This is part of a series. The first post for 2011-12 is here - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=112891
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Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) - *½
Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Geoff Zanelli, Tom Gire, John Sponsler,
Mathew Margeson, Guillaume Roussel & Rodrigo Y Gabriela; add’l
arrangements by Jacob Shea, Thomas Bergersen & Nick Phoenix;
orchestrations by B&W Fowler/Moriarty, Liz Finch, Rick Giovinazzo,
Kevin Kaska & Ed Neumeister; orchestra conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith;
choir conducted by Eric Whitacre, Ben Foster, Gavin Greenaway & Matt Dunkley;
featured guitar Rodrigo Y Gabriela; featured cello Martin Tillman; ‘Mermaids’ by
Zimmer & Whitacre; technical music assistants Phill Boucher, Joerg Huettner,
Josh Lynch & Jason Soudah; thank you to Jasha Klebe
RC discovery #79.
Zimmer at the At World’s End premiere in 2007: “Four very intense years. Tonight is the end of my career in pirate movies.”
Despite lingering fatigue from the prior Pirates sequels, audiences still showed up in droves for another Jack Sparrow adventure, quickly catapulting the movie to enormous box office returns. But gone was the sense of mischief and intricate action sequences and visual effects innovations that director Gore Verbinski had brought to the proceedings, and the film is now generally regarded as the weakest in the franchise, if not an outright misfire (no new major characters returned in the next entry). Arguably the biggest contributor returning after Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush was Hans Zimmer (in spite of his earlier comments), whose infamous late-night composing session eight years earlier had accidentally birthed a film music juggernaut.
The music for the third film in the series was perhaps the high water mark (sorry) of Zimmer’s collaborations with Jerry Bruckheimer, a surprisingly orchestral and romantic pivot for a franchise that had previously channeled the electronic, muscular feel of Hans’ Media Ventures days. On Stranger Tides would be an unfortunate retrenchment. Despite Zimmer’s claims that he tried to leave his synths and processed sounds at home this time, the resulting music drifted back to the bloated, bass-heavy sound of yesteryear. Note the Blackbeard theme, a relentlessly hammering idea that sounded like Remote Control on autopilot, as well as an almost hilariously overblown theme for the Spanish. It felt like a work bereft of inspiration, save maybe for the use of guitar duo Rodrigo Y Gabriela and the mermaid material that featured contributions from famed choral composer/conductor Eric Whitacre. And there was another problem: in several cases the music was just too BIG for the sequences. An early fight between Jack and Angelica was scored like the world was ending. Not helping matters was the overbearingly loud theatrical music mix.
The album was an astonishing failure that made the frustrating album for Dead Man’s Chest look like a masterpiece by comparison. 30 minutes are remixes. Nine minutes are “theme ideas” by Rodrigo Y Gabriela, and another five cover their interpretation of the mermaid theme. The opening track from the film is the second-to-last score track on the album. What’s left does include Zimmer’s attractive Angelica suite, as well as the Mermaid suite and some related action material. But you also have to wade through cut-and-paste applications of the Black Pearl theme (in a movie where that ship isn’t full size!), the undead theme pulled from The Rock, a secondary Davy Jones melody, and portions of Beckett’s defeat from At World’s End. And most listeners will likely find Palm Tree Escape and End Credits to be little more than familiar tracks with guitars layered over them.
The complete score has its benefits, including some sprightly early material. And a significant amount of alternate or revised tracks hewed more closely to the music of the earlier films, suggesting at some point the studio or filmmakers got nervous about deviating too far from what had already worked, which helps paint Zimmer in a slightly better light. Still, that doesn’t excuse the outright laziness of, say, the music for the early carriage chase through London which bizarrely resurrects the primary melody associated with the not-at-all-present Davy Jones villain from the other sequels (which, at least for me, ranked pretty high on the unintentional comedy scale when I saw the film in theaters). And the full work reveals even more depressing recycling of the various themes for the earlier Beckett villain as identities for the British and Barbossa; the ideas are arguably overexposed and exhibit none of the inventive variations Zimmer and team unleashed in the prior film such as the Jack & Beckett negotiation scene.
The mix is all over the place too. You get that obnoxious Jack / Angelica sword fight track with an almost unison sound, but then also tracks where an individual bassoon line is discernible. Weren’t we supposed to have left these inconsistencies behind with the first film’s score, which at least had the understandable affliction of being recorded in three different studios?
Zimmer liked working with director Rob Marshall. “He doesn’t make me feel foolish about my foolish ideas and he makes me feel good about my good ideas.” But that was cold comfort for score fans, who came expecting either the transgressive thrills of the first two Pirates scores or the exquisite highlights of the third one and instead got served a smorgasbord of half-baked leftovers. When has anything so loud ever been so boring? Like much of the film, the score reeks of indifference rendered at a colossal scale. If it wasn’t for the utterly intoxicating mermaid / Fountain of Youth theme, I might’ve given this a FRISBEE rating.
The score would mark the final Remote Control appearance of composer John Sponsler. Partner Tom Gire would contribute a later summer blockbuster, after which the duo would return to trailer music.
Cowboys & Aliens (2011) - ***
Harry Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Halli Cauthery; orchestrated by Ladd McIntosh;
solo vocalist Lisbeth Scott; electric cello Martin Tillman; guitars Heitor Pereira, George Doering
& Tony Clarke; add’l drum programming by Hybrid & Anthony Lledo
RC discovery #80.
“A collision of genres was always going to be polarizing and I started not to get caught up in whether this felt cowboy or alien.”
Essentially taking the premise of the movie Krull (advanced aliens invade the Middle Ages) and transporting it to the Wild West, Cowboys & Aliens was possibly the biggest box office bomb of summer 2011 despite boasting the starpower of Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford. Director Jon Favreau had tended to use John Debney as his composer but in this instance went with Harry Gregson-Williams, who was coming off of a tremendous year. “Normally I might be dealing with a director and an editor bi-weekly and then intermittently with a producer or head of a studio. But on this occasion, because it was Universal putting it out [with] Paramount, there was a two-week period before I got the score where a lot of people had to be a part of this. We got through that and there were a lot of good things that came from those playbacks. But it was time-consuming and kind of scary.”
This score would seem to be a work of extreme compromise, one not leaning too much in either a Western or science fiction direction, not really hitting you over the head with memorable themes, and also not exactly leaning in to Gregson-Williams’ distinctive style (arguably it could’ve used more of his electric instrument collaborators in the soundscape). Harry would admit he struggled with finding the right tone. “I started in December of the previous year. Come May of that year—whew. I’d really beaten myself up and tried forever to get to a certain spot, and I still wasn’t there.” But also playing a part was the heavy tinkering the film underwent in post-production. “Huge chunks of the film were coming out, and it was becoming streamlined and fine-cut. And I thought I’d already lived it, in terms of a score’s life, and I had to energize myself to do it once again. That was very tricky.”
It’s a minor miracle the score turned out fine enough. But it was still surprisingly anonymous.
The Sims 3: Generations (2011) - **
Steve Jablonsky; add’l music by Pieter Schlosser
RC discovery #81. Jablonsky would return to the franchise he’d done two prior expansions for. If you liked the chipper, pseudo-Elfman library music feel of earlier Jablonsky efforts in the series, you’ll probably like this one too.
Your Highness (2011) - ***½
Steve Jablonsky; ambient music design Clay Duncan; orchestrated by Suzette Moriarty, Penka Kouneva, Geoff Stradling &
Frank Macchia; technical score advisor Nathan Whitehead; thank you to Hans Zimmer & Harry Gregson-Williams
RC discovery #82.
Possibly the only stoner sword & sorcery comedy in existence, Your Highness would be thrashed by critics and ignored by audiences, only really reappearing in pop culture whenever star James Franco had to make fun of it. But for composer Steve Jablonsky it was an opportunity to extend his Transformers action style into the fantasy realm, with a notable uptick in orchestral flourishes, flowing themes, and a dash of 80s electronica. You could question why a bunch of modern anachronisms were showing up in a story set in the Middle Ages, but that would seem to miss the irreverence of the movie that Jablonsky was working with. It wasn’t the most unique score (lots of chugging recurring string rhythms and familiar “epic” chord shifts), but it was tons of spirited fun and probably the most impressive thing Jablonsky had done since Steamboy.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) - **½
Steve Jablonsky; add’l music by Jacob Shea & Andrew Kawczynski; add’l arrangements by Nathan Whitehead & Tom Gire;
ambient music design by Clay Duncan & Stephen Hilton; music programming by Todd Haberman & Pieter Schlosser;
orchestrated by B&WFowler/Moriarty, Rick Giovinazzo, Kevin Kaska, Ed Neumeister & Penka Kouneva;
orchestra conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith; choir conducted by Gavin Greenaway; synth programming Jay Flood;
cello by Martin Tillman; thank you to Hans Zimmer, Harry Gregson-Williams, Lorne Balfe & Atli Örvarsson
RC discovery #83.
“They’ll sometimes pitch the sound to match my music. In one scene, there’s a helicopter - Michael wanted the sound of the blades - and I went ‘oh my god, the blades are in the tempo of my music!’ so that subliminally it’s not clashing. I don’t know if anyone in the audience will notice that. But it’s key for composers on movies like this: get to know your sound designers.”
I was in Chicago when the third Transformers film was being shot, and it was legitimately awesome looking down a street and seeing the gigantic sets they had crafted out of the city’s streets - rubble, weaponry, and vast chunks of Transformers strewn across the roads. A friend claimed that from her office window she saw Michael Bay make Shia LeBouf run up the same stairwell over 20 times. The resulting Chicago battle sequence would help make Dark of the Moon titanically successful at the box office, and if it wasn’t exactly a critical darling it was at least recognized as being better than the desultory Revenge of the Fallen. Composer Steve Jablonsky would return to the franchise, but while he maintained some of the general style of his prior two scores in the series he would largely avoid their themes (at least on the hour-long album, which actually spends about half of its runtime on the suites Jablonsky wrote before composing to picture). The end result played like Remote Control library music, which made for an album that was generally easy to listen to but also a bit dull thanks to how predictable it felt.
One track would seem to copy Zack Hemsey’s track Mind Heist which was notably used in the trailer for Inception - and you’d better believe Hemsey had something to say about it that summer! “Someone is selling a Mind Heist impostor on iTunes as part of the contents of the Transformers 3 score. Maybe my song was temped in by the director or producers and forcibly shoved on Jablonsky, and maybe Jablonsky even protested the instruction to rip it off…or maybe Jablonsky just thought ‘hey, Mind Heist would sound really good here.’ I'm an independent artist, with no record label or studio backing. My albums don't go platinum, and I don't make anywhere near the money of a successful feature film composer. Add to that the fact that I don't have any assistants at all (let alone the army that is customary on a feature film score), nor the privilege of working with a live orchestra…and still, Mind Heist beats this rip-off to death.”
The rock band Linkin Park would once again appear, this time with a new song Iridescent that was adapted by Jablonsky as the film’s love theme. Oddly, the album wouldn’t include any of those references.
Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011) - ****½
Hans Zimmer & John Powell; add’l music by Lorne Balfe, Dominic Lewis & Paul Mounsey; supervising orchestrator
John Ashton Thomas; add’l orchestrators Dave Metzger, Rick Giovinazzo, Andrew Kinney, Gavin Greenaway, Tommy
Laurence & Germaine Franco; score technical engineers Thomas Broderick, Victor Chaga, Chuck Choi, Andrew
Kawczynski & John Traunwieser; conducted by Gavin Greenaway; thank you to Bob Badami, Matt Dunkley & Jasha Klebe
Blessed with a sinister villain, creative visuals, a vibrant use of color (especially red), and astonishing action sequences, Kung Fu Panda 2 was considered a worthy follow-up to its smash hit predecessor from 2008. Returning along with the voice cast and Jennifer Yuh Nelson (head of story on the first film, now promoted to director) would be co-composers Hans Zimmer and John Powell to provide more funky, Eastern-inflected adventure tunes. A different troupe of additional composers would be involved this time, including Lorne Balfe (the use of 7/8 time in several tracks recalls his contributions to Megamind). The gang would outdo themselves; even with some expected copy/paste, the work exhibited satisfying new takes on the existing themes for kung fu, Po, and the Furious Five as well as a menacing idea for the villain Shen and a number of jaw-dropping extended action tracks.
It made for an addictive joy of an album, even with a credits remix by Junkie XL threatening to sour things for some listeners.
Powell wouldn’t return for the third film. Its production schedule possibly overlapped with his sabbaticals from film scoring, though an interview in 2014 suggested he might’ve just felt done with the franchise (“there are plenty of people who can do that”).
The Smurfs (2011) - **½
Heitor Pereira; add’l music by John Jennings Boyd & Guillaume Roussel; orchestrated by Bruce Fowler,
Ladd Mcintosh, Jennifer Hammond & Geoff Stradling; conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith
RC discovery #84.
Sony Animation’s live action/CGI adaptation of the famed 80s kids cartoon was rancidly reviewed but (alas) financially successful, perhaps owing to copying the Dreamworks formula of having very famous people as voice actors. Heitor Pereira, coming off of the success of Despicable Me, would get another chance to stretch his wings in animation. The result would be a largely straightforward orchestral romp, with some injections of caper jazz, fantasy, guitars, and Celtic tones. Oh, and whistling too.
It’s all over the place in the way that, say, John Debney family adventure music sometimes goes. Sometimes that results in entertaining tracks (The Vortex), but a lot of it will probably go in one ear and out the other. Helping matters was that it wasn’t a retread of the Dreamworks “house style”. Not helping matters was the thinness of the sound; it’s tough to tell if it’s a result of how the work was written or mixed, but regardless you’ll be reminded of that late 90s / early aughts “MIDI orchestration” sound.
Fright Night (2011) - ***
Ramin Djawadi; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman & Tony Blondal; conducted by Tim Davies; choir conducted by Jasper Randall;
electric cello Cameron Stone; electric violin Lili Haydn; technical score advisor Brandon Campbell; thank you to Hans Zimmer
RC discovery #85.
This remake of a well-regarded 1980s horror film about a teenage boy discovering his neighbor is a vampire got decent reviews but did marginal business at the box office. Director Craig Gillespie has tended to bounce to a new composer with each project; for this one he enlisted Ramin Djawadi. Djawadi’s music would largely dwell in grim tones and nervy suspense standard to the genre, with a few moments of pseudo-gothic grandeur and a brief deviation into rock ‘n roll. It wasn’t the most distinctive work, but it was definitely a step up from the stingers and atmospheres of his music for the earlier horror film The Unborn.
X-Men: First Class (2011) - ***
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Christopher Willis, Matthew Margeson & Dominic Lewis;
orchestrated by Stephan Coleman; John Ashton Thomas & Noah Sorota; conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith;
score technical engineer Alex Belcher; technical assistants Jason Soudah, Victor Chaga & Ben Robinson;
thank you to Hans Zimmer & John Powell
RC discovery #86.
“There wasn’t a fixed theme that ran through the Powell, Ottman and Kamen scores. If that had been the case then I think it would have been weird to depart radically. But there wasn’t a general onus to take any particular tone. I started off somewhat in the Alan Silvestri vein - Van Helsing, florid orchestration. But that was before I’d seen a lot of footage. Matthew’s very anarchic, and he’s like, ‘Oh I know you can write big film music, but let’s just do something else. Come up with something else.’ The symphonic cues didn’t serve the movie quite as well as the simpler stuff that had more of a rock feel to it. So I threw that in the trash.”
One can imagine an alternate universe where Monsters vs. Aliens and Gulliver’s Travels were bigger hits and the partnership between Henry Jackman and director Rob Letterman is still going strong. Instead, Matthew Vaughan’s Kick-Ass was a critical and commercial success, and while that film’s music production had been a mess (featuring work by Jackman & team, John Murphy and Marius de Vries, plus a track by Danny Elfman) Vaughan had clearly liked what he had heard from Jackman to bring him on board for his groovy X-Men prequel First Class, possibly the best film in the franchise up until then.
It would be the first full score that truly sounded like Jackman finding his own voice, as elements of it would inform many of his works over the rest of the decade (those sprightly string ostinatos, the occasional use of sonic distortions, etc.). Granted, it would end up a more stylistically engaging score than a powerfully thematic one; the new, gradually building musical idea for the team would be appropriately rousing without being terribly memorable (possibly by design, as Vaughan felt the characters were “finding themselves” for much of the film), while the simplistic-sounding Magneto theme would get the job done (and be mixed quite loudly in the film) without being terribly malleable. And one climactic track would hew almost hilariously close to Journey to the Line from The Thin Red Line. Still, it made for a fun score that balanced modern style with snippets of sophistication (a brief choral outburst would have shades of the horror music creepiness of Christopher Young, a composer whom Jackman has expressed admiration for).
Jackman could’ve written a more traditional score if left to his own devices, but instead the very direct nature of First Class reiterated what various scores for Bruckheimer films had proved in the 90s and aughts: film composers are ultimately at the mercy of their collaborators’ preferences. “If you only have a classical background but then you find yourself doing a score with a more restricted harmonic language—so that it becomes more pop or rock—if you don’t know what you’re doing it can get a little clumsy. But if you’ve made records—and I’ve spent a lot of time making records...A lot of pop songs don’t have a lot of chords in them. It’s not about how clever your chords are, how sexy the woodwinds and orchestrations are. It’s about other stuff. The discipline comes in the construction of sounds, and texture (not symphonic texture). So the fact that I’ve done a lot of that helped.”
Note: I found the Magneto theme obnoxious when I saw the film in theaters. It’s really not that bad. Shame on me.
“I made a folder in my iTunes called Treasure Chest, which is all the music which never got used. They don’t have a real orchestra but they’re finished pieces. There is about four and a half hours of music in there (laughs). Some of it is definitely better than others. It’s just that it was not synchronous with the intention of the filmmaker. It might come in handy on a rainy day.”
This would be the first credited appearance of regular Jackman team member Alex Belcher, another Berklee College of Music alum who’s now mostly known now for his contributions to Jackman’s more drone-like action scores - though it wasn’t the first job he helped on. “I grew up in a small town in south central Kentucky and from an early age I studied music - trumpet, violin, piano and guitar. I wanted to pursue music as a career. I went to college as a music major and kind of stumbled into film composing. After college I moved to LA and got really lucky that within about a month I got a job at Remote Control and met Henry. This was around 2009 or 2010, and he was looking for some help on Winnie the Pooh. We have been collaborators since then.”
Winnie the Pooh (2011) - ***½
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Christopher Willis; orchestrated by John Ashton Thomas;
technical assistants Edward Bainton & Alex Belcher; songs by Robert Lopez & Kristen Anderson-Lopez
& Zooey Deschanel; songs co-produced by Matthew Ward; songs arranged by Doug Besterman
RC discovery #87.
“It’s all about harmony and orchestration and melody, and has nothing whatsoever to do with cool noise and production or anything. I almost deliberately wrote a score that could have been written anytime between 1940 and 2011. If someone’s listening to X-Men and Winnie the Pooh, I wanted it to be so extreme that you’d assume it has to be someone else who did the other one.”
A charming but underseen continuation of the classic A. A. Milne characters, this film would end up as the last traditionally animated feature film released theatrically by Disney. The filmmakers would enlist the husband and wife songwriting team of Robert Lopez & Kristen Anderson-Lopez (then perhaps better known for their individual works like puppet musical Avenue Q) to mimic the Sherman Brothers sound of Disney features past, with Zooey Deschanel’s singing bolstering the winsome feel of it all. Along for the ride was composer Henry Jackman. “One thing I was worried about when I showed up is, ‘I wonder if they tried to do something where there’s been some marketing meeting and Pooh’s going to have an iPod and be using colloquial language.’ And the exact opposite happened. It was rooted in everything that we love about Winnie the Pooh— nostalgia, hand-drawn, looked like the woods that I grew up near. It’s England before they built the motorways and the KFCs. That idealized fantasy of a perfect childhood affected the music.”
Jackman wouldn’t quite duplicate the sound of the original cartoons but would write something that was at least their close cousin. Channeling more of his symphonic education (Jackman would cite composers like Vaughan Williams and Dukas when interviewed), the composer would produce a chamber-sized work of lighter, whimsical music. It’s not the most memorable score, nor does it interact much with the songs (also true of other Disney works with songs by the Lopezes), but you’ll be utterly charmed by the classic Hollywood feel of it and be glad you visited the Hundred Acre Woods one more time.
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Next time: “I phoned and said, ‘road trip.’”
