This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Mad Max, Home, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117381
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.

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The Little Prince / Le Petit Prince (2015) - ***½
Hans Zimmer & Richard Harvey; add’l music by Ed Buller, Dominic Lewis, Nathan Stornetta,
Czarina Russell & Benjamin Wallfisch; add’l programming by Dave Fleming; orchestrated by Harvey,
Adam Langston, Philip Klein, Stephen Coleman & Andrew Kinney; conducted by Thomas Bowes;
digital instrument design Mark Wherry; songs by Zimmer, Stornetta, Camille & Clément Ducol;
music consultant Nick Glennie-Smith; accordion Graham Preskett; ‘Suis-moi’ acoustic guitar Heitor Pereira;
woodwind solos Richard Harvey; music wrangler Bob Badami; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant

This feature film adaptation of the famous novella had a troubled release history, namely getting its U.S. theatrical release abruptly cancelled owing to financial disagreements between American and European producers and resulting in the film getting dumped on Netflix over a year after it came out in France - though the turbulence did nothing to dent the largely stellar reception it received from critics. With its director having previously overseen Kung Fu Panda, there was little surprise that composer Hans Zimmer would be along for the ride, though in this case he would give a co-composition credit to his old friend, sometime contributor, former provider of free studio space, and occasional supplier of MV/RC talent Richard Harvey.

“Hans had a good experience with John Powell on the Panda movies. John, like me, comes from a classical background, and Hans felt it was time to collaborate with someone else, but not someone who was completely new. And we’ve always said we don’t work together enough. He said to Nick Glennie-Smith, ‘Why don’t we work on this,’ and Nick said, ‘Why don’t you get Richard involved,’ and in the end Nick quietly backed out and just left us to get on with it, which was incredibly selfless.”

The work would end up feeling like two halves sewn together, with one part featuring charming songs by Zimmer and the French singer Camille Dalmais (all could’ve fit comfortably in any of Zimmer’s easy-going aughts comedies) and the other part closer to the whimsical fantasy sounds of James Newton Howard or Patrick Doyle. “They wanted a different approach that felt like art acceptable to France and Germany and Canada (where there’s a strong affiliation with the book) and fit with the magical realism. The original discussions involved French classical music, and even French film music. It’s like I was brought in as the classical specialist, and Hans looked after the songs.” The two moods never quite congealed, but they made for a wholly pleasant hour of music with a few standout passages. It was about as far from the bustling Dreamworks “house style” of music as you could get.

“Bob Badami is the greatest little referee. Anyone with talent can produce a minute of great music, but to create a score that takes time standing back from it. You may think you wrote the best theme of your life. ‘Hey buddy, save it for your next movie.’ Bob watches the whole film twice a day, he tries things, he moves things around. He’s gotta be the best score wrangler in town.”

Fun fact: Zimmer’s co-composer on 1995’s Something To Talk About played the accordion here.


Monkey Kingdom (2015) - ****
Harry Gregson-Williams; orchestrated by Ladd McIntosh; score arranger Stephanie
Economou; cello & electric cello by Martin Tillman; electric violin by Hugh Marsh

This entry in Disney’s ongoing April-released series of nature documentaries focused on monkeys (duh) in Sri Lanka. Harry Gregson-Williams was a surprise composer choice, though he relished the chance to score a film that his kids could watch (it’s unlikely family movie night at Harry’s household would include Domino). It gave him the opportunity to do his own spin on the South Asian/orchestral fusion sound that Thomas Newman had been doing a few years prior in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, mixed in with some of the playfulness from his children’s scores of the aughts as well as his established affinity for woodwind solos. The resulting score was a serene joy, and an intriguing adaptation of Gregson-Williams’ style to a new genre.

This would be the first credited compositional appearance of Gregson-Williams’ then-assistant and future Assassin's Creed Valhalla expansion releases composer Stephanie Economou, whom Harry met at a performance he did at UCLA.


The Martian (2015) - ****
Harry Gregson-Williams; also orchestrated by Alastair King & David Butterworth;
possible uncredited add’l arrangements by Anthony Willis & Stephanie Economou

Easily the best film Ridley Scott had directed in at least a decade, this adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel about an astronaut using his ingenuity to escape being stranded on Mars was a smash critical and commercial success. After using Harry Gregson-Williams for some last minute clean-up duties on both Prometheus and Exodus: Gods and Kings, Scott would finally ask the composer to write him a full score again (the two had last collaborated in full on Kingdom of Heaven, one of the finest scores of the prior decade even with Scott somewhat mangling its application in his theatrical and director’s cuts). “He did not spell out in musical terms where he wanted me to go. But he knows what he wants from his film. So if I were to write something that was too active, he would jump on that. He talks in terms of tone, shade, color. We didn’t need a darkness to Mars. That was counterproductive. It’s clear that if he puts a foot wrong it’ll kill him. Not to say that we didn’t make [the music] austere and threatening in places, but ‘majesty’ and ‘mystery’ are the adjectives Ridley used.”

Large stretches of what Gregson-Williams wrote for The Martian are close to the sound palette that Harry often provided for the films of Ridley’s brother Tony, albeit without the aggressive tone and wilder experimentalism that often defined those works. It’s a smaller-scale mix of acoustic and electronic sounds at times, but it’s extremely appropriate in context, reflecting how intimate and human-centric the film often is, and also subtly aligning with all the science stuff going on. The richly textured environment (far beyond standard loops and thumps) was also fairly engaging on the corresponding album; for lack of a better term, it just sounded cool. The main theme proves extraordinarily versatile, and Gregson-Williams takes it through darn near every instrumental section by the end of the film. And the few moments that the score goes big and unleashes a more symphonic backing are astoundingly effective.

A somewhat daunting element was the vast number of preexisting songs deployed in the film, a function of the script more than anything else. “The commander left behind her laptop, on which [our protagonist Mark] finds a bunch of music. He’s quite happy until he finds out it’s a bunch of 70’s music which he can’t stand. It wasn’t specified in the script that ‘this will be a David Bowie song’ or whatever. Ridley, the film editor, myself, and producers from Fox said ‘let’s try this or let’s try that’. There are many scenes in this movie that are quite bleak but the music could be quite bleak and it could work. Some moments were up for interpretation. There’s a great moment in the film where there’s a Bowie song playing out of which I needed to seamlessly come out of source music into score. My music cue had a very different purpose than what we just heard, but I needed to be in the right key and the right tempo and then we could leave it behind us.”

The strong score was a testament to the value of Gregson-Williams taking that year-long sabbatical, and it was a genuine surprise that the film’s success didn’t lead to greater awards consideration for Harry’s music.


13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016) - **½
Lorne Balfe; technical score engineers Max Aruj & Steffen Thum; electronic music programming
Clay Duncan, Kevin Lamb & Michael Tuller; digital instrument design; Mark Wherry; orchestrated by
Oscar Senén & Joan Martorell; conducted by Robert Ziegler; score technical assistants Joseph Cho &
Sydney Harrison; electric cello Peter Gregson; score production coordinator Kelly Johnson; executive
music production & synth programming by Hans Zimmer; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant

TBTF discovery #25.

“Movies that I would sit as a young teenager and look at were films like Bad Boys or The Rock. Sometimes I wish I could be telling you that it's a black and white Italian movie but it's not. Con Air and all these movies were what made me want to get into film and if Crimson Tide is on the television, that's me for the next two hours. I'm not leaving.”

After nearly a decade of largely focusing on effects-heavy blockbusters, director Michael Bay would decide that Pearl Harbor wasn’t enough and opt for doing another adaptation of military history. But whereas that prior film was a romanticized period piece, 13 Hours would be a guy-heavy depiction of modern warfare, specifically the events surrounding a recent attack on the American embassy in Libya. Surprisingly, Bay’s longtime composer Steve Jablonsky wasn’t along for the ride, the why not being particularly clear (though with Jablonsky having several films come out in late 2015 and the first half of 2016 the issue could have just been availability). Balfe would claim he got the job after Hans recommended him when talking to Bay about ideas, and he was possibly a known commodity already given his additional music contributions to other instances of Bayhem.

Balfe’s score has the requisite hybrid acoustic/electronic action - thumps, repeated string rhythms, and whatnot - but there’s a surprising amount of music that feels more textural, closer to early-stage Djawadi works or possibly a more abstract take on parts of Black Hawk Down. “The music needed to reflect the complex feelings the guys were dealing with. We stuck with more simple electronic soundscapes. Peter Gregson brought his electric cello and we created the feelings of isolation and abandonment that the men had to deal with.” It didn’t make for the most distinctive music, but it was a step up from the sometimes hysterically derivative material that Bay had usually demanded of Jablonsky to support Autobots and Decepticons.


Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016) - ****
Hans Zimmer; score production and new Father & Son theme by Lorne Balfe;
‘I’m So Sorry’ by Imagine Dragons; add’l music by Paul Mounsey; add’l arrangements by
Stephen Hilton & Nathan Wang; score technical engineers Chuck Choi, Stephanie McNally,
Max Aruj & Steffen Thum; orchestrated by Oscar Senén & Joan Martorell; orchestra conducted
by Gavin Greenaway; London choir conducted by Matt Dunkley; China choir conducted by Eric Whitacre;
piano solos by Lang Lang; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant, thank you to Germaine Franco & Kelly Johnson

Kung Fu Panda was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=111559
Kung Fu Panda 2 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113009

Zimmer: “The Dark Knight movies took 10 years. That’s a chunky part of life. It’s the same for the Panda movies. I need to treat each one as autonomous. On this one I had free reign to call up Chinese musicians and just experiment.”

The third time wasn’t quite the charm for the longstanding franchise, with this entry doing decent but unexceptional business in early 2016 and essentially ending Dreamworks’ grand plans for six movies (six!), though that didn’t stop the company from cranking out three subsequent seasons of related content on Netflix. Hans Zimmer was tagged as the sole composer, with co-composer of the previous entries John Powell no longer involved (its production may have overlapped with his second sabbatical, though rumors persisted that he didn’t have the best time on Kung Fu Panda 2). But while Zimmer did have a hand in a few pieces of music and was filmed interacting with several of the film’s instrumental soloists it is probably more appropriate to characterize Kung Fu Panda 3 like Madagascar 3 since the bulk of it was done by Lorne Balfe and his team (note the music credits being dominated by Balfe’s usual assistants and orchestrators). Ultimately it didn’t impact how consistent the music was with the sonic world established by the first two films, not only because Balfe had written a significant amount of music for Kung Fu Panda 2 but also because Powell team members Paul Mounsey and Germaine Franco helped.

Balfe: “I remember the first time I worked on Kung Fu Panda just being always in awe of the music of John Powell. I felt so intimidated, and I just felt there’s no way I can get through this.”

The legacy themes and whiz-bang action returned, and a new family theme penned by Balfe (somewhat replacing the exquisite theme for the panda village from the end of Kung Fu Panda 2 which Balfe claimed “didn’t work” when they tried using it here) was quite nice. But some of the new components were puzzling. The theme for the new villain Kai was derived from an Imagine Dragons song released in the middle of the prior year; maybe Zimmer thought up the idea while they were in his studio working on Transformers: Age of Extinction. Odder still was the presence of famed pianist Lang Lang in the credits, who only seemed to be deployed in a few places and for parts that didn’t seem to demand much technical skill, arguably making it seem like a marketing gimmick on part with Joshua Bell’s appearance on Zimmer’s Angels & Demons album. In theory, using the melody from Kung Fu Fighting (Celebration Time) as a secondary theme for chi was a bit on the nose, though in practice the applications of that idea were actually quite tasteful and made for some of the album’s more serene passages. These quibbles aside, the score was a reliably entertaining extension of the franchise’s sound, even if it fell a bit short of greatness.

Zimmer: “Kids hate when you try to write funny [music]. You have to approach it as genuinely as you would any storytelling.”


Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) - *½
Hans Zimmer & Tom Holkenborg; add’l music by Steve Mazzaro, Andrew Kawczynski & Benjamin Wallfisch; orchestrated by
B&W Fowler/Moriarty, Carl Rydlund & Kevin Kaska; conducted by Holkenborg & Nick Glennie-Smith; choir orchestrated by
Eric Whitacre & Gavin Greenaway and conducted by Greenaway; technical score engineers Chuck Choi & Stephanie McNally;
digital instrument design Mark Wherry; electric cello Tina Guo; drum orchestra including Satnam Ramgotra; vocalists including
Dominic Lewis; technical assistants Jacqueline Friedberg, Julian Pastorelli, Max Sandler, Lauren Bousfield, Stephen Perone,
Emad Borjian & Aljoscha Christenhuss; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant; score wrangler Bob Badami

Man of Steel was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=116951

Zimmer: “After 11 years, here I sit again. The perception is that I know what I’m doing. But it’s not a repetitive job; you have to come up with something new. It’s very good to have somebody who in the privacy of your own paranoia you can go to and say ‘is this shit?’ Batman and Superman, they might be that strong, but one wrong note can really hurt them.”

Batman v Superman is generally seen today as a huge failure, though director Zach Snyder’s army of ardent fans would of course argue otherwise. It dragged Bruce Wayne into Snyder’s grim, slow-mo Man of Steel aesthetic, with its sole innovation for the character seeming to be “hey, we had Superman kill last time, let’s have Batman kill too.” It represented a clumsy attempt by Warner Bros. to build a shared universe like Marvel’s less than two years after Sony’s similarly pained efforts to set up the Sinister Six in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. It produced probably the most righteously mocked line of dialogue in cinema history. It called itself Batman v Superman and had that fight be less than 10 minutes of a nearly 3-hour runtime more focused on a lot of dull plot and then on a big fight with a rubbery orc-like thing. And it made boatloads of money but not Avengers-level cash, catalyzing more corporate and creative anxieties that made the development of Snyder’s follow-up Justice League film a nightmare for almost all involved.

Hans Zimmer & team’s music for Man of Steel had been perhaps the most divisive film score of the modern age, hated by most film score critics and more “traditionalist” film score listeners but aggressively adored by fans of the Snyderverse and/or of Zimmer. It was no surprise that he returned to score the sequel, though it was perhaps a surprise to see Tom Holkenborg (not yet shedding his Junkie XL moniker) elevated from contributor to co-composer status. Holkenborg had played a significant part in the development of Man of Steel without getting on the front cover of its album, and it’s possible that his more prominent placement here reflected his new standing as a more “known” composer in the wake of the commercial success of Mad Max: Fury Road. But Zimmer would say he originally wanted to handle the Superman parts and leave “my friend Tom” to write the Batman material, perhaps showing some initial reticence about having to reinvent his own musical reinvention of the character only a decade or so after Batman Begins. The division of responsibilities ended up being a bit muddled, as Zimmer would say he “couldn’t entirely let it go”, it being the brooding, minor key world of the Batman, while Holkenborg would say Zimmer focused on the emotional parts while he worked on “the action language.”

Regardless of who owned what part, what ended up being the thing Zimmer most frequently mentioned in promotional interviews was fatigue. BvS was one of the last works he did before going on his first European concert tour, which he seemed more excited about than anything having to do with the film. He would infamously claim that he had “officially retired from the superhero business.” And he would be very transparent about how he “really struggled for eight weeks moving two chords around” trying to find a new vocabulary for Bruce Wayne that didn’t “betray” what he had done for the recent Nolan trilogy of films. Sure, one could argue that this wasn’t the first time Zimmer had given insight into months-long ideation periods (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, for example), and sometimes what he described as challenging compositional periods ended up resulting in some stellar material (such as his admitted struggles with whether to lean more Western or more Japanese with The Last Samurai). But here the pain came off more like writer’s block, especially when you look at the end product, a work so multivariate in its flaws that one struggles to think of where to begin.

- There are the new “darker, more ambiguous” Batman themes. One is the same note hammered over and over again, funny not only because it was a predictable Zimmer technique at this point but also because Holkenborg did something similar in Mad Max AND because it was a reduction of Zimmer’s two-note Batman Begins motif - how about just one pitch now?

- Ideas and sounds from the prior film are marginalized. Somewhat of that is undoubtedly a function of Zimmer trying to treat sequels as “autonomous” entries so he doesn’t repeat himself. One could also argue this is the inevitable result of Zimmer originally planning to cede control of the Batman material but then taking his eye off the ball. Bits and pieces of Man of Steel do pop up, including in some odd places - some Zod-related action material in the titular fight scene, for example - but the one great theme from the 2013 film barely appears at all, and nothing approaches the wow factor of that idea’s ultra-cool usage in Flight, which was the track that even those who didn’t like Man of Steel’s music would point to and say “THAT was good.” Funny enough, this does help to make this score’s flop status distinct from Zimmer’s two comparable creative failures of the prior era (Modern Warfare 2 and On Stranger Tides) since those works were largely undone by how derivative they were.

- A LOT of the score is murky sound design or standard action/thriller fare, and not even the kind where you could at least find an intellectual purpose for it like the bat wing sounds Mel Wesson put in Batman Begins. If you played someone a track like Must There Be A Superman? there was a nonzero chance they couldn’t say what movie it came from. This mostly sounded like everything else - Remote Control library music, in a way - and even the sole scene that tends to get praised in the movie (the brawny Batman warehouse fight) is disappointingly accompanied by a typical array of drums, loops, and distortions.

- There is yet another final battle finale that sounds like it was ripped from King Arthur, continuing a trend of that perhaps being the only unsuccessful film whose music kept informing future Zimmer works - and a dozen years later, no less!

I could go on, though there was one moment of exquisite inspiration: a war cry for Gal Godot’s Wonder Woman given an edgy fury by the electric cello playing of Zimmer’s occasional collaborator Tina Guo in probably her most notable appearance since she started working with him on Sherlock Holmes. It was a true team effort: Zimmer crafted the theme but credited Holkenborg for cracking the code on how to work it into the movie, and add’l music composer Steve Mazzaro would later talk about the work he did to triple-track Guo’s recordings to get them to sound “like a group of banshees.” The idea would make it into both Wonder Woman films, and it’s the only thing salvaging this snooze-inducing slugfest from a lower rating.

Unlike the Dark Knight trilogy, Zimmer didn’t put much on the record about his opinion of this film, outside of some statements about how cool the shots in a promotional sizzle reel looked. It’s almost like Zimmer knew the film was an outright turkey, though the days where he would slag a film he worked on for not being any good (like Broken Arrow) were very much in the rearview mirror. His various “it was hard” comments were perhaps an acknowledgement that the music might’ve been a turkey too, and one gets the sense that many of his most ardent fans did as well. Whereas Man of Steel led to a whole bunch of online hullabaloo, there was minimal fuss about BvS. We all quietly acknowledged the music sucked and moved on.

And it wasn’t even the only “superhero vs. superhero” movie that year scored by someone from this musical lineage!

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Next time: that other “supe vs. supe” score.

And: “When you're high, everything looks great. Our job is to heighten whatever experience you're having.”