This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Widows, Mortal Engines - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119665
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.

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

How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019) - *****
John Powell; add’l music & arrangements by Batu Sener, Anthony Willis & Paul Mounsey; orchestrated
by John Ashton Thomas; Tommy Laurence, Geoff Lawson, Andrew Kinney, Randy Kerber, Jon Kull &
Rick Giovinazzo; orchestra conducted by Gavin Greenaway; choir conducted by Eric Whitacre;
bagpipes by the Red Hot Chilli Pipers; add’l drum programming Satnam Ramgotra; ‘Together
From Afar’ written and performed by Jónsi; dedicated to Melinda Lerner & Oliver Powell

HTTYD was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=112368
HTTYD 2 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117220

Director Dean DeBlois: “The clearest way John works came to me on this film. He’d play tunes that didn’t belong to any one sequence. It’s not driven by the imagery, but by a larger thematic sense, which comes through John’s prism. He understands the story in a different way than I do and draws his own throughlines which work as harmonies with what I’m dealing with on the surface level.”

The final How To Train Your Dragon film flew into theaters in early 2019, giving John Powell a chance to complete what the entertainment website Polygon later referred to as my generation’s version of the music of the original Star Wars trilogy. Far less of its runtime is taken up by new takes on existing themes than was the case in How To Train Your Dragon 2 (about as perfectly balanced between old and new as a sequel score can get), so perhaps there may be some disappointment for certain listeners. Some of this was a function of mid-production changes to the story in the wake of the commercial underperformance of Kung Fu Panda 3; DeBlois would say “Jeffrey felt it was because it didn’t do enough new, so he said we need to jettison a lot of slavish continuity.” But Powell ended up feeling it was merited given the new adventures the characters were going on. “That was one of the big things: how are we going to make this big, difficult transition together? If I’d over-indulged in the existing themes, I don’t think I would have got quite the value out of them. It was frustrating not being able to use the [first film’s] romance music more, but it was the right decision.”

And there was a more personal dimension also influencing Powell’s approach. “I did the first one, and then my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer on the day I was nominated [for an Oscar]. And she was going through a hell of an ordeal on the second one. I think the first one’s the most joyful. The second one’s hunkering down and dealing with difficult stuff. The third one’s my most reflective score. What was important was to write material that allowed the story to move forward.”

Powell would produce a plethora of delightful new themes including one for the community’s journey to a new home, a sinister idea for the new villain, a majestic melody for the titular hidden world, and a theme for the romance between Toothless and a female Night Fury dragon, plus a secondary flirtation / mating idea that Powell would cheekily refer to as the “sex riff.” There is more of the magnificent large-scale action / adventure material that folks had come to love about the franchise and was still about as far away from typical Mickey Mousing animated music as one could get. And, as with the first film’s famed Forbidden Friendship portion, Powell had to contend with another dialogue-free scene that ended up creating a highlight musical sequence. “Third Date really kind of killed me. The animators did such a wonderful job with the pantomime of that scene. I had to work to make sure the music matched that quality. They had temped it with Forbidden Friendship, but we didn’t get the exciting sense of love. This was more about the jitters of sex. What if it was just a little more light on its feet?”

Unlike the aforementioned original Star Wars trilogy, where all three scores are considered great but Empire Strikes Back is the runaway favorite among score fans, there is a remarkable lack of consensus about which of the three Dragon scores is the finest. There are folks like me who love the mix of past & present in How To Train Your Dragon 2 the best and others who are more partial to that initial dose of amazement in the first score, but there seem to be just as many who find the new delights of the third to be the most impressive, not just those themes but also the layered choral material conducted by Eric Whitacre and the weird vocal contributions by Jónsi in one track. “There’s certainly choir in the first two, but in the interceding years I had written a whole album of choral music. The choir is a great shortcut for a bonded society, a feeling of togetherness [and] interaction with your neighbors.” And even if you thought the music of The Hidden World was the least of the three, it was still better than 99% of everything else.

DeBlois: “Oftentimes we think something will work in a sequence and it doesn’t. He played a tune for me that I loved, and I’m sure it’ll appear in another John Powell score in the future.”

Another dragon-centric series would end only a few months later.


Game of Thrones Season 8 (2019) - ****
Ramin Djawadi; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman & Andrew Kinney; technical score advisors
William Marriott & Garret Reynolds; thank you to Hans Zimmer & Brandon Campbell

Season 1 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=112891
Season 2 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113090
Season 3 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117113
Season 4 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117220
Season 5 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117381
Season 6 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117611
Season 7 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=118953

Hans to Ramin in 2018: “Binging Game of Thrones saved my life on the [tour] bus at night. Recording ostinatos on Batman, that’s nothing compared to what you’ve been up to. It floors me how you kept this complex structure going. Suddenly putting a piano in - I noticed [you’re] trying to tell me something! And it completely translated to someone as idiotic as me, who to this day does not remember the characters’ names.”

The final season of Game of Thrones wouldn’t require a lot of new melodic material; as with season 7, the show was converging all its disparate storylines into one final spectacle, so Ramin Djawadi was mainly tasked with revisiting legacy themes in new guises (often with great success). The opening piece of music in the first episode of the season would even mirror the music of the first episode of the show, with the House Baratheon theme announcing troops heading for Winterfell just as we’d heard eight years earlier, though now the theme of an accompanying army would be used in clever counterpoint. The final episode’s music would be largely sparse and dour, though the solo cello writing in the penultimate track The Last of the Starks was a fitting farewell to the concept, even if it lent some unintended credence to Hans’ joke from the prior year that Ramin had “been making a living off one solo cello.”

Most of what was new to the score would be centered around the midseason Battle of Winterfell. As the carnage mounted, the music for the dimly lit siege chaos played less like fantasy and more like John Carpenter filtered through the world of Hans Zimmer. By leaning into director Miguel Sapochnik’s view that it was an hour of survival horror akin to Assault on Precinct 13, Ramin ended up having to deal with challenges that Hans had encountered two years earlier on Dunkirk. “I've used electronic elements in the show, but not to this extent before. It was a real struggle. Whenever it became too orchestral it felt too safe, so David and Dan kept asking for the music to be more abstract and weird. I spent three times as much time writing this one compared to the other ones to constantly have the tension rising and then to reset to create a little bit of hope, like our heroes can maybe defeat the Night King.”

And Ramin would morph some small motifs used in the battle into The Night King, a lengthy piece occupying the final stretch of the episode that gave off hints of the composer’s work on the last two seasons of Westworld and was a transparent attempt to duplicate the success of the biggest musical moment of season 6. “This was an opportunity to have a big piano piece, and we wanted to call back to Light of the Seven. I end[ed] up in the same key and tempo. But I also [wrote it knowing] when the piano drops people would sit up and see the Night King on his final march towards Bran, and you'd think back to the Cersei theme and that this is all going his way and all of our heroes are going to die — this is it. But it has the reverse effect at the end.” Even if the piece wasn’t quite the equal of Light of the Seven, it was still remarkable that Ramin’s role had evolved from often having to stay out of the way of the dialogue to writing music that was in-your-face and meant to carry scenes, if not entire episodes.

I could also use the word remarkable to describe Djawadi’s career ascent during the airing of this show. He’d entered the 2010s as a somewhat unknown Remote Control graduate with a few successes but also with a resume chock-full of sound design scores and additional writing credits. By 2019 he was a composer with a distinctive voice and evolved compositional chops, one who was now writing some of the most widely-recognized original scores (I’ve had family members who don’t listen to scores go “that’s Game of Thrones!”) and was also viewed with respect even by those film music fans who had questioned his last-minute replacement assignment on Thrones in 2011, an opportunity that Ramin had almost declined due to his overlapping film commitments at the time. Never mind that Thrones had come from HBO, a network whose best-known dramas (The Sopranos, The Wire) lacked original scores!

Ramin was understandably emotional as the final season was airing. “I definitely feel sad. I won’t be writing or expanding on those themes anymore. [But] I feel very lucky that I've been part of this. It's been unbelievable.”


Penguins (2019) - ****
Harry Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Stephanie Economou; orchestrated by Alastair King;
conducted by Gregson-Williams; drums programmed by Satnam Ramgotra

Monkey Kingdom was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117475

TBTF discovery #62.

Alastair Fothergill and Disneynature would once again enlist the services of Harry Gregson-Williams, this time to provide music for their nature documentary film about (surprise) penguins which Harry had once described as “bloody cute.” Harry’s charming score would be alternatingly playful and noble, with one of his themes containing minor but intriguing similarities to his main theme from The Martian (both start with two pairs of ascending notes), probably coincidental but still suggesting similarities between the films in terms of characters stranded in vast deserts. In a way, Harry was tasked to provide emotions that the birds couldn’t express themselves. “Alastair said that the thing about penguins is that they can’t smile. They don’t have the muscles in their cheeks. So the music [is] going to do a lot of the smiling for them in this picture.”

Orchestra and choir would be backed by ethnic woodwinds, a few quirky elements including an upright bass and a saxophone ensemble, and a spot of whistling to somewhat kowtow to the filmmakers putting his famed Chicken Run music in part of this film’s temp track. “Quite intimidating, because I remember the amount of sweat and blood that John [Powell] and I put in to get to that spot many years ago. Now, no one was sitting there saying, ‘We want you to do this.’ It was a good indication of the place I could go.” There are even hints of the magic of his Narnia scores at times. The whole package made for a lovely companion piece to his earlier Monkey Kingdom.

Harry’s brother would also provide music for an icy story later in the year…


Abominable (2019) - ***
Rupert Gregson-Williams; add’l music & arrangements by Evan Jolly, Sven Faulconer & Forest Christenson;
orchestrated by Alastair King & Gregson-Williams; orchestra conducted by King; choir conducted by Ben Parry

Bee Movie was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=109726

TBTF discovery #63. Note: this is not to be confused with Lalo Schifrin’s music for the 2006 film Abominable that his son directed, which is one of the nastiest orchestral scores of the aughts (in a good way).

This Dreamworks co-production saw its director fired and rehired and its Chinese partner studio change ownership during its development process, with the end result limping into theaters and giving the studio its most underwhelming performer since perhaps Flushed Away. But it was at least a welcome reunion for the studio and Rupert, who had contributed to several Dreamworks scores in the 90s and the aughts but hadn’t been on any of their films since his delightful music for 2007’s Bee Movie. There are moments of wonder and some nice regional instrumental additions (and possibly throat singing), but it largely played like spare parts from earlier fantasy works by the Gregson-Williams brothers mixed with the usual bustling house style for Dreamworks animation scores.

In between those two aforementioned films came a rare collaboration between the Gregson-Williams brothers…


Catch-22 (2019) - ***½
Harry Gregson-Williams & Rupert Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Evan Jolly,
Stephanie Economou & Tom Howe; orchestrated by Simeon Edward & George Strezov;
conducted by Strezov; technical score engineer Forest Christenson

TBTF discovery #64.

Harry: “Rupert has the jazz gene in our family, if anybody does. (Laughs) Definitely not me.”

George Clooney & Grant Heslov would be the latest gang to attempt an adaptation of Joseph Heller’s satirical war novel, with most critics thinking they certainly fared better than MIke Nichols on his flawed and commercially disastrous 1970 film version. For Harry and Rupert, the miniseries represented an opportunity to finally collaborate on a score, something the brothers had been looking for over the last several years. “Catch-22 was produced and (largely) directed by two people. Why not have two composers?”

A unique demand of this score was having a main theme that was malleable enough to traverse all the elements of the story. The guys would later call it a “bloody strange beast. There’s the time period, the early 1940s during the first World War, and there’s quite a bit of humor in there. It takes you from the depths of despair to joy and triumph then back to despair again. Finding the right tone was our biggest challenge. When we came to the project, there was a piece from Hacksaw Ridge that George [liked] – the tone of it was quite austere, and it had a certain emotion going, but it wasn’t right in the face. He made that quite clear that he didn’t want us to be too overt emotionally to begin with.”

The brothers would eventually settle on an angular theme which could function in a variety of settings and eventually “be beaten into submission.” Once they cracked the code on how to put it into a jazz arrangement (needed to both fit with the era and blend with a few needle-dropped songs, and also to represent the character’s mounting insanity), Clooney would apparently start dancing around the room. The score ends up sounding remarkably coherent despite the many disparate elements at play.

The brothers would jointly work in Harry’s studio on some material but would largely retreat to their own studios to co-write the entire thing. “We divided the work up so that we weren’t writing the same cue. George [let] us know one of the cues [Harry did] didn’t quite nail the middle part. There was a cue that Rupert had written for a previous episode, which they had liked, and we actually discovered that if we were to use some of that material in the middle of the cue we’d be on a winner.” In promotional interviews the brothers would act like the process was seamless, though in an interview done two years later (with another family co-composition on the horizon) Rupert would say it was more of a challenge than they’d let on, especially since they weren’t always on the same continent. “It was tricky. He [often] wanted to go one way and I wanted to go the other. We thought we might fall over, but we didn’t.”

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

Next time: “I always treat these books as steampunk.”

(Message edited on Saturday, February 4, 2023, at 7:35 a.m.)

> Henry Gregson-Williams

Ah, the long-lost third cousin of the Gregson-Williamses, finally making a return. Or debut, no-one really knows for sure.

> Ah, the long-lost third cousin of the Gregson-Williamses, finally making a return. Or debut, no-one really knows for sure.

Damn! Fixed.

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

> How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019) - *****

Repeat my 100-star freakout from HTTYD2. This is a very special movie to me, despite its flaws (the massive retooling late in development resulted in some obvious seams, but it's mostly a fitting send-off), because I saw it in theaters with my dad. He and I are both massive fans of the franchise, and of Powell's music for them.

This score is just... No words. In my mind, Powell and his team's work stand breast-to-breast with the all-time greats of film music (perhaps orchestral music EVAR), and in my most breathless moments, I would declare them to surpass Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Obviously not my ~professional~ opinion, but hey, I'm a fan

I think if I was told, gun to head, to pick a best score from this trilogy, I'd just cry lol. They're all amazing and have unique strengths. They really do form a complete symphony. HTTYD3's choral work is stunning, and Whitacre's contributions remind me that I *really* need to explore more of his stuff.

> Game of Thrones Season 8 (2019) - ****

Djawadi's music for this series is incredible. I mean, it's not that it's the best music composed for television or anything (though it holds its own), but as you said, how he went from being subdued and out of the way to commanding attention with his themes is incredible. You may or may not care for his style (I am the former), but his music commands respect. Iron Man couldn't seem farther away.

> Penguins (2019) - ****

Wonderful little score, and the Chicken Run rip came off as a cute easter egg. I don't remember a massive amount about this one, but it was a demonstration that he could still do this style. (Nature docs tend to bring out the best in composers.)

> Abominable (2019) - ***

I'd bump this up a star for the melodic emotional bits. A lot of this is sorta standard DW style, but he really taps into something beautiful at several key moments, summoning a haunting call (my words don't work so good this morning). The film's an underrated gem too, in my opinion.

> Catch-22 (2019) - ***½

Haven't heard, and from your description, it sounds really interesting. It's funny that they downplayed the difficulty of working together!

> Next time: “I always treat these books as steampunk.”

Again, no idea what this could be, but the quote makes me curious!

I'm looking forward to seeing what you pick and choose from the pandemic years, given that notability seemed to go out the window with theaters closing. (It feels profoundly wrong for 2020 to be treated as a historical study now...)

> I'm looking forward to seeing what you pick and choose from the pandemic years, given that notability seemed to go out the window with theaters closing. (It feels profoundly wrong for 2020 to be treated as a historical study now...)

The answer is almost everything.

Probably can't treat the pandemic years as a monolith either. There's a whole batch of scores that had all or nearly all of their work done before the pandemic lockdowns began but didn't get releases until later in 2020, 2021, or amazingly 2022 in one case as Zimmer said in an interview that his score for The Survivor was done in 2019.

The dividing line for my purposes will likely be opining on anything composed and recorded pre-pandemic and released in 2020 (there are around a dozen of those) - then everything else.

> This is part of a series.
> - Here’s the last post on Widows, Mortal Engines -
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119665
> - If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or
> earlier, click on my profile.

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

> How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019) - *****
> John Powell; add’l music & arrangements by Batu Sener, Anthony
> Willis & Paul Mounsey; orchestrated
> by John Ashton Thomas; Tommy Laurence, Geoff Lawson, Andrew Kinney, Randy
> Kerber, Jon Kull &
> Rick Giovinazzo; orchestra conducted by Gavin Greenaway; choir conducted
> by Eric Whitacre;
> bagpipes by the Red Hot Chilli Pipers; add’l drum programming Satnam
> Ramgotra; ‘Together
> From Afar’ written and performed by Jónsi; dedicated to Melinda Lerner
> & Oliver Powell

It seems like I'm on the same page as you with this series. 2 is my favorite score of the trilogy, and 3 is 3rd, but still 5 stars with some fantastic highlights. I'd also say the third film is the weakest of the trilogy, but still good.

Probably the two biggest factors with the third film for me are a villain that's a bit too similar in motivation to the second film, and I wish they had done more to show some growth in Hiccup's companions. I get that they're the comic relief, but I look back at Harry Potter as an example of how that series was able to not only mature the main trio, but the other students as well. Small complaints, in what is otherwise a good film and in my top 5 animated film series.

The quote about HTTYD being this generations Star Wars trilogy of scores seemed a bit odd to me. It's not that far from Lord of the Rings or the Star Wars prequels, which I think several score fans would hold in similar regard.

>
>
> Game of Thrones Season 8 (2019) - ****
> Ramin Djawadi; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman & Andrew Kinney;
> technical score advisors
> William Marriott & Garret Reynolds; thank you to Hans Zimmer &
> Brandon Campbell

Fantastic score and possibly some of Ramin's best work. To me, the highlights from the last few season of this series is better than anything from Rings of Power, one of the reasons I struggled to understand some of the praise for that score.

> Ramin was understandably emotional as the final season was airing. “I
> definitely feel sad. I won’t be writing or expanding on those themes
> anymore. [But] I feel very lucky that I've been part of this. It's been
> unbelievable.”

Well, that quote didn't age well since he returned to score House of the Dragon lol.

> Abominable (2019) - ***
> Rupert Gregson-Williams; add’l music & arrangements by Evan Jolly,
> Sven Faulconer & Forest Christenson;
> orchestrated by Alastair King & Gregson-Williams; orchestra conducted
> by King; choir conducted by Ben Parry

Almost forgot that I saw this film. 3 stars seems about right.

> Catch-22 (2019) - ***½

Somehow this film and score completely escaped my attention at the time of release.

> Fantastic score and possibly some of Ramin's best work. To me, the
> highlights from the last few season of this series is better than anything
> from Rings of Power, one of the reasons I struggled to understand some of
> the praise for that score.

Well, I would very much disagree with that - McCreary is flat out a better composer. Djawadi even at his best is still writing very simplistic music, and McCreary simply has a greater range of capabilities within his wheelhouse. There's far more color and variety in the music for the single season of Rings of Power than there is in nine seasons and counting of Djawadi's music for Westeros.

> Well, I would very much disagree with that - McCreary is flat out a better
> composer. Djawadi even at his best is still writing very simplistic music,
> and McCreary simply has a greater range of capabilities within his
> wheelhouse. There's far more color and variety in the music for the single
> season of Rings of Power than there is in nine seasons and counting
> of Djawadi's music for Westeros.

In terms of composition and complexity, I'm in agreement with you that McCreary has certainly proven to have more range. To me, color and variety aren't quite as important as emotional resonance, and that's where I feel Djawadi's highlights from GoT is better for me.

Obviously I know it's not exactly a fair comparison since one has a whole series and the other is just one season, but it was just an observation.

> In terms of composition and complexity, I'm in agreement with you that
> McCreary has certainly proven to have more range. To me, color and variety
> aren't quite as important as emotional resonance, and that's where I feel
> Djawadi's highlights from GoT is better for me.

> Obviously I know it's not exactly a fair comparison since one has a whole
> series and the other is just one season, but it was just an observation.

I think you said it. Game of Thrones has better emotional resonance and better hightlights. But I think Rings of Power has better music overall.

> How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019) - *****

> The final How To Train Your Dragon film flew into theaters in early
> 2019, giving John Powell a chance to complete what the entertainment
> website Polygon later referred to as my generation’s version of the music
> of the original Star Wars trilogy.

That's got to be LOTR, no? Unless the extra decade pushes it into a new generation?

> And, as with the first film’s famed Forbidden
> Friendship portion, Powell had to contend with another dialogue-free
> scene that ended up creating a highlight musical sequence. “Third Date
> really kind of killed me. The animators did such a wonderful job with the
> pantomime of that scene. I had to work to make sure the music matched that
> quality. They had temped it with Forbidden Friendship, but we didn’t get
> the exciting sense of love. This was more about the jitters of sex. What
> if it was just a little more light on its feet?”

> Unlike the aforementioned original Star Wars trilogy, where all
> three scores are considered great but Empire Strikes Back is the
> runaway favorite among score fans, there is a remarkable lack of consensus
> about which of the three Dragon scores is the finest.

I see a lot of debate between 1 and 2, but not many claiming 3 to be the best. For me, 3 sits unambiguously in third place, and 2 is the best complete score, even if 1 has some of the greatest highlight moments.

> There are folks like me who love the mix of past & present in How To Train
> Your Dragon 2 the best and others who are more partial to that initial
> dose of amazement in the first score, but there seem to be just as many
> who find the new delights of the third to be the most impressive, not just
> those themes but also the layered choral material conducted by Eric
> Whitacre and the weird vocal contributions by Jónsi in one track.
> “There’s certainly choir in the first two, but in the interceding years
> I had written a whole album of choral music. The choir is a great shortcut
> for a bonded society, a feeling of togetherness [and] interaction with
> your neighbors.”

Kind of mind-boggling to think what Powell's implying he could've done with choir in the first two. 2 was already doing amazing stuff in its own right. I wonder what he might've done with the additional experience and chops had he had them earlier.

> Penguins (2019) - ****

> Monkey Kingdom was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117475

We'll see how you feel about Polar Bear, but I think I'd rank PB and Penguins about even (3.5-ish) and Monkey Kingdom a step below (3). Penguins has the best themes, personality, and highlights, while PB is the most consistent.

Putting this and MK a half-star below the magnum opus that is Narnia is...well, I have to guess there's some star-rating nuance pulling them further apart than that.

> Orchestra and choir would be backed by ethnic woodwinds, a few quirky
> elements including an upright bass and a saxophone ensemble, and a spot of
> whistling to somewhat kowtow to the filmmakers putting his famed
> Chicken Run music in part of this film’s temp track. “Quite
> intimidating, because I remember the amount of sweat and blood that John
> [Powell] and I put in to get to that spot many years ago. Now, no one was
> sitting there saying, ‘We want you to do this.’ It was a good indication
> of the place I could go.” There are even hints of the magic of his
> Narnia scores at times. The whole package made for a lovely
> companion piece to his earlier Monkey Kingdom.

I maintain that 'Spring Break' is among his career-best cues. The build from that utterly goofy main theme, to rendering that theme in 'embarking on a adventure' mode and then as a full-blown fanfare, to that quintessentially HGW climax with the theme turned into a noble line on woodwinds, supported by churning strings and brass counterpoint. It's one of the few moments in his nature doc trilogy that seems to have offered a real dramatic storytelling opportunity. I've got to track down the scene someday to see how it works.

> Catch-22 (2019) - ***½

> A unique demand of this score was having a main theme that was malleable
> enough to traverse all the elements of the story. The guys would later
> call it a “bloody strange beast. There’s the time period, the early
> 1940s during the first World War, and there’s quite a bit of humor in
> there. It takes you from the depths of despair to joy and triumph then
> back to despair again. Finding the right tone was our biggest challenge.
> When we came to the project, there was a piece from Hacksaw Ridge
> that George [liked] – the tone of it was quite austere, and it had a
> certain emotion going, but it wasn’t right in the face. He made that quite
> clear that he didn’t want us to be too overt emotionally to begin
> with.”

> The brothers would eventually settle on an angular theme which could
> function in a variety of settings and eventually “be beaten into
> submission.'

The theme is the highlight of the score - very Newman-esque in its melody and occasionally instrumentation, especially in 'Basecamp at Dawn' - but the rest of the score didn't do much for me.

I've never heard them confirm in either case, but I'd bet that Harry composed the main themes for both this and The Gilded Age. They bear his fingerprints much more than Rupert's, though I'm more familiar with the former.

> That's got to be LOTR, no? Unless the extra decade pushes it into a new generation?

The literal language they used was 'How the How to Train Your Dragon trilogy wound up with the most thrilling music since Star Wars', which was perhaps some power-tagged headline work on their part (i.e., an intentional overstatement).

> I see a lot of debate between 1 and 2, but not many claiming 3 to be the best. For me, 3 sits unambiguously in third place, and 2 is the best complete score, even if 1 has some of the greatest highlight moments.

I have no scientific evidence to support this, just my hazy memories from a few years ago.

> We'll see how you feel about Polar Bear, but I think I'd rank PB and Penguins about even (3.5-ish) and Monkey Kingdom a step below (3). Penguins has the best themes, personality, and highlights, while PB is the most consistent.

I seem to be trending 1 to 1.5 stars above you on these. I went back and forth between what rating to give Penguins, though funny enough I liked Monkey Kingdom a tad more. But there's a sense of adventure, lyricism, and occasional harmonic sophistication in the HGW nature scores that seems to get me every time and that tends to be lacking in the Bleeding Fingers nature works. They're not, like, Planet Earth or Tale of a Lake, but they're only a tier or so below those.

> Putting this and MK a half-star below the magnum opus that is Narnia is...well, I have to guess there's some star-rating nuance pulling them further apart than that.

Low-end 4 star vs. high-end 4.5 star. If I didn't use half stars, the first Narnia would probably get the full 5.

> of the original Star Wars trilogy. Far less of its runtime is taken
> up by new takes on existing themes than was the case in How To Train
> Your Dragon 2 (about as perfectly balanced between old and new as a
> sequel score can get), so perhaps there may be some disappointment for
> certain listeners.

For me the best parts of How to Train Your Dragon 3 ARE the new themes and the fresh new places Powell takes the music tonally. Like Powell said, this score is more calm and contemplative compared to its predecessors, which was the right tone for this bittersweet final chapter. Some of the themes, particularly the new themes for Berk, are more complicated and less iconic than previous themes, but this goes well with how the culture of Berk has matured since movie #1. And as usual Powell constantly develops and reiterates upon these themes, so they still manage to linger in your memory. The "Furies in love" theme and "sex" riff, however, are a stroke of genius; I particularly love how part of "Furies in love" is directly reminiscent of Hiccup and Astrid's love theme, specifically the first few bars.

It's when the score does the big re-recordings of old themes where I feel it's a step down from 1 and 2; it honestly seems less like an orchestration or performance issue as it is a recording/mixing issue. Those prominent, pounding layers of percussion that defined the first two scores are now VERY muted, and the album overall is strangely quieter and less punchy-sounding. The main/flying theme in the finale cues "As Long as He's Safe" and "Once There Were Dragons" doesn't have quite the same luster it previously had. Maybe the Deluxe Edition album coming next year will improve on this.

> Unlike the aforementioned original Star Wars trilogy, where all
> three scores are considered great but Empire Strikes Back is the
> runaway favorite among score fans, there is a remarkable lack of consensus
> about which of the three Dragon scores is the finest. There are
> folks like me who love the mix of past & present in How To Train
> Your Dragon 2 the best and others who are more partial to that initial
> dose of amazement in the first score, but there seem to be just as many
> who find the new delights of the third to be the most impressive, not just
> those themes but also the layered choral material conducted by Eric
> Whitacre and the weird vocal contributions by Jónsi in one track.

That all being said, this is still magnificent fantasy music! It still has that amazing tapestry of old tunes and some great new tunes and new, beautiful tones as well. While I don't think there's THAT much contention over the ranking of 3 - seems like most film music nerds consider it third-best - I do think there's some contention over HOW distant a third place it is. I personally flip-flop between giving The Hidden World 5 or 4.5 stars because while I do think it's lesser than the first two 5-star scores (which are more like scale-breaking, "6-star" masterpieces), it's still better crafted and more engaging than most film music. So does Dragon 3 deserve a 5-star rating because my nitpicks only keep it from being "better-than-perfection", or are those nitpicks enough to dock half a point over? I tend to lean towards 5 stars, but I'm still not sure.