This is part of a series (a long-running series at this point).
- The last post covering 2005-12 is here - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113153
- The 2005-2012 rankings are here - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113226
If you want the full set of links, click on my profile.
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We come at last to the fourth (and probably final) era of my rundown of the works of Hans Zimmer, his alumni, and their collaborators - following Zimmer’s early days (up to mid-1994), the Media Ventures era (1994-2004), and the initial Remote Control years (2005-2012). It will be almost as hard to expediently listen to all the major works from this crew in this era (2013-2022) as it was to coin a catchy name for the timeframe, and the subsequent overview reflects in part my struggles with that.
These nine years would give us a transformed entertainment landscape. 2013 would inaugurate the age of streaming as the DVD rental company Netflix pivoted into creating original series, and in the years to come Hulu, HBO, Disney, and a host of other providers (remember Quibi?) would start producing an astonishing amount of content for their own platforms. Studios became more likely to only produce films for traditional theatrical distribution if they were “sure things”, and a sure thing almost always meant a name director, pre-existing intellectual property, or an existing franchise, the latter exacerbated by the runaway success of The Avengers and Disney’s acquisition of Star Wars. The midsize dramas and comedies that had been how Zimmer had broken into Hollywood in the late 80s and early 90s were a thing of the past, at least if you wanted to see them in a movie theater. The new landscape would also somewhat marginalize Zimmer’s longtime collaborator Jerry Bruckheimer, who would oversee fewer films than he had in the prior decade, some of them enormously successful but one a Waterworld-sized turkey.
The legacy MV / RC crowd would move in a variety of directions. Harry Gregson-Williams and John Powell would start this period on sabbatical. Harry would intriguingly add nature documentaries to his output after he returned, while Powell would actually take a second sabbatical for another year to work on concert music and tend to be very selective about the future projects he did, though with four of those being among my favorite 100 scores ever it’s hard to argue with the results. Harry’s brother Rupert would still do boatloads of Adam Sandler movies, but also write music for two of the biggest superhero movies of the era.
Trevor Rabin would record his first solo album in almost 20 years but otherwise largely step away from film music, while former bandmate Mark Mancina would make the most of a chance to return to the limelight even with the stress of it making him pass out at one point. Henry Jackman would keep balancing adventure and animation jobs with contemporary thriller ones. Steve Jablonsky would continue working with Michael Bay and Peter Berg on blockbusters, though several of his more recent efforts were intriguing deviations from his established style. And Geoff Zanelli would finally get to captain a Pirates of the Caribbean score, though his inheritance of another franchise arguably produced more impressive results.
Director and showrunner relationships would drive many of Zimmer’s most prominent assignments: regular collaborators Christopher Nolan and Ron Howard and new collaborators Steve McQueen and Denis Villeneuve, plus a reunion with Rain Man director Barry Levinson. But that wasn’t a trend unique to him; consider all the work done between Jackman and the Russo brothers, Jackman’s team and Matthew Vaughan, Jablonsky and Bay / Berg, Powell and Dean DeBlois / Chris Sanders, Gregson-Williams and Antoine Fuqua, and so on. Meanwhile, many below-the-line contributors from the last era would start to get their own gigs or significant co-composition credits: Lorne Balfe and Tom Holkenborg most notably, but also Benjamin Wallfisch & Steve Mazzaro (usually Zimmer collaborators), Matthew Margeson & Dominic Lewis (Jackman), Max Aruj (Balfe), Batu Sener (Powell), and Harry Gregson-Williams’ former assistants Stephen Barton, Toby Chu, and Stephanie Economou.
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This musical lineage would be more significant on television than it was in the prior era. Ramin Djawadi would remain on Game of Thrones as it became one of the biggest (and most-pirated) shows in the world, while Trevor Morris would stay in the historical realm with Vikings. Atli Örvarsson would re-team with producer Dick Wolf on NBC’s Chicago Fire as well as several later spinoff series, while Blake Neely’s work on the first season of the CW superhero show Arrow would lead to him overseeing a team of composers covering a sprawling “Berlantiverse” of DC series as well as the network’s campy Riverdale. Jim Dooley and James S. Levine would do shows ranging from Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story franchise to TNT’s The Last Ship.
And Zimmer would start up a subsidiary within Remote Control called Bleeding Fingers, which originally focused more on unscripted television but eventually drifted into new territory for the brand: animated series (replacing Alf Clausen on The Simpsons) and nature documentaries (namely the resurrection of the Blue Planet / Planet Earth brand, which in the past had received more traditional orchestral scores from George Fenton). I thought about calling this the Bleeding Fingers era in the original post that started this all, but that doesn’t seem appropriate. In the prior eras there was a clear separation in corporate names. But Remote Control was still around in this era! So…back to the drawing board…
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In the wake of the awards success of the music Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross wrote for The Social Network, more filmmakers and showrunners started to seek out nontraditional composer choices. Think the indie rock band Arcade Fire for Her, the classically trained experimental pop musician Mica Levi for Under the Skin, the German pianist Hauschka for Lion, and the electronic band Survive for Stranger Things. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been pop artists entering film scoring before - Oingo Boingo’s Danny Elfman, Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh, and, heck, Zimmer himself! But those guys had to varying extents adapted their talents to film scoring norms. The new entrants weren’t being asked to do something classically orchestral or even tuneful. They were doing stuff that was more experimental, electronic, even intentionally abrasive.
Running concurrent with this was more filmmakers being increasingly inclined to want music that blurred the line with sound design, something that Zimmer had probably kicked into overdrive with The Dark Knight and Inception and that had really become more pronounced in summer 2012 with the MRI sounds in Jablonsky’s Battleship. Jokes about the prominence of BWAAAAAAM gave way to a new term: the “drone score”, meaning music that was almost entirely averse to melody and was instead grounded in abstraction, processing, and sustained waves of sound. The score fans who had been repelled by the typical sound of Remote Control and its imitators in the prior seven years would find much of this era to be a gut punch, especially as famed melodic composer James Horner (of Titanic fame) would tragically pass away in the middle of this era.
My second hypothesis on what to call this era was something like the “processed” era. That seems unfair. Sure, some of the material by Zimmer, his alums, and his collaborators would certainly align with those trends, and even continue to push them further (Winter Soldier looms large, as does the drum-heavy Mad Max sequel). But there were plenty of exceptions to that. Reliable animation jams. Throwback orchestral action music. A more “traditional” live action superhero score overseen by Zimmer. And even Star Wars music that…sounded like actual Star Wars music! So…back to the drawing board…
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Perhaps celebrity is the best way to brand the era. Think of how video and social media revolutionized how personalities were marketed and discussed, and how Zimmer became a savvy operator in this new environment. “Career breakdown”-type interviews with actors became popular, so of course he did one of those for Vanity Fair. “How this works” videos like Wired’s Technique Critique also picked up tons of views, so we saw plenty of behind-the-scenes featurettes on the compositional process, including a bunch of recording sessions footage Warner Bros’ released for Man of Steel and the recent deep dives on world music instruments used in the promotional push to get Zimmer an Oscar for Dune. Zimmer would film a series of classes on film scoring for the virtual learning company MasterClass, and even drop a film music playlist on TikTok in 2022.
And the celebrity element would extend beyond cyberspace. As film music concerts started to become more commonplace, Zimmer would take his hits on the road, but in a rock band format that seemed to solve some of the challenges he’d had during his Ghent concert in 2000. It became even more important for Zimmer to have collaborators he could hand off suites or ideas to, not only because of how much work was still coming his way but also because he seemed to spend so much dang time on tour.
It felt like almost every Zimmer score released during this time was greeted with significant media attention and fawning praise from reliable corners of the internet, regardless of whether it was a great work, a stylistic retread, or just…like…noise. One could imagine a world where Zimmer banged an out-of-tune tuning fork for two hours and got multiple film critics to say it was an audacious inversion of typically manipulative film music (arguably this is what the success of the music of Dunkirk felt like for some folks). Many older or more “traditionalist” score fans started to feel a huge disconnect between the type of music they preferred and the type of music that was extensively covered and up for awards considerations.
Zimmer stans were often quick to defend the man’s output, including early on with Man of Steel, and the resulting disagreements would seem to cause schisms in certain corners of film music fandom, including right here on this message board. The snarkiness would extend to Zimmer himself, as he would on a few occasions unleash rather caustic comments from his Facebook profile, one of which was so hostile it nearly made a longtime score reviewer quit his beloved hobby. None of this did anything to slow down the runaway freight train of success ZImmer was riding.
So, welcome, dear reader, to the beginning of the Too Big To Fail era.
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G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013) - **
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Dominic Lewis, Matthew Margeson & Tom Holkenborg;
add’l arrangements by Stephen Hilton & Andrew Kawczynski; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman,
Andrew Kinney & Larry Rench; conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith; technical score engineers Alex Belcher,
Ben Robinson, Jason Soudah, Christian Vorlaender & Victoria De La Vega; guitars Joe Perry, Alex Belcher
& Daniel Pinder; ethnic strings George Doering; ethnic winds Pedro Eustache & Chris Bleth; thank you to Hans Zimmer
TBTF discovery #1.
“With G.I. Joe, everyone accepts that it’s not the place to display your ‘John Williams chops.’ [It] doesn’t always have to do with harmonic or melodic complexity—it’s to do with sounds and synths. Imagine fusing The Chemical Brothers with orchestra.”
Ostensibly a sequel to the 2009 live action adaptation of Hasbro’s toy franchise but more like a reboot given that earlier film’s reception, Retaliation was delayed from mid-2012 to early 2013 so it could be retooled. The end result still didn’t appease critics but would prove relatively successful at the box office. Adherence to composer Alan Silvestri’s earlier score was not mandated, no great loss as it wasn’t among his better efforts, and so the sequel became an opportunity for Henry Jackman to apply his edgier production skills to his First Class action style. Jackman clearly had fun playing around with percussive rhythms, but despite a few fun Eastern-inflected passages the score largely played like contemporary action music folks had heard plenty of times before. Most score reviewers hated it at the time, though today the album comes off as anonymous rather than offensive.
This is the End (2013) - ***
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Dominic Lewis; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman; conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith;
score technical engineers Victor Chaga, Vivian Aguiar-Buff, Antonio Andrade & Ryan Robinson
Actor Seth Rogen and producing partner Evan Goldberg would make their directorial debut with this successful horror comedy about movie stars (all playing warped versions of themselves) trapped in a house during the apocalypse. Most scary movies from this era had music more akin to sound design, but for this Jackman was asked to be “as grand and pompous as possible, semi-highbrow, the stuff you can never do on a modern horror film. Even though it was a comedy, because it had an apocalyptic element it was sort of gothic and symphonic and was peeling a leaf from The Exorcist and The Omen.” The result (playing the music straight to amplify the comedy) was a fun pastiche that mixed nastiness and religious glory to appropriate effect.
Turbo (2013) - **½
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Halli Cauthery & Paul Mounsey; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman,
Andrew Kinney & John Ashton Thomas; conducted by Gavin Greenaway; score technical engineers
Victor Chaga, Vivian Aguiar-Buff, Antonio Bruno & Alex Williams
TBTF discovery #2.
Dreamworks’ movie about a snail with superspeed would sputter out of the gate and end up being the studio’s biggest underperformer in a decade (since either Sinbad or Road to El Dorado). It would at least provide an opportunity for Jackman to follow up Wreck-It Ralph with another animated assignment that mixed orchestra with more electronic experiments. “There’s a cultural expectation of a symphony in an animated film, but what was cool about Turbo was the invitation to get rock, breakbeats, electronica, dubstep, and other things in there.” The result was adequately rousing if also decidedly less distinctive than Jackman’s last two animated works - neither of its two themes are earworms (earsnails?) - though intriguingly it did show Jackman pulling some of his action music mannerisms from live action films into an animated setting.
Jackman’s early film career had been in large part defined by Dreamworks, with supporting roles on Bee Movie and Kung Fu Panda leading into primary roles on Monsters vs. Aliens and Puss in Boots, but this would actually be the last animated feature he would work on for the studio, though he would contribute to the first episode of the companion Netflix series Turbo F.A.S.T. before largely handing off responsibilities to Halli Cauthery (previously of Harry Gregson-Williams’ team).
Captain Philips (2013) - *
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Al Clay & Jack Dolman; featured violin Ann Marie Calhoun;
featured percussion Satnam Ramgotra; score technical engineer Alex Belcher; thank you to
Hans Zimmer, Jasha Klebe, Victor Chaga, Vivian Aguiar-Buff, Beth Caucci & Jason Soudah
TBTF discovery #3.
Bourne sequel director Paul Greengrass would helm this acclaimed thriller about Tom Hanks’ ship captain and the Somali pirates that take over his vessel. Greengrass had collaborated with John Powell on his prior four films, but given Powell’s increasing disinterest with live action scoring and ongoing sabbatical (as well as rumors that Green Zone had been a challenging collaboration) it was unsurprising that the director sought out a new composer. Jackman would describe the assignment as a learning process. “His ideal scenario is when music is denuded of narrative information. A drone, a pulse, whatever the limits of minimalism are. Instead of Winston Churchill, it’s monosyllables. I like doing more virtuosic music, but nothing would ruin that movie more than the classic heroes theme. Paul was adamant that none of that could fly.”
Significant rewrites were needed to meet Greengrass’ demands, with Jackman’s former boss Hans Zimmer (and team member Jasha Klebe) even stepping in at one point. Much of the score’s first half would only be a step up from ambient noise, mirroring Harry Gregson-Williams’ Phone Booth in that by not deviating much between various forms of background haze the music failed to indicate any kind of escalating tension. One could shuffle almost all the tracks at random and perceive no difference in the listening experience. But at least that score had the ultra-cool Times Square track. What the heck did this have?
The volume levels would occasionally rise for screechy BWAMs, menacing bass pulses, and fairly derivative Remote Control action rhythms in the second half of the film. The final nail in the coffin was a finale that transparently resurrected Zimmer’s famed Time and Journey to the Line tracks. Amazingly, Greengrass had found a way to ask even less of a composer than he had of John Powell on United 93. The score proved the same point I raised in my bit on First Class about film composers being at the mercy of their collaborators’ preferences, though here that point was stretched to ludicrous speed (it’s gone plaid).
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Next time: “It's a little bit like standing naked on a cold day on the beach in front of the most beautiful girl.”
