far down the writing rabbit hole and then having to start again from scratch. Sometimes it's just easier to bring someone else in; this is exactly what happened to Marc Shaiman on Team America.

> Much has been written on Bleeding Fingers as a brand move (it replacing Alf Clausen on The Simpsons especially stung, though I'm not sure if one should blame Zimmer or the showrunners more for that)

It was fascinating to cover The Simpsons Movie and find Alf Clausen quoted grousing about Zimmer doing the movie. Those were the good old days...

> Also, heh, love that unattributed quote. Hey, if it supports the experience!

That magnificent quote came at the end of interview Shea and Klebe did with Vice. You do have to love how the reporter basically says 'we're Vice, so we have to talk about drugs at some point'...#knowthyself

> Strongly(ish?) disagree on this one (though I suspected this rating was coming, given your prior comments).

A simpler way to justify my rating would be
a) It's not as good as Bourne Identity and I have that at ***
b) It has nothing as wild as Bim Bam Smash or even Tangiers

It's basically the Superman II of spy sequel scores.

> I still wonder whether Powell was attached first and Buckley came on or vice versa (I tried to find what you wrote before but couldn't remember what score you provided commentary on).

Never mind what I said about not being able to find any comments from Powell. There is shockingly little from Buckley on the record as well. I've only found only a few comments in a video interview with Daniel Schweiger, though it's possible he may have commented on it when doing press for The Sandman.

> Incidentally, I hope you're going to cover Powell's oratorio!

Yup. The holiday break is coming at a nice time though, as all three works on that album have write-ups in varying stages of incompleteness. That's not as much writer's block (I have made decent headway into 2017-19) as it is two things:
a. All three are decidedly atypical work in this rundown, and it's hard to figure out how to approach them
b. My wife is generally pretty tolerant of my musical interests, but she loathes the final track of the requiem (The Gift), specifically those call-and-response laments from the soloists

Nonetheless...SLACKER!

> Love, love, love this series! Each installment is such a treat!

Thanks!

> The simple answer is I forgot about it.

The film doesn't seem to exist in popular culture either! Frankly, when you're covering so many works, it would be entitled as hell to demand a minor work be included! (I do recommend it on your own time sometime if you like delicate, pretty, chilly atmospheres with a few passages of pathos, though overlong album warning.)

> The follow-up answer is that I probably could've snuck it in but was
> getting a little fatigued by lesser works at this point (note the absence
> of Deadpool).

And I forgot about Deadpool too. Frankly, you could get away with a * (that it's not a frisbee is thanks to Maximum Effort, everything else is wretched) and one-sentence review, and you're missing even less than when you decided you were done with Pereira's scores.

> It's an interesting quirk in Debney's 'chameleon' qualities as you put it:
> he is very good at emulating the style of others (Silvestri, Horner, maybe
> Williams), but he seems to rarely be asked to channel the MV / RC sound -
> and why would he be, when you can just hire those guys for likely less
> money?

That makes an astonishing amount of sense. Come to think of it, I really can't recall any score of his meaningfully channeling that sound (as in, a score that pastiches it, rather than it being a sound from the temp track). And I keep forgetting that the RC-to-the-rescue people aren't just the quick, predictable solution, but the budget one too.

> At the same time, I know other composers have spoken about the challenge
> of getting so far down the writing rabbit hole and then having to start
> again from scratch. Sometimes it's just easier to bring someone else in;
> this is exactly what happened to Marc Shaiman on Team America.

Yuuup. Rather than struggle with conflicting visions, getting someone who understands what went wrong and appreciates the time crunch makes more sense than possibly waste more time tinkering. (And Shaiman's TA:WP, that's another score I'd be interested to hear!)

> It was fascinating to cover The Simpsons Movie and find Alf Clausen
> quoted grousing about Zimmer doing the movie. Those were the good old
> days...

No clue what was coming down the line, I remember thinking when I read that lol

> That magnificent quote came at the end of interview Shea and Klebe did
> with Vice. You do have to love how the reporter basically says 'we're
> Vice, so we have to talk about drugs at some point'...#knowthyself

Heh, I missed that attribution. Know your audience!

> A simpler way to justify my rating would be
> a) It's not as good as Bourne Identity and I have that at ***
> b) It has nothing as wild as Bim Bam Smash or even Tangiers

> It's basically the Superman II of spy sequel scores.

Even as someone who hasn't heard Superman II, that makes a startling amount of sense. Indeed, I'll acknowledge that JB has no highlights approaching those. And Identity is a weird one, it's got four-star highlights with some 2-star passages. No idea what I'd average out the rating to. Ah, the curse of the fan!

> Never mind what I said about not being able to find any comments from
> Powell. There is shockingly little from Buckley on the record as
> well. I've only found only a few comments in a video interview with Daniel
> Schweiger, though it's possible he may have commented on it when doing
> press for The Sandman.

Woah, that's interesting. That really makes me wonder about what kind of atmosphere this film had. In cases like this, silence may be for the sake of civility, or not dwelling on a challenging project. I know not all scores get the publicity lap, but you'd think a major franchise of the 2000s with a major player and a composer of note would get at least one magazine profile. How bizarre.

Can't wait to read about Hubris!

Planet Earth II...A very enjoyable score but yes, completely different than George Fenton's creations. If I remember right, the mandate was to make a score that is more cinematic and movie like, which they did. Zimmer's main theme was both memorable and epic and a complete missed opportunity. I think more could be done for a theme that was supposed to represent Earth. I am interested to read what you think about Blue Planet II. I think that was a superior score to Planet Earth II in every way, including the main theme.

> This is part of a series.
> - Here’s the last post on The Martian, BvS, etc. -
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117475
> - If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or
> earlier, click on my profile.

> -----------------------

> Captain America: Civil War (2016) - ***
> Henry Jackman; add’l music by Halli Cauthery & Alex Belcher; score
> technical engineers
> Victor Chaga & Maverick Dugger; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman,
> Andrew Kinney,
> Carl Rydlund & John Ashton Thomas; conducted by Gavin Greenaway

> The Winter Soldier was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117220

> Half a sequel to Winter Soldier and half a third Avengers
> movie, the second hero vs. hero blockbuster of 2016 was much more of a
> critical and commercial success than BvS was. With the Russo
> brothers returning to helm the film, it was no surprise that Henry Jackman
> returned as well. The pivot away from being a pseudo-political thriller
> gave Jackman the opportunity to take “a different approach, more
> symphonic and less electronic than the second one,” which was great
> for those who were repelled by his intentionally distorted material for
> the villain of the previous film (though those elements do still show up).

> Jackman had somewhat of an impossible task beyond that: score both sides
> of the conflict without giving away any preference, while also providing
> quick musical signifiers for new characters Black Panther and Spider-Man
> without overwhelming the narrative. He generally succeeded, providing the
> requisite level of large-scale orchestral energy while also tying the film
> together with a new descending theme of weighty tragedy. “This is
> Captain America’s movie. However, you don’t want to let the audience know
> that he’s going to win. What I ended up doing was making a Civil
> War theme to balance everything out. Even with that, I had to be a bit
> careful. There was still that danger of making it too much of a thriller
> or too heroic.”

> The downside is that, perhaps owing to the nature of the film and not
> wanting to musically pick a side, large stretches of the score play like
> adequate but largely unmemorable ruckus. Still, one has to keep in mind
> that it’s very easy to focus on what these kind of multi-hero team-up
> movie scores DON’T do (the music eschews using an established Iron Man
> theme, for example - though one could point out similar issues with any of
> the other Avengers scores, never mind that we now have four
> Thor movies with four different Thor themes), and if you
> focus instead on what it does well you’ll find a decent hour-plus of music
> on album.
>
>
> The Legend of Tarzan (2016) - **
> Rupert Gregson-Williams; add’l music & programming by Thomas
> Farnon, Tony Clarke & Tom Howe;
> technical score engineer James Roberson; orchestrated & conducted by
> Alastair King; ethnic percussion
> Paul Clarvis; solo vocals Zoe Mthiyane; vocals produced by Lebo M; thank
> you to Hans Zimmer

> TBTF discovery #26. Another year, another rush-job replacement effort for
> Zimmer & team.

> It was surprising that the film David Yates elected to direct after
> supervising four straight Harry Potters was this effects-heavy
> Tarzan remake - and equally surprising was him choosing the
> relatively-unknown Bulgarian composer Mario Grigorov to do the film’s
> music. For reasons unknown, a supposedly fully-recorded score was tossed
> and Hans Zimmer & Rupert Gregson-Wililams were brought in to “save”
> the movie only about four months before its release date (the two had
> shared credit on the truly bizarre 2014 flop Winter’s Tale, though
> Gregson-Williams would eventually receive sole credit here). The swap
> didn’t salvage the film, but it still presented an intriguing opportunity
> for Gregson-Williams to pivot into action blockbusters, something a world
> away from the comedies that had defined much of his output over the last
> decade. “Before Tarzan I was Adam Sandler’s guy.”

> Alas, the filmmakers seemed to want Rupert to provide little more than a
> safely predictable sound in line with past Zimmer & co. efforts, like
> what Lorne Balfe had done the prior year on Terminator Genisys and
> arguably a tradition going all the way back to what was asked of John
> Powell on Face/Off. The portions of Tarzan that don’t sound
> like Remote Control duplicates tend to be the portions that sound like
> Media Ventures duplicates. African instrumental and vocal additions are
> there but infrequent, and there is very little about the music rooting you
> in a specific time or place - and, sure, that last point is true of most
> of John Barry’s music for Out of Africa, but at least that score
> has distinctive themes. Rupert was more skilled than this, though his 2016
> would soon morph into a year of replacements as this score was exactly
> what another director thought his film needed.
>
>
> Hacksaw Ridge (2016) - ***
> Rupert Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Anthony Clarke, Steve Mazzaro
> & Evan Jolly;
> orchestrated by Gregson-Williams, Oscar Senén & Joan Martorell;
> conducted by Cliff Masterson;
> technical score engineers James Roberson, Jacqueline Friedberg, Edward
> Underhill & Drew Conley

> TBTF discovery #27.

> “We didn’t want the music to sound like it belonged to a conventional
> war hero; he was bearing his faith and no gun. Andrew Garfield’s
> performance is so powerful I didn’t need to tell people how brave and
> special a man he was.”

> This Mel Gibson-directed tale of a pacifist medic in World War II achieved
> decent reviews and awards consideration in late 2016 despite lingering
> disdain over the various scandals in Gibson’s personal life. James Horner
> had scored several earlier Gibson films and was slated to score this one
> but tragically passed away in 2015. Composer John Debney, who wrote the
> music for Gibson’s controversial Passion of the Christ, was brought
> on board in late 2015. In an interview only a month before the premiere at
> the Venice Film Festival, Debney spoke about putting the “finishing
> touches” on the music (a martial “hero theme” remains on his
> SoundCloud webpage), but for whatever reason his score was tossed and
> Rupert was brought in. Whether Gibson liked Legend of Tarzan or
> just liked that such sufficient music could be done so quickly is unclear.

> The score ends up being structured similar to John Williams’ music for
> War Horse - pleasant material before the protagonist goes to war,
> brutal passages once he’s in the conflict, and redemptive music for the
> finale. That early pleasant material (”quite conventional”) finds
> Rupert operating in territory not dissimilar from Thomas Newman or even
> something his brother Harry might’ve written - warm yet subdued (the horn
> usage throughout is a nice touch). The war-focused midsection seems to
> fall squarely in the Remote Control wheelhouse of tense repeated string
> figures and quasi-sound design. It was a choice perhaps understandable
> given the nature of the film - “the sound of war was so ambitious
> sonically and so ambitious technically that I didn’t try and underscore
> that” - yet also an undeniably modern-sounding move that may come off
> as predictable and even anachronistic to some (never mind some brassy
> statements that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Bruckheimer movie).
> The last few tracks doubled down on stock Media Ventures / Remote Control
> heroism vibes, with the shakuhachi flute functioning as both a nice accent
> and an unintended trigger for memories of The Last Samurai.

> On the whole, it’s not as if Gregson-Williams didn’t put any thought into
> the work; he based his “pious theme” for the character’s
> spirituality on something like 12th century music, wrote passages for solo
> cellos in unison with a bassoon “a bit higher than we would normally
> write for those instruments just to make [the character] feel
> vulnerable”, and even added his own “very high countertenor”
> voice singing in a some sections “which added another color.” And
> it was definitely a more interesting musical achievement than his
> replacement score from earlier in the year. Its main issue is that what’s
> familiar about the score is ultimately more memorable than what’s new.
> It’s not as if this musical lineage couldn’t write action music for older
> war films in a different vernacular - look at what Trevor Rabin had done
> with The Great Raid and Flyboys only a decade earlier - but
> that clearly wasn’t what Gibson wanted.

> The most successful thing Rupert worked on that year wasn’t even shown in
> theaters…
>
>
> The Crown Season 1 (2016) - ***
> Rupert Gregson-Williams; main theme by Hans Zimmer; add’l music &
> arrangements by Lorne Balfe, Evan Jolly, Max Aruj,
> Steffen Thum, Tony Clarke & Guy Farley; orchestrated by Oscar Senén
> & Joan Martorell; produced by Zimmer;
> conducted by Johannes Vogel; digital instrument design Mark Wherry;
> technical score engineer James Roberson;
> Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant; Andy Patterson as Gregson-Williams’
> technical assistant; thanks to Paul Mounsey

> TBTF discovery #28.

> With House of Cards somewhat starting to lose its luster four
> seasons in (even before actor Kevin Spacey’s scandals), Netflix made a new
> bid for television prestige with its Peter Morgan-supervised show about
> the rise of Queen Elizabeth and the lives of those both in and around the
> British royal family, with the show garnering immense acclaim for its cast
> including John Lithgow’s magnificent single-season showing as Winston
> Churchill. Morgan knew Zimmer from their time working with director Ron
> Howard on Frost/Nixon and Rush, and Zimmer would rave to
> people about the scripts he’d read, but owing to his busy schedule
> composing as well as touring that summer (and perhaps also thinking that
> doing episodic television composing was a bit beneath him at that point in
> his career) he pulled in Rupert. “Hans said it was going to be the
> greatest thing on TV.” It’s also possible that this was Rupert’s third
> 2016 replacement score, as Paul Englishby had been announced as composer
> in fall 2015.

> Gregson-Williams described working on the score as initially a challenge,
> since his instincts were to write something a little more typically
> English-sounding, imbuing the royals with a sense of pomposity or
> stuffiness, but Morgan “felt strongly that this wasn’t a royal story;
> it was really about these strange human beings. He wanted something
> edgier. I worked on themes for a good month before I wrote a cue. I hated
> him for it [at the time], but I loved the end result.” The music was a
> mix of styles, ranging from more chamber-like and austere to rhythming
> fluttering to passages adjacent to The Thin Red Line or The Last
> Samurai, with the overall musical tapestry generally adequate as
> background music and sometimes even elevating the show. Still, the
> occasional burst of Zimmeresque modern tones could overwhelm the images
> (Duck Shoot practically drowns an early scene in unnecessary
> Inception vibes), and it didn’t help matters that Zimmer’s drab
> title theme was a bit of a dud.

> And it wasn’t even the only television score that had “main theme by Hans
> Zimmer” on its album cover that fall. It is now time to talk about
> Bleeding Fingers.
>
>
> Planet Earth II (2016) - ***
> Jacob Shea & Jasha Klebe; main theme by Hans Zimmer; orchestrated
> by Karen Tanaka & Sean Barrett;
> produced by Zimmer & Russell Emmauel; conducted by Goeff Alexander;
> score technical engineers
> Hannah Parrot, Jake Schaefer, Emmanuel El-Helou, Jared Fry & Wayne
> Ingram; add’l instrument design
> Jake Schaefer; score consultant Monica Sonand; thank you to Satnam
> Ramgotra

> “A lot of us grow up with David Attenborough telling us about this
> world. We were conscious that [his] voice was as much to the forefront as
> possible and [guiding] us musically, especially speaking with Hans about
> how to approach this. There are moments where the narration is explaining
> what’s happening, and the music kind of holds still, maybe a tense
> atmosphere to keep the soundscape uncluttered so you’re able to take in
> what he’s describing. [Music] has more of an impact when he’s not
> speaking.”

> Zimmer and his business partner Steve Kofsky had originally set up
> Bleeding Fingers, an ancillary brand for Remote Control, as a
> collaboration with Russell Emmanuel and his Extreme Music production wing
> at Sony to create music libraries for TV miniseries and reality shows.
> After a few years of that, the gang got the opportunity to try out working
> on a nature documentary with the large-scale series Planet Earth II
> thanks to Emmanuel having a longtime friend at the BBC. Seasoned score
> fans were a tad confused why this series was supporting Zimmer’s “proof of
> concept” for whether his business could pivot to a new genre, as the
> notable British-produced nature documentaries voiced by David Attenborough
> in the last 15 years had tended to have expansive symphonic scores by
> English composer George Fenton (the original Planet Earth, as well
> as Blue Planet and Frozen Planet). But that choice was less
> a rejection of Fenton’s approach and more just that Alastair Fothergill,
> the chief creative force behind those earlier series, wasn’t involved as
> he had been leading the nature documentary unit at Disney since 2008.

> “If one person was doing 10 minutes of bird scenes in one episode, the
> other person was getting them in the next episode. You take this bird
> scene, I’ll take this bird scene. Birds are always funny. Comedy
> music!”

> As with The Crown, Zimmer would craft a theme and be in some
> meetings, but the bulk of the scoring was done by two associates. Jacob
> Shea was more of a known commodity; he’d been part of RC credits since
> 2007 and a frequent contributor to Steve Jablonsky’s scores. Jasha Klebe
> was a fresher face for many score fans. “My grandparents owned an opera
> house growing up. I studied piano for 15 years and later got an internship
> at Remote Control. I went through the path of being a studio assistant to
> orchestrating for Lorne Balfe to working with Hans on his films.” Shea
> and Klebe got into a bake-off with other Bleeding Fingers team members by
> doing demo scores for three scenes (not dissimilar from how Jim Dooley
> competed to win the SOCOM 3 gig a decade earlier), and both were
> chosen to co-compose.

> Shea would later acknowledge there was no point in trying to duplicate
> Fenton’s earlier material. “George did an amazing score and there’s no
> way we can outpace him in orchestral brilliance. I like the music George
> wrote better than my own music, but you can’t out-Fenton Fenton!” So
> the composition ended up rotating between a variety of styles while
> maintaining a kind of “epic” Remote Control cinematic feel. “There’s
> nothing off-limits, from orchestras to synthesizers to weird instruments
> that are from around the world. Even incorporating sound design elements
> that they had recorded when out shooting animals into the score.” It
> was all competent yet unsurprising, and lacking that beguiling “something
> extra” that made Harry Gregson-Williams’ music from the prior year’s
> Monkey Kingdom worth returning to.

> Zimmer would admit to being impressed by Attenborough’s tenacity at his
> age. “During the promotion, I just felt knackered all the time. I asked
> him whether he was going to go home and rest and it turned out he was off
> to do a dinosaur dig.” And the proof of concept for Bleeding Fingers
> would pay future dividends, not only because it set up the entity to work
> on a bunch of nature series in the future but also because it showed
> Zimmer’s team could adapt to different types of television, which gave the
> makers of The Simpsons an easy replacement option when they pushed
> longtime series composer Alf Clausen out the door the next year.

> “I have friends that are very excited to watch the series and chill
> out. When you're high, everything sounds great, everything looks great on
> the series. Part of our job is to heighten the experience, whatever
> experience you're having.”
>
>
> Jason Bourne (2016) - *½
> John Powell & David Buckley; add’l music, arrangements,
> programming, and/or MIDI programming by
> Batu Sener, Luke Richards, Logan Stahley & Anthony Willis; sound
> design by Michael White; orchestrated by
> Geoff Lawson & Tommy Laurence; conducted by Gavin Greenaway; thank you
> to John Ashton Thomas

> The Bourne Identity was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=108240
> The Bourne Supremacy was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=108507
> The Bourne Ultimatum was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=109726
> Green Zone was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=111863
> Captain Philips was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=116843

> Powell: “[Paul’s] favorite score is Battle of Algiers. A lot of
> it is just a snare drum.”

> This legacyquel, coming almost a decade after the supposedly conclusive
> Bourne Ultimatum, would reunite Matt Damon and director Paul
> Greengrass for another tale of gritty spycraft, though sadly to
> diminishing returns. Composer John Powell had accidentally written
> influential music for the original trilogy, to the point that it was hard
> for him to not hear it in seemingly every other action scene on
> television, but he had largely stayed away from live action films over the
> last several years (in part ambivalent over concerns about glorifying
> violence but also because the music he was asked to compose for them
> didn’t interest him too much anymore) and hadn’t worked for Greengrass
> since 2010’s Green Zone, though the latter was probably for the
> best since he missed out on the tortured composition process for
> Captain Philips. It seemed at first like a welcome reunion.

> Yet Powell seemed to have next to no role in the finished product. Former
> Harry Gregson-Williams assistant David Buckley was given a co-composing
> credit, only one track is solely credited to Powell, and Powell didn’t
> seem to participate in much (if any) press for the movie. Buckley claimed
> he was caught in the classic trap of a successful film with successful
> music making the filmmakers want to repeat that music in later ventures;
> heck, that had already happened on Bourne Ultimatum. “Paul said
> we’ve got the tunes. I did try to reinterpret things a bit, but there was
> a limit to how far I could stray. It wasn’t my place to resist the party
> line.” The end result was a disappointingly dull retread of Powell’s
> style without any of its heart or wilder action flair. Maybe Buckley
> should’ve started a Greengrass music support group with Captain
> Philips composer Henry Jackman.

> -----------------------

> Next time: “We know if something's fabricated.”

Great work as always! Seriously, you could write a book on this topic given the immense amount of research you’ve done. I’ve noticed a recurring theme in your posts: an up and coming or unknown composer writes a score for a movie/tv show. Things don’t work out. Hans Zimmer and his team at Remote Control are called in to save the day. I’m guessing the reason for this is that the composers at RC involve multiple people working on one project at a time therefore they’re able to turn in a score in a faster and what they produce, for good or bad, is more in line with what a “modern” blockbuster sounds like. Any other thoughts on this?

> Great work as always! Seriously, you could write a book on this topic given the immense amount of research you’ve done. I’ve noticed a recurring theme in your posts: an up and coming or unknown composer writes a score for a movie/tv show. Things don’t work out. Hans Zimmer and his team at Remote Control are called in to save the day. I’m guessing the reason for this is that the composers at RC involve multiple people working on one project at a time therefore they’re able to turn in a score in a faster and what they produce, for good or bad, is more in line with what a “modern” blockbuster sounds like. Any other thoughts on this?

It's a great question - and it would be interesting to review all of the known instances once the rundown's completed. I'd imagine there are probably some differences when an 'established' composer gets replaced versus someone else.

The speed element you mentioned is important. The team has proved that in a month you can get something sufficient, which works if the actual music isn't working as well as if the film / show isn't working and the filmmakers just said 'F it, let's change the music and see if that helps.' Game of Thrones certainly embodies this.

I think hiring an MV / RC crew removes an element of randomness to a certain extent. It's predictable. You may not have wanted that sound in your movie originally, but at least you know what you're gonna get, something you cannot say about the test-and-learn / trial-and-error process you just went through with your first composer. I imagine this is what happened with Terminator Genisys.

A lot of these re-scores involve someone with a pre-existing Zimmer / RC relationship, and that isn't always the same person who made the original composer decision. This is probably what happened on The Crown and way earlier on Point of No Return, which I believe was the first replacement score by this musical lineage ever. And it's actually what happened on a replacement score in 2017.

Of course, there also is the one major case of a Zimmer score getting mostly rejected. But we're months away from me posting about that one.