>
>
> Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) - ****
> Lorne Balfe; produced by Balfe & Steffen Thum; score technical
> assistants Steffen Thum, Shane
> Rutherfoord-Jones, Max Aruj & Mike Ladouceur; orchestrated by
> Rutherfoord-Jones; orchestra
> conducted by Matt Dunkley; music production coordinator Queenie Li; thank
> you to Hans Zimmer

> TBTF discovery #55.

> A strength of the Mission: Impossible film franchise up until this
> point had been shifting the team supporting superstar Tom Cruise each
> time. Even if you didn’t like all of the entries by directors Brian De
> Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, Brad Bird, and Christopher McQuarrie, you
> can at least admit they helped to keep things from feeling stale. But
> Cruise would bring back McQuarrie for a second go-round, and the result in
> Fallout would be the highest-earning film of the franchise and my
> favorite film of 2018. Different directors usually meant different
> composers, so the franchise had been treated to Danny Elfman’s nervy
> strings, Hans Zimmer’s jam band ensemble, the retro antics of Michael
> Giacchino, and the vibrant orchestral realization of Lalo Schifrin’s famed
> franchise identities by Joe Kraemer (McQuarrie’s friend and composer on
> his two earlier directorial efforts) on Rogue Nation.

> The latter was beloved by most score fans when it came out in 2015. Even
> with McQuarrie claiming he wanted to do a very different follow-up story
> about Ethan Hunt and his team, there was still some shock when the
> director decided to use a different composer. Kraemer would, to put it
> lightly, not take this well; he would view it as a betrayal and even go on
> a Twitter rant about it years later. “One of my closest friends made a
> deal behind my back that swindled me out of hundreds of thousands of
> dollars and then dumped me for a Zimling and this was after assuring me
> that working for him was the same as having a savings bond.” There was
> no public comment from McQuarrie on the whole hullabaloo; the most he’s
> said on the matter was “I knew I had to make a distinct change, even
> one that went against some of my instincts” and that he’d ”never
> been near a synthesizer in my life.”

> In came Lorne, who may not have exactly come up with his own voice wholly
> independent of his Remote Control origins at this point but was now
> getting his first major gig that wasn’t a last-minute replacement job (he
> had 10 months here) or one directly connected to a director / lead
> producer he’d already met via Hans. He might not have gotten the
> opportunity if not for helping on a blockbuster the prior summer when
> Zimmer was on tour. “Jake [Myers] was a producer on [Dunkirk]
> and was also on Mission. I’ve worked a lot for Paramount and
> Skydance, and the head of music from Paramount got me that meeting with
> Chris. I started writing after our first meeting before seeing anything.
> After our second breakfast I started writing more. I looked at it as I
> needed to prove to Chris I could do this movie. I’d done music for a
> number of movies that hadn’t been well-received.”

> The assignment was arguably as much of a dream come true for the composer
> as working with Bruckheimer and Bay. “I [loved the 1996 film] when it
> came out in college. For the last 22 years, in my head I’ve basically been
> scoring Mission: Impossible.”

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

> “One of the best action sequences I've ever seen was that bathroom
> fight. And I cannot say I helped, because there is no music in that
> scene.”

> Lorne would say Chris was the rare director who didn’t use a temp track,
> but the mission (should the composer choose to accept it) still seemed to
> be pretty clear: with the aesthetics of the franchise shifting a little
> closer to the style of Christopher Nolan with this movie, the music should
> follow suit and plunge Schifrin’s themes (the classic ‘da da da’ and its
> corresponding ‘dun dun, da da, dun dun, da da’ rhythm, plus his secondary
> idea The Plot) into the brooding darkness and the ostinatos of
> The Dark Knight trilogy and other similar Remote Control action
> scores. “You could easily go retro and make it sound nostalgic, which
> the film isn’t. We weren’t trying to do an Ocean’s Eleven movie,
> making it feel retro and jazzy and pastiche. It’s a far darker tone. We
> get to see this side of Ethan we haven’t seen. You have to take Ethan’s
> theme to a darker place.”

> The dang thing would even get composed like a Nolan movie for a while,
> with Lorne writing “endless amounts of music” that was done apart
> from the picture and moved around until they could settle on what worked
> where. “My studio got sent to London. I lived next to the edit room for
> about 4-5 months. When there was a new scene that had been filmed and they
> were experimenting with the edit, you were able to come in and say, ‘What
> if we did this, or what if we tried that?’ You’d have conversations about
> doing just the rhythm of the theme, and I’d do a 3-4 minute piece and we’d
> see where it fits.”

> This change was seen as something tantamount to heresy by a number of film
> music fans, especially given the abandonment of what they had liked about
> Kraemer’s effort, and as such Lorne’s work got loads more shit from people
> than it deserved, with things like ”anonymous,” “oppressively boring,” and
> “stopped when it was good enough and never actually good” tossed around.
> Lorne was acutely aware of all this. “There was a massive backlash when
> it came out that I was doing it. Some people felt it wasn’t as loyal
> musically to the prior movie, and that genre. [But] things have gotta move
> on sometimes in life and evolve. If you alienate all these wonderful
> [electronic] tools, it’s like saying we shouldn’t be going into [Dolby]
> Atmos.” There are churning low strings Lorne had often utilized in his
> career. A sickeningly deep synth pulse appears for the villains; Lorne
> would later laugh about not even being able to sing that low. There are
> escalating BWAMs for the skydiving sequence, done only days before the
> picture was locked according to McQuarrie. And you can hear hints of
> Zimmer’s Bane chant rhythm from The Dark Knight Rises informing
> The Exchange.

> But the familiarity of that lengthy anticipatory track doesn’t (at least
> for me) overwhelm one of the biggest pleasures of the work: Schifrin’s
> main theme gets several variations that are clearly indebted to
> Inception but still sound outrageously cool and also do a stellar
> job building up tension before the lengthy chase sequence commences. Lorne
> would indulge in plenty of booming variants during that actual chase, and
> as the film went on he would start to toy with new takes on The
> Plot as well (something Zimmer didn’t do on M:I 2): urgent
> horns in the motorcycle chase, bombastic takes throughout the climactic
> helicopter chase, and a militaristic version as Hunt is rescued on a boat,
> a throwback to the sound of the original TV series that was only stumbled
> upon after a more rueful composition didn’t give audiences the desired
> sense of victory and McQuarrie suggested a snare drum as an alternative.
> Your brain will at first lament the Zimmerization of the sound, and then
> your brain will tell you “wow, that was fun!”

> And focusing on the more typical aspects of the score would unfairly
> overlook the things Lorne was doing to tinker within the margins of a
> fairly familiar sound, something that he hadn’t gotten an opportunity to
> do on the recent Geostorm but which you could trace back to at
> least 2011’s Assassin’s Creed: Revelations on his lead composing
> roles and probably earlier if one considers his additional music
> assignments. There is a startlingly dramatic use of percussion at times,
> even almost from the get-go when drums hit on Angela Bassett’s footsteps
> when her character enters the film. But it’s not the kind of big, booming,
> relentless, Tom Holkenborg-style drums that were a bit in vogue at the
> time. Lorne would seem to prefer sounds that would cut through the
> darkness and provide some diversity to the soundscape, just as composers
> such as Schifrin and Gerald Fried had done on the original series and
> other 1960s shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (although they had
> much smaller ensembles and budgets than Balfe had at his disposal).

> One group used by Balfe would rival the 18-member accordion ensemble John
> Powell had used on the fourth Ice Age film for sheer
> ridiculousness. “Bongos were always in the TV show, and I thought why
> have one when we can have twelve? It’s hard enough for one bongo player to
> get a gig these days. For twelve, it's a miracle. It's very like the
> stunts, trying to push them to a larger form.” McQuarrie would even
> jokingly refer to Lorne’s experiments as a “weird bongo lab. Guy’s got
> a budget, he’s gone off the rails, I’m sure he’s going to use it
> somewhere.” Jokes aside, their applications in the score lend a nice
> edge to action and suspense tracks like Stairs and Rooftops and
> help them somewhat transcend their more derivative elements.

> There are other intriguing elements. Lorne originally intended a piano
> idea for Henry Cavill’s character but the skittering theme would end up
> being used more as a general momentum device. And a series of lightly
> shifting strings lent an emotional edge to several scenes that wouldn’t
> have been there otherwise, even with Lorne removing a corresponding melody
> at the director’s behest. “I wrote a suite called Loves with some piano
> in it. Chris thought it was a bit busy, so I took it out and called it
> Loves Reduced!”

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

> If you enjoyed Henry Jackman’s earlier tale about sharing his music with
> Alan Silvestri, rest assured Lorne had an even funnier story. “I sent
> Lalo [my take on] the theme, because we have the same agent. Nothing. A
> month goes by. I’m doing a radio interview in [Latin America] and I say he
> never got back to me. They called me back later, there’s translation going
> on, and they’re calling Lalo Schifrin and he’s listening to four tracks of
> it live! He said it’s so lovely for people to still enjoy this music. The
> last time I beamed this much was when my wife had our child!”

> The work brings to mind what Lorne said after Terminator Genisys
> about how “you don’t need interesting string lines with this.”
> Sure, what he wrote was a somewhat streamlined, incredibly contemporary
> take on the franchise that lacked the adornments of Kraemer’s earlier
> score. But the dang score worked like gangbusters, and no amount of
> high-minded classical snobbery can tell my brain I didn’t enjoy the
> ever-living shit out of it. Everyone’s got a guilty pleasure score. This
> one’s mine.

> Not everyone liked the music of Fallout as much as I did. And when
> viewed in aggregate Lorne’s film scores from this year, each with their
> own modern flavor, seemed to affirm Tom Holkenborg’s comments from the
> prior year. Maybe this was really the new reality of what filmmakers
> wanted. But then there were examples to the contrary from the same year,
> including one by a man who “can put more energy in a piece of music
> than a roomful of EDM fuckers.”

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

There is probably no score that has come out in the past five that my opinion on has changed as much as this one, I hated it when it first came out and made the first viewing of the film miserable for my family by pointing out how inappropriate Lorne's score was compared to Kraemer's, but with time, like Marvin Hamlisch's score for The Spy Who Loved Me, I have come around to it and its my second favourite score from Lorne after Home. Yeah, what McQuarrie did to Joe was unforgivable, but it doesn't mean Lorne should be blamed for it and the score like Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (which Lorne also worked on!) is one of my biggest guilty pleasure scores, I enjoy it a lot and it fits the film (which weirdly enough I just rewatched last night for the first time) like a glove and I can't imagine a world without "We Are Never Free" in it.

So take this as a lesson, don't write off things too quickly because they're not like what came before in the series, because sometimes you might be missing on a lot of fun.