This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Gemini Man, 21 Bridges, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119853
- 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 Lion King (2019) - ****
Hans Zimmer; add’l arrangements by David Fleming & Steve Mazzaro; orchestrated by
B&W Fowler/Moriarty, Kevin Kaska & Carl Rydlund; add’l orchestrations by Dave Metzger,
Aaron Meyer, Dave Giuli, Melissa Orquiza, Jennifer Hammond, Chris Anderson-Bazzoli,
Martin McClellan, Nicholas Cazares, Marshall Bowen & Brandon Bailo; conducted by
Nick Glennie-Smith; woodwinds Pedro Eustache & Richard Harvey; kalimba Heitor Pereira;
solo cello Tina Guo & Steve Erdody; drum kit circle including Satnam Ramgotra & Sheila E;
the Hans Zimmer Band including Guthrie Govan, Yolanda Charles, Nile Marr, Nathan Stornetta &
Nick Glennie-Smith; African vocal & choir arrangements created & produced by Lebo M.; technical
score engineer Chuck Choi; digital instrument design Mark Wherry; digital instrument preparation
Taurees Habib & Raul Vega; original songs by Tim Rice, Elton John, Mark Mancina, Jay Rifkin &
Lebohang Morake; songs produced by Pharrell Williams & Stephen Lipson; ‘Spirit’ by Timothy
McKenzie, Ilya Salmanzadeh & Beyoncé and produced by Beyoncé, ILYA & Labrinth; ‘Never Too Late’
by Elton John & Tim Rice and produced by John, Greg Kurstin & Matt Still; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant
TBTF discovery #71.
The Lion King (1994) was…uh…briefly covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=107376
With the benefit (?) of hindsight, I can now see several amusing things about that initial post:
- Scores mentioned without any quotes, back when this was just a “basic” composer rundown like I’d just done with John Scott’s works and not some insane research hobby. If I had any idea that I was going to willingly sit down and watch Pan, an utter fiasco in spite of John Powell’s efforts to improve it, I might never have started this last March!
- Me spelling guitars as guitarz, an attempt at comedy that now reads like, “How do you do, fellow kids?”
- Me essentially skipping writing anything about The Lion King because we all knew it was great.
- Gosh, I’ve really gotten a lot of mileage out of finding that quote about Pacific Heights.
- The bold / italic norms weren’t exactly locked down at that point. Oops.
- Me playing “spot the collaborator” like it’s an effing bingo game.
- Me thinking this would be around 150 scores. Ha!
But…I digress…
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Few things in entertainment annoyed me more in 2019 and early 2020 than Disney’s new Lion King film being called a “live-action version.” Sure, that’s what the Mouse House had been cranking out for a few years now, with this coming on the heels of redos of Maleficent, Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin with actual actors surrounded by tons of special effects. But nothing about the 2019 version was real! The whole thing was photorealistic but rendered inside computers! Live action my ass; this thing was an animated remake of an animated film. How as a society did we allow this to happen? Clearly my semantic ranting meant nothing though, as the film earned oodles of cash despite mixed reviews (mainly over its padded runtime and how the photorealism robbed the animals of their expressiveness) and Elton John calling it “a huge disappointment.”
Starting with The Jungle Book, Disney had started having the music of these remakes adhere more to the music of the original animated entries, both in score and songs. John Debney would call back to what the Sherman Brothers and George Bruns did for the 1967 Jungle Book, while Alan Menken would largely reconceptualize his scores from the 1990s Disney films to often stellar results, especially on Beauty and the Beast. So it made sense that the studio would seek out Hans to revisit the highlight of his pre-Media Ventures career, one that had sold tons of albums (and at least one cassette tape, since that’s how I first heard the score), resulted in a spin-off album and stage musical, and won him an Oscar for best original score which he accepted while wearing a tux and a large scarf, one of the all-time great winner outfits. Its runaway success validated his ascent in Hollywood in the late 80s and early 90s.
One could imagine Hans, who for years had maintained a steadfast desire to avoid revisiting his past works, saying no to the request if things had started before 2016, which could very well have crippled Disney’s ability to do the film. But it seemed two-plus years of touring his hits, including tracks from the original Lion King done as part of Hans Zimmer Live, The World of Hans Zimmer, and his show at Coachella, had changed his outlook on looking back. “We had been playing the notes, but we were playing them differently, putting all our humanity into it. And [we can] add that energy, add that passion, make it a celebration. Since we did The Lion King the first time, look how the music business has fallen apart. We're never going to get our six-platinum album anymore. We're not doing it for the money. We're doing it because we have to give back to this audience that has supported this story all these years.' Disney announced he had signed up in late 2017, possibly after Favreau wowed him with in-progress visuals Hans called “indescribable and incredibly moving.”
I’d argue Hans could’ve gotten away with just simply lightly rearranging his score, handing off the songs to his friend Pharrell, and calling it a day. But thankfully the work would be quite distinct at times, at least with respect to its score. Hans would even admit he “recklessly” tried doing a radically different score from the 1994 film but it “wouldn’t have worked. The tunes held up.” There are shockingly few hints of the composer’s instrumental mannerisms from the early 90s; for starters, drum pads are absent as Hans swore he would replace all the synth percussion he played on his keyboards with real instruments. There are some impressively expressive solo performances featured, especially for cello. Some passages have very little to do with the music from corresponding scenes in the 1994 version, while the ones that use the prior score as a reference point largely avoid cut-and-paste in favor of new instrumentation or significant reconceptualization.
Rafiki’s Fireflies would reimagine the powerful crescendo from the first film’s We Are All Connected as a mystical choral piece. Elephant Graveyard lightly hints at the jazzy nature of the hyena material from the comparable 1994 sequence but otherwise indulges in more mysterious orchestral textures before unleashing a new floor-shaking version of Hans’ Mufasa theme, arguably his most underrated melody and one which receives substantial new variations in other places in the film (including several that didn’t make the album). The major action setpieces Stampede and Battle of Pride Rock are perhaps the most indebted to the structures of the originals; they’re both realized with more impressive orchestrations at times, but they’re also lacking a bit of the wild energy of their predecessors.
The “new” score wasn’t all perfect; the goofy legacy fanfare for Timon and Pumba goes unused, and all of its replacements are underwhelming. But it still was a largely marvelous reinvention, and one of the most richly orchestral Hans works in years, bereft of the weighty processing, sound design, and sonic wallpaper that had defined a significant portion of his output in the Too Big To Fail era (though funny enough Favreau would seem ask for a lot of that from the composer on his next major project, the Star Wars streaming series The Mandalorian). One gets the sense that if it had received a more complete release similar to the expanded 2CD Disney Legacy album its predecessor received in 2014 we’d be talking about it with the same enthusiasm as the original; alas, only 44 minutes of score ended up on the album.
The songs? Those were a different story.
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Obviously the songs of the original film were going to be reprised. Director Jon Favreau was also a big fan of the musical, saying it explored “what the roots of the music are,” which meant the arrangements and new songs from the stage show would be a reference point as well. That made the decision to not to involve Mark Mancina in the remake rather puzzling given that he was the one responsible for the sound of the musical; Mancina would wish them “best of luck with it” in an oral history of the original film published by Forbes around the time the remake came out.
The results were mixed. Circle of Life is adequate, though perhaps not as powerful as the original version where Lebo M. sang all the vocals. I Just Can’t Wait To Be King probably has a superior instrumental mix here. Hakuna Matata has amusing ad libbing from Billy Eichner and Seth Rogan but really suffers in comparison to hearing Nathan Lane and Ernest Sabella belting that tune out. Can You Feel The Love Tonight is largely fine but does suffer a bit from Beyoncé belting out her lines while Donald Glover takes a more intimate tone. The new song by Elton John feels like it belongs in The Road to El Dorado, which is not a compliment. Hilariously, the fact that Jay Rifkin had gotten a songwriting credit on He Lives In You meant that the use of a new version of that song in this film’s end credits ensured Hans couldn’t quite escape his former scoring mixer and business partner even 15 years after the lawsuits that had dissolved Media Ventures.
Ultimately, two songs stood out, and not for the better. First, Be Prepared was crippled by Favreau’s insistence that the original was too over-the-top for his version. The new barely-sung take is a stain on the Disney legacy of great villain songs, especially since they had Chiwetel Ejiofor doing the voice of Scar this time. Seriously, did no one see Kinky Boots? Second, the new song Spirit by Beyoncé Knowles wasn’t a cohesive fit. That’s not to diminish the rousing gospel feel of it or Knowles’ powerful voice, but it seemed to come out of left field when it appeared in the film. In the end credits this incongruity might’ve been easier to handle, but it was moved up per Hans’ recommendation. “We’d done something else in that place, but how can you say no when a masterpiece is sent to you?” It was the one truly flawed choice he made on the remake, though it created intriguing parallels with Disney’s live action remake of Aladdin from earlier in the year which also had a new song (Speechless) that stuck out like a sore thumb.
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You may recall that the making of the original film was fraught with some danger for the composer. Hans had a police record in South Africa in the early 1990s owing to doing the music for two earlier anti-apartheid films, and concern for his livelihood prevented him from traveling back to the country for recording sessions. This version had no such challenges, but it still gave the composer some opportunities for highlighting racial justice. Akin to how he had taken Pharrell’s suggestion to include African American women in the orchestra on Hidden Figures, he would get Disney to fund a fairly expensive plan where the predominantly African-American Re-Collective Orchestra and several of its alumni were flown to Los Angeles to sit alongside the usual session players for nine days of recording. “I really do not want to pat myself on my back, but I think there was something very important and very good that we managed to get done, which was to make a Black Music Matters More Than Ever orchestra. That was [another] reason I wanted to do Lion King again, because I thought, ‘Let’s be inclusive. Let’s just go and celebrate this.’ It was wonderful.”
His other 2019 score would have none of these joys.
Dark Phoenix (2019) - **
Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Steve Mazzaro & Dave Fleming; produced by Zimmer, Mazzaro,
Fleming & Andy Page; orchestrated by B&W&R Fowler/Moriarty; conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith;
vocalists Loire Cotler, Katy Stephan & Suzanne Waters; electric guitar Gthrie Govan; bass Nico Abondolo;
electric & acoustic cello Tina Guo; sequencer programming Steven Doar & Omer Benyamin; technical score
engineer Chuck Choi; digital instrument design Mark Wherry; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant
TBTF discovery #72.
X-Men: The Last Stand was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=109366
X-Men Origins: Wolverine was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=111646
X-Men: First Class was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113009
Deadpool was…not covered.
Over a decade after the famed Dark Phoenix comic book storyline was mangled in the lucrative but disappointing X-Men: The Last Stand, writer/producer Simon Kinberg figured he’d give it another go. The film would get delayed over a year past its originally planned release date, in part to reshoot much of its third act, and ended up getting released in summer 2019 just a few months after Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox. It was a surprise when Kinberg showed up at one of Hans’ concerts and asked the composer to do the music for this; maybe he had nerves during his directorial debut and wanted the music to be as sure a thing as possible. But Hans had since backed off his famed retirement comment about superhero movies, claiming Ron Howard told him he shouldn’t skip any genre and instead wait for the right story. “I had an idea, and it seemed to fit into that movie.”
There were complaints when the score came out about Hans abandoning the franchise identity that editor/composer John Ottman used on the three films he’d scored. But the other X-Men films made by Fox had been treated to a wide variety of scores that often had very little to do with each other melodically or sonically. Four of those were even by former Zimmer collaborators: John Powell’s raucous “everything including the kitchen sink” fare for The Last Stand in 2006, Harry Gregson-Williams’ extension of his hybrid orchestral/contemporary style for the 2009 Wolverine origin movie, Henry Jackman’s streamlined retro fun for First Class, and Tom Holkenborg’s outrageous noise for Deadpool. In short, there was no franchise sound that Hans had to adhere to, and even if there was it’s not like people tend to hire him if they don’t want some sort of reinvention.
What ended up in the film was fascinatingly experimental and frustratingly redundant in equal measure, and sometimes simultaneously. So much of it felt made up of spare parts. A main theme that moves in note pairs. That and other themes being hard to identify because of the overwhelming sonic ambience. Extensive intermingling of real instruments with sound design, including slurred pitches that suggest an overly caffeinated Joker. Sick bass pulses to reinforce a brooding mood that really put the dark in Dark Phoenix. You could cheer for some of the retro feel to the action that summoned the spirits of his 80s and 90s material, but Zimmer had been doing that for several years at this point, including far more entertainingly in CHAPPiE.
Critical derision and laughably low box office for the movie brought an ignominious end to Fox’s uneven stewardship of the X-Men franchise. Hans barely did any press for it when it came out, and it’s unclear if he even liked the finished product. The only comment I’ve found was him obliquely referring to it as “a film that got away.” None of its music appears to have been revisited in any of his concert tours. He seemed to have some affection for the collaborative composition process though, as he released an album of demos and unused tracks two months later as “a diary of ideas developed over time. It’s nice to not have it disappear in a rubbish bin.” Maybe he liked being able to inject his love of the band Massive Attack into a superhero score; note the stylistic similarities this music has with what band member Neil Davidge had written for the Halo 4 video game earlier in the decade.
Or perhaps the idea he wanted to try was all the wacky stuff he was doing with rhythm vocalist Loire Colter, whose contributions remain the most intriguing part of the work for me. Given that she was a big part of his most famous score from the 2020-2022 timeframe, he clearly didn’t think Dark Phoenix closed the book on that type of experimentation. Hans had mused about ”how many sunflower scenes Van Gogh [painted] before he was happy” when discussing similarities between Crimson Tide and the later Peacemaker in the 90s, and he still wasn’t done contemplating the various musical possibilities of women singing.
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Next time: Scores that were written and recorded before the pandemic and released in 2020.
You might think “hey, you can see the finish line!” but that would overlook that there are still over 60 works left to go through.
If you want the perfect metaphor for how this has turned into a Sisyphean task, it’s probably me writing over 5,000 words about one of those scores for the last month-plus and not being done yet.
