> Dune (2021) - ***

> Hans, talking to editor Joe Walker in November 2021 about their
> experiences with this film - “You did say, ‘Maybe we can move away from
> D minor for just a little bit.’”

> Me, describing this film in 2021 - “DOON”

Was the whole 'DOON' thing something you came up with or was it from something? Remember getting a mild kick out of seeing you constantly refer to the movie/score as that.

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

> The demo album was a truly uncompromising collection of ideas. Many
> weren’t even designed to be enjoyable, including raspy gasps right at the
> start and the ear-splitting noise that dominates the Mind-killer
> track. Hans acknowledged “it’s pretty provocative. It barks at you, and
> then it bites you.” He’d frequently referred to many of his
> suggestions for earlier scores as revolutionary or dangerous or crazy or
> insane or bold, only for the end product to not be that far removed from
> the bounds of normality, but those proclamations were rather accurate at
> times with this work. Hans even did staggeringly complicated things with
> harmony, though not in easily discernible ways. Few really knew what to
> make of the demo album. I first listened to it while nursing a massive
> hangover the morning after a friend’s wedding, which may have been the
> best way to absorb this alternatingly soothing and abrasive creation. I
> found it both astonishing and confounding, though I knew even in the midst
> of my gradually diminishing headache that there was no sense in rendering
> an opinion about the work until I heard the actual music written to
> picture. It would turn out to deviate in several ways from the sketchbook
> album, and not always for the better.

When everyone else was losing their minds over the concept album and even reviewing It already, I held firm to 'I'll withhold final judgment until I hear *the film score*'. Turns out, what eventually made it into the finished picture was far FAR better than the tedious cluster of noise that was the concept album.

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

> First, it devoted substantially more of its runtime to the undulating
> theme that was ostensibly for House Harkonnen but was also applied to
> other darker parts of the film. “It’s my deepest, blackest heart, and
> all it takes is a German and a fuzzbox to do that one.” It wasn’t a
> bad theme, but it also wasn’t that far removed from bad guy ideas from
> earlier Hans scores (think Commodus in Gladiator or the villain
> material in the Langdon films), which made its frequent use a minor
> disappointment in what was framed as a wildly different creative
> enterprise.

> Second, the loose thematic attribution would carry over into other parts
> of the film, thus extending the ambient approach to music Denis had wanted
> on Blade Runner 2049. “It felt more interesting to, like an
> impressionist painter, come up with different colors as opposed to the
> normal, ‘here’s the love theme, here’s one for the car crash.' Lady
> Jessica might not be in the next scene, but her words might echo into
> [it].” (In a funny way, that last point makes this work somewhat of a
> sequel to Crimson Tide, where the near-omnipresent choir was used
> by Hans to suggest the distant but deadly Russian threat) The score was a
> perfect fit for the director’s aesthetic, but maybe too perfect; in
> having intentionally alien sounds float across the movie in an
> occasionally abstract fashion, Hans’ music seemed to reinforce the
> audience’s emotional distance from the characters.

> Third, the score felt grimmer and darker on average than the sketchbook
> did. That’s not to say it was a quieter score by any stretch of the
> imagination; it is arguably the most colossal contemplative score in
> cinema history. But the more operatic, serene, and shimmering aspects of
> Hans’ demo ideas seem to have been largely discarded in favor of doubling
> down on brutal, stark music that matched the barren landscape - drones n’
> tones, if you will. The prog rock joys of the bagpipes are largely
> relegated to source music in an early scene and a brief quote in a midfilm
> battle. Not to mention that there’s an obnoxious thumping heartbeat effect
> in a few passages, which may have been appropriate for the film but spoils
> every album track it appears in.

> Fourth, while nearly every theme idea from the sketchbook is carried over,
> few of them really evolve, which makes the back half of the long score
> album (and especially its largely drifting and hazy last 20 minutes) a
> challenge, as the music is basically sitting in the same place that it was
> at the beginning. As with Zack Snyder’s Justice League and a few
> other works covered in this rundown, it’s an open question if playing the
> 22 tracks on the album at random would really change one’s perception of
> the score’s narrative. For all the thought and weird new sounds, the end
> product was at times surprisingly predictable for Hans and occasionally
> quite dull. It suggested that the composer was operating with the same
> kind of logic he’d applied to assignments like Widows in this era
> where he thought the filmmaking was so high quality that he didn’t need to
> do as much melodically or narratively as he would on a more mid-tier film.
> Additional music compiled for an album meant to accompany a book about the
> filmmaking process would take that ambience to its absolute extreme.

The hazy thematic applications was one of the major 'eeehh' factors for me but I don't consider it too much of a detriment. House Atredis, House Harkkonan (sorry if I butchered the spelling) and the Main theme/Paul theme are distinct enough to carry much of the score in my opinion. Also, I had already made peace with the fact that hazy, minimalist soundscapes was what Villeneuve always wanted so we probably weren't getting 'Lawerence of Arabia in space' despite my little soundtrack loving heart going pitter-patter at the idea.

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

> Dune was the natural endpoint - or for all we know just a midpoint
> - of the evolution of Hans’ approach in this era towards creating
> soundscapes instead of more traditional theme and variation scoring. It
> was no surprise how divisive the music was. It had its supporters,
> including those in the IFMCA who gave Hans a nomination for best film
> score for the second straight year, but also plenty of frustrated film
> score fans and websites like Filmtracks which lamented that (just like
> with Blade Runner 2049) the score seemed laser-focused on ambient
> sound design aligned to a visual aesthetic at the expense of hitting on
> other elements of the narrative or doing any of the other normal functions
> of film music. Yet unlike Man of Steel, where reactions to the
> music seemed to fall into one of two ardent camps, the score for
> Dune seemed to leave plenty of folks in the middle; both MMUK and
> Movie-Wave published reviews that suggested their authors were equal parts
> fascinated and perplexed.

And then there was me, who once again found himself at the seemingly opposite end of the reviewer spectrum of unabashedly liking DOON. Currently re-listening to the soundtrack album and yep, I'd still give this the rating I did in 2021.

My review of Dune (2021):
https://soundtrack-universe.blogspot.com/2021/09/dune-speed-review.html

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

> Next time: “It just wasn’t right.” “Massive change in
> direction.” “I wish we could have spent more time together.”
> “I’m not convinced any of my work will make it through to release.”
> “A yes used to be a yes.” “I'm not very amused.” The post
> I’ve been working on for four months; it’s the most deeply-researched and
> longest score write-up of this rundown, and also its most insane story.

Oh, clearly this is referring to The Son.