This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on POTC 5, Wonder Woman, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=118953
- 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 Lego Batman Movie (2017) - ****
Lorne Balfe; produced by Balfe, Max Aruj & Thomas Farnon; score technical assistant
Steffen Thum; orchestrated by Oscar Senén, Joan Martorell & Vladimir Tubic; orchestra
conducted by Christopher Gordon; boy’s choir conducted by Thomas Wilson; children’s choir
conducted by Sam Allchurch; Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers featured on drums;
music production coordinator Queenie Li; ‘Who’s The (Bat)Man’ produced by Balfe & Kato Khandwala;
‘I Found You’ by produced by Balfe & Aruj with lyrics by Antony Genn

A sequel to the wildly successful Lego Movie was inevitable, though it was perhaps surprising that the initial follow-up film focused on the supporting Lego Batman character hilariously voiced by Will Arnett. Lorne assumed his hiring as composer was due to his additional music contributions to the Dark Knight scores and that the music would be a parody of that, but was relieved that the filmmakers wanted to instead treat it ”as if it was a real live-action movie, and then sometimes we added humor to it. Chris McKay pitched the concept as About a Boy meets Michael Bay. I thought that sounded amazing.”

He would craft a score that marvelously synthesized the various styles of earlier Batman music - the hip goofiness of Neal Hefti’s contributions to the Adam West series, the gothic grandeur of Danny Elfman’s music for the Tim Burton films, and the more modern sounds of Hans Zimmer - though Balfe would admit that the Hefti elements were his only conscious nod. “Batman was very classical, and deadly serious. For animation, you shouldn’t write anything cheaper or less than you would for an adult. His theme I would happily put into a live action Batman film.”

A Robin theme, possibly the first in the character’s film and television history, would start off sounding like something from one of Zimmer’s charming comedy scores but undergo a significant amount of variation. And the composer clearly had a good sense of humor about his work, including the prog rock ensemble used for the Joker (vs. the punk rock inspirations for Zimmer’s take on Heath Ledger’s Joker) and a large choir literally singing “The Phantom Zone” during scenes involving that dimension. ”That had been an amusing thought of mine for months. I kept singing it, and everybody would look at me strangely. I don’t know why! I just thought it was obvious to do. As soon as the choir sang ‘The’ we had crossed the line. I laughed. I thought it was very funny.”

Balfe’s earlier work Home had been a marvelous example of the composer taking the extra time to make his score coherent with the songs in the film. Here he would get the chance to write / produce those. The Robin theme would morph into I Found You with help from Balfe’s friend Anthony Genn who had also done lyrics for Penguins of Madagascar. But the icing on the cake would be the absurd rock masterpiece Who’s The (Bat)Man - the funniest score track of the year, complete with lyrics like “I 100% am not Bruce Wayne” and bits about Batman never skipping leg day, choke-holding a bear, and never paying his taxes.


Genius Season 1: Einstein (2017) - ***
Lorne Balfe; main title by Hans Zimmer; score technical assistants Max Aruj & Steffen Thum; orchestrated by Oscar
Senén & Shane Rutherfoord-Jones; digital instrument design Mark Wherry; score production coordinator Queenie Li

TBTF discovery #35.

The Zimmer brand had been trusted to launch such things as Dreamworks and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it would now be called to launch the first original scripted series to air on the National Geographic channel, thanks in part to the involvement of Ron Howard as a producer. The show would get an energetic title theme by Hans, a step up from the dour one done for The Crown, while the episodic scoring would be done by Lorne. “We had all worked together. It wasn’t out of the blue.”

As with the music for Frost/Nixon, there’s often a focus on rhythm and momentum rather than themes. “The way viewers watch television now is different. People will watch three or four episodes in one day. I try to kind of step back and watch two or three episodes at a time, and make sure we’re not being overly thematic. I think the audience understands it.” That quote would become unintentionally hilarious two years later when Lorne wrote perhaps the most densely thematic score on television.

There are also moments of piano and mallet percussion that strongly suggest someone in the production process may have had Thomas Newman’s music on their mind. Synths are prominent, perhaps reflecting the constraints of television, although there was very little money in the music budgets for those aforementioned Howard films. With the exception of the emphasis on solo violin, there are not many nods to the era the show takes place during, a conscious choice on the filmmakers’ part. “[Genre] doesn't matter. We didn't want a period score. You have to write [what’s] right. It would be overwhelming to look at him as [an] important [figure]. Looking at the human characteristics made it more possible to write.”

Helpful note: there are two albums. An EP seems to contain Balfe’s demos while a later album contains the score proper (not too far removed from the approach taken for the Musical Anthology albums for the later His Dark Materials series).


Geostorm (2017) - **
Lorne Balfe; produced by Balfe & Steffen Thum; score technical assistants Thum & Max Aruj; conducted by Aruj &
Nick Glennie-Smith; orchestrated by Oscar Senén; synth programmers Clay Duncan, Kevin Lamb & Jon Aschalew;
technical score assistants Joseph Cho & Jennifer Dirkes; music production coordinator Queenie Li

TBTF discovery #36.

The directorial debut of Roland Emmerich’s producing partner Dean Devlin (of Stargate and Independence Day fame) was originally intended as a 2016 release, but a combination of factors including a poor test screening in 2015 led to the release getting pushed as the studio ordered costly reshoots supervised by Jerry Bruckheimer and an executive producer of his CSI television franchise. Unsurprisingly, Bruckheimer wanted music tailored to his preferences, so composer Pinar Toprak (for whom the film arguably constituted a big break) was somewhat cruelly tossed aside - even with her having a brief background working at Media Ventures. “I became the first woman to be hired on a $100 million-plus movie and the first one to get fired from one.”

In came Lorne, who was starting to get a reputation for capable replacement scores after writing Terminator: Genisys, supporting Rupert Gregson-Williams on the first season of The Crown, and partially replacing Clint Mansell’s music for Paramount’s troubled Ghost in the Shell. Balfe was a known commodity to Bruckheimer thanks to being a contributor on Pirates sequels and The Lone Ranger. “Jerry was a massive influence. He knows what he wants the audience to feel.” Other scores had given Balfe the opportunity to tinker with a familiar style, but he probably only had two weeks on this one, and in any event this was a classic “what Jerry wants Jerry gets” scenario, and the end result suggested Jerry wanted a safe, surprise-free reprise of many Remote Control action mannerisms.

Lorne liked the film, calling it “exactly the type of movie I would go to the cinema for an hour and a half of pure escapism.” And Bruckheimer clearly loved the partnership as he would bring back Balfe for five future films.


The Crown Season 2 (2017) - ***
Rupert Gregson-Williams & Lorne Balfe; produced by Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Evan Jolly & Jon Monroe;
add’l arrangements by Max Aruj & Steffen Thum; orchestrated by Shane Rutherfoord-Jones; music coordinator Queenie Li

Season 1 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117577

TBTF discovery #37.

Rupert: “Having done a few interviews for Wonder Woman, some people ask me the question about female superheroes. Of course, I’ve covered Queen Elizabeth, and while she’s not a superhero, she’s certainly a heroine.”

Rupert and Lorne would return for the second season of the acclaimed Netflix series. Balfe had a supporting credit the prior year but would be a co-composer this go-round, with he and his team taking episodes 1-3 and 8-9 and Gregson-Williams overseeing the other five episodes, perhaps a necessity as composing for the show was in Balfe’s perspective “like having to write six feature films in this short space of time.” The score still manages to sound coherent in spite of the “your turn, my turn” nature of the assignment, and if you liked the music of the first season (including the derivative Duck Shoot) you’ll probably like this too.

The show would overhaul its cast as its characters aged, and the music would follow suit with Martin Phipps, a veteran of various BBC productions including Peaky Blinders and a War & Peace miniseries, taking over scoring duties in Season 3.


Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) - **
Steve Jablonsky; add’l music by David Fleming, Luke Richards & Gary Dworetsky;
add’l arrangements by Max Aruj & Steffen Thum; orchestrated by Chris Anderson-Bazzoli,
Rhea Fowler, Walt Fowler, Rick Giovinazzo, David Giuli, Jennifer Hammond, Suzette Moriarty &
Carl Rydlund; conducted by James Sale & Nick Glennie-Smith; music production coordinator
Queenie Li; technical score assistants Joseph Cho & Jennifer Dirkes; flute Pedro Eustache;
thank you to Hans Zimmer, Harry Gregson-Williams & Bob Badami

Transformers was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=109608
Revenge of the Fallen was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=111761
Dark of the Moon was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113009
Age of Extinction was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117220

TBTF discovery #38.

“There’s no critic on Earth who’s going to like it. [Bay’s] making it for a very specific audience.”

The final Michael Bay-directed Transformers was far less commercially successful than the last few entries, and Bay would later concede he probably should’ve stopped making them despite the money being good and them being “fun to do.” But don’t let that obscure the batshit crazy pleasures of the fifth entry in the franchise. Anthony Hopkins as a Transformers-loving historian! Robots fighting Nazis in World War II! Earth turning out to be a planet-sized robot!

The music of the other Transformers sequels tended to reinvent the wheel each time and have relatively little to do with each other, so why should this one be any different? Steve Jablonsky would make a few concessions to the medieval and historical elements in the film, but otherwise The Last Knight largely come off like another generally competent and inoffensive library of Remote Control music, though thankfully not with the kind of in-your-face references to Inception and Man of Steel that the prior two scores had. And even with Age of Extinction rarely using the well-known themes of the first film, it is still shocking how little of the runtime those ideas take up in this work, though it’s possible that’s a function of Optimus Prime being “evil” until the movie’s final battle.

At times Jablonsky found the score a challenge almost equal to his experiences on Revenge of the Fallen. “There were a lot of picture changes. Bay up until the end was really trying to shorten [it]. The scenes used to have a melodic feel, then [the music became] five notes of the theme, then cut to something else. There are so many scenes like that. I’d say ‘we’ll use the same idea but we can’t keep cutting it, we have to start over,’ but I can’t [rescore] them all. I [didn’t] even know all that the editors did until I [got] to the final mixing stage.”

Muddling matters was how many members of Lorne Balfe’s team were credited. Sleuths will note the appearance of his usual assistants Max Aruj and Steffen Thum plus his music production coordinator Queenie Li. Perhaps this was a function of Jablonsky needing help given the intense time pressures, or maybe even a case of Bay liking what Balfe did on 13 Hours and wanting the composer involved here. Regardless, it brought the franchise full circle, as Balfe had been an additional contributor on the first film and its 2009 sequel.


The Dark Tower (2017) - ***
Tom Holkenborg; add’l music by Aljoscha Christenhuß & Antonio Di Iorio; orchestrated /
copied by Holkenborg, Jonathan Beard, Edward Trybek, Henri Wilkinson, Jamie Thierman,
Sean Barrett & Ben Hoff; conducted by Edward Trybek; technical score engineer Alex Ruger

TBTF discovery #39.

After a decade-plus of efforts to adapt Stephen King’s massive book series, Sony and MRC finally got a version out, though not without struggle. There were acrimonious clashes between the studios, disastrous test screenings in October 2016 that suggested the story was confounding, and unnamed sources saying director Nikolaj Arcel was in over his head. The resulting film was only 88 minutes long, a shockingly small runtime for what was supposed to set up a multi-film franchise. A report from Variety would claim producer Ron Howard stepped in after those screenings to help advise Arcel on the music, though it’s unclear to what extent that impacted the score written by Tom Holkenborg or if he was even on the film at that time; the earliest date he mentioned his involvement was April 2017.

Holkenborg would characterize his score as “thematically driven, whereas some of my other film scores are very sound-driven.” There is definitely more traditional orchestral material than any previous Holkenborg work (and why wouldn’t there be, what with all the credited orchestrators), and even some nicely rousing material in the later tracks. But what will dominate in most folks’ minds is the instrumental and sonic tinkering that Holkenborg had been talking about since messing with that piano on 300: Rise of an Empire. “We used a bunch of really outlandish guitar pedals. I made these really weird ambient sounds and then we turned that in samples and in hardware to play them a certain way. That created a really unique ambiance that you can’t really tell what it is.” Behold, Hans’ old Pacific Heights quote, remixed for a new generation of composers.

For some listeners, the score would be more of the same. MMUK would call it his best yet but still a “poor-to-middling work,” Movie-Wave would give the album its lowest rating, and Filmtracks wouldn’t even bother covering it, though it likely would’ve if the film had been more successful. But the composer would be unapologetically matter-of-fact about his role in the industry in promotional interviews. “For a lot of classical music / film score fanatics, [my music is] all rubbish and noise. But that's the reality where we are: a lot of directors want to take that new approach to film scoring.'

Despite that, there was evidence that Holkenborg was trying to be taken more seriously as a composer and seem less like a DJ. In 2016 his film music album covers said either “Junkie XL” or “Tom Holkenborg aka Junkie XL.” But on this score’s album, as well as the one for Brimstone (also released in 2017), he was now just Tom Holkenborg. “I started my production career in 1994 under that name. It was a great time in my life, but it’s time to move on to something new. All the future films that I do will be under my own name. Junkie XL we'll just leave for what it was.”


Ferdinand (2017) - ****
John Powell; score produced by Batu Sener; add’l music by Sener, Anthony Willis & Paul Mounsey;
orchestrated by John Ashton Thomas, Pete Anthony, Rick Giovinazzo, Randy Kerber, Andrew Kinney & Jon Kull;
conducted by John Powell; thank you to Edie Boddicker; dedicated to Melinda Lerner & Oliver Powell

“I used to joke with directors about how crazy the music should be. You can be right at the top, which I definitely did on some of the Ice Ages. At the other end of the scale, I’m very admiring of Thomas Newman’s Finding Nemo. It’s so elegant. So do you bring charm to the scene and allow everyone to relax, or do you push the comedy and ensure it’s as funny as it can possibly be? I fight with that all the time.”

An animated film about a pacifist bull that was an adaptation of a book with anti-fascist overtones was perhaps a note-perfect assignment for John Powell (even more so than Stop-Loss). Powell drew some inspiration from Spanish-sounding classical music, in essence injecting his mannerisms with the flavor of the great Iberian-inflected scores of yesteryear like Max Steiner’s Adventures of Don Juan and Miklós Rózsa’s El Cid, That was amusing given that the filmmakers were “initially worried about anything that’s classically Spanish, because when they were trying to temp it they couldn’t find anything. [In] the early 20th century, Debussy, Ravel, and Rimsky-Korsakov heard all this amazing music from Spain, [and] we ended up with incredible work like Rapsodie Espagnole. You probably hear a lot of that in my scores! It could be more overt in this film.”

Even with that, Ferdinand adheres closely to his typical animation sound, so even with its memorable themes and Spanish accents it will feel a tad familiar to most listeners. The score wasn’t on par with the Dragon scores or Pan, and arguably wasn’t even the equal of something like Ice Age: The Meltdown, but the whole package was still a toe-tapping joy, and anyone who liked the Zorro scores by James Horner will find much to enjoy. One can only speculate how much more fun it might’ve been even more so if a musical number Powell worked on wasn’t cut during the development process (the composer would later say the scene didn’t work).

Alas, it would turn out to be the final film Powell scored for Blue Sky, bringing over a dozen years of zany collaborations to a close. Their 2019 film Spies In Disguise would use Theodore Shapiro, and all other projects were scrapped when Disney bought them as part of its Fox acquisition, though the continuations of the Ice Age franchise on Disney's streaming service in 2022 would be scored by Powell team member Batu Sener (a key contributor here) along with a short credits track by Powell that was one of the most ridiculous pieces of his career.

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Next time: “I know why nobody has done it before - because it’s sort of impossible.”