This is part of a series. The second post for 2011-12 is here - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113009
-----------------------
Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure (2011) - ***
Lorne Balfe; theme by Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Andrew
Kawczynski & Peter G. Adams; add’l arrangements by Stephen Hilton
RC discovery #88.
After years of avoiding video games, Zimmer would follow up overseeing 2009’s Modern Warfare 2 with writing the theme for Activision’s toy-based platform game Skylanders, with Lorne Balfe and a handful of assistants overseeing the full score. “I love doing children’s projects. ‘Hey Dad, I heard your music, it wasn’t so bad.’ One of the advantages of being a musician is you aren’t supposed to grow up. It’s fun to draw on myths / ancient ideas.” The predominantly sampled, quasi-medieval music would be an anonymous-but-entertaining romp that was the halfway point between the Dreamworks Animation house style and the jubilant keyboard tunes of Zimmer’s early Hollywood scores. It narrowly avoided tripping into obnoxiously twee territory. You’ll hear it, you’ll like it, you’ll forget about it. The franchise would be enormously successful, and Balfe would return for several sequel scores.
Assassin's Creed: Revelations (2011) - *** (Balfe portion)
In-game music by Jesper Kyd; main theme, cutscene music & multiplayer music by Lorne Balfe;
add’l music by Andrew Kawczynski & Steve Mazzaro; add’l arrangements by Max Aruj, Jasha Klebe
& Catherine Wilson; digital instrument design by Mark Wherry; conducted by Samuli Örnströmer
RC discovery #89.
“I think the whole process was around five months. I was brought on far later into the game process than usual. Unlike the next game where I am right at the beginning and writing whilst they create gameplay and cutscenes.”
Assassin’s Creed would be the next video game franchise to pivot towards the Zimmer sound. Game composer Jesper Kyd had provided all the music for the games so far, but after the team at Ubisoft liked the music Lorne Balfe had written for the trailer for Brotherhood at the 2010 E3 game convention they offered him the opportunity to score the cutscenes for Revelations, give the game a main theme, and even write music for the multiplayer mode (Kyd would still provide the in-game music). The result was an unsurprising mix of everything we’d heard from the MV/RC crew in movie and gaming action in the last ten years, but it was executed with panache, definitely wasn’t mixed in a way that the sound was too bass-heavy or synthetic, and even had some lovely vocal work too. The score would be released as 3 digital albums covering 2 hours and 40 minutes, half of which was Balfe’s contribution. If you want to chart Balfe’s evolution into the guy who wrote the music for His Dark Materials, start here.
This was the first credited RC appearance of Steve Mazzaro, who had been creating digital covers of pre-existing scores at London Music Works and would go on to play a significant role in many Hans Zimmer scores in the next era. “When I was younger I used to play a lot of video games. One of my favorites was Final Fantasy - all of them. The thing I loved the most was the music. Nobuo Uematsu knew how to take very few sounds and create a world with them. When I was 13 my parents got me a computer and I was hunting for all these sounds, and just fell in love with writing from there. I moved out to Los Angeles when I was 18 right after high school. I started getting little games, short films, nothing major.
Silva Screen found me and [said] why don’t you mock up samples and make it sound like a real orchestra? With Hans’ music it’s very fabricated, in that there’s a lot of synth in the background fine-tuned to what you’re hearing, so I got really good at that. I was still working as a file clerk at a law firm [and] L.A. is not cheap, [so] I was going to move back to Ohio and work remotely. And then two weeks before I was about to leave I got an email from Hans’ assistant. ‘Hi Steve, Hans would like to speak with you.’ My immediate thought was, ‘Ok, I’m being sued!’ But I called and he said, ‘I heard this thing you did. I think it’s really good. Are you in town?’ So I cancelled my ticket!”
This was also the first credited RC appearance of Max Aruj, who like Jim Dooley and Tina Guo had graduated from USC’s Thornton School of Music. “I started out by playing piano, jazz and classical, and then hanging out with my friends where we made a short film. I was the worst actor ever. I was also in rock bands with my buddies, in my mind the way a kid should get into music. With each movie and game it’s like writing a symphony – it’s not just 12 singles – it’s an hour of music that’s all connected and needs to evolve. To do multiple projects a year takes a lot of work and focus and with Lorne you learn how to do that.”
Gears of War 3 (2011) - **½
Steve Jablonsky; add’l music by Jacob Shea, Pieter Schlosser &
Nathan Whitehead; orchestrated by Penka Kouneva & Philip Klein
RC discovery #90. If you were a huge fan of Jablonsky’s prior Gears of War or Transformers scores then you’ll probably like this too. But the overall style was becoming a tad stale at this point.
Immortals (2011) - ***
Trevor Morris; add’l music by Steve Davis, Todd Haberman & T.J. Lindgren; ambient music design
Diego Stocco; orchestrated by Jeff Atmajian, Andrew Kinney, Jon Kull, Patrck Russ & David Slonaker
RC discovery #91.
“Melodic assignment to the lead can be a little bit ‘on the nose’ in modern film scoring. So rather than give a tune to the hero, I assigned a melody to the idea of immortality, because everything Theseus is doing is leading him toward being immortal.”
Director Tarsem Singh would deliver another visually striking but narratively questionable film with his Greek gods epic Immortals. Composer Trevor Morris ended up on the project after his music from the Showtime miniseries The Pillars of the Earth was used in the temp track. His score was a mixed bag. It was frustratingly one of the earliest post-Inception scores to heavily feature a BRAM as part of its soundscape, even if Morris and the director had a decent rationale behind doing so. “I love a good ‘bad guy’ theme, but it didn’t work for Mickey Rourke. He has a quiet menace the whole time, but you just know at any moment’s notice he’ll kill anybody about anything. So I came up with [a] growly, low, aleatoric kind of ‘soup’ Tarsem could put under anything.” But other moments impressed with their choral grandeur, noble stretches, and striking instrumental solos.
As Remote Control-influenced epic music of this era went, it was probably on par with Clash of the Titans, if perhaps a tad superior. Around half of the large score (including two tracks which strayed close to Bram Stoker’s Dracula territory and several busy vocal stretches that recalled 160 BPM from Zimmer’s Angels & Demons) would make the album. “If you look at The Tudors or Pillars of the Earth, I’m within seconds of the CD maximum. I wish CDs were able to hold 100 minutes of music. I would put every cue on there and call it a day. (Laughs) Relativity felt very strongly that they didn’t want to do that. So we had a bit of a bargaining process.”
Puss in Boots (2011) - ****½
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Dominic Lewis & Matthew Margeson; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman,
John Ashton Thomas & Tommy Laurence; score technical engineer Alex Belcher; asst. score technical engineer
Ben Robinson; thank you to Hans Zimmer, John Powell, Gavin Greenaway, Germaine Franco & Pedro Eustache
“If you hit too many things directly and too many per minute, then you start falling into the cartoon trap, which undermines the film. If you were in the middle of Legends of the Fall, you wouldn’t dream of hitting something just because Brad Pitt’s putting his glass on the table. If you have an emotional beat—[like when] Humpty has betrayed Puss—you treat it like any betrayal scene in an actual movie. You take it seriously. You don’t write a cue and go, ‘Well, I’ll water it down a bit, it’s only an animated film.’”
This spin-off of the beloved supporting character from Dreamworks’ Shrek 2 turned out far better than many expected, especially given the decline in the quality of the later Shrek films as well as this film’s potentially awkward combination of Zorro pastiche, Jack and the Beanstalk lore, and…Humpty Dumpty? It wasn’t perfect (a climactic confrontation with a giant rampaging goose was unsatisfying), but it was still a critical and commercial success. For Henry Jackman, the film’s release came near the end of a busy year, with this, X-Men: First Class, and Winnie the Pooh (as well as the next year’s Man on a Ledge which was also written in 2011) establishing him as someone who could channel his myriad musical influences into a wide variety of genres. “It was important to get the marriage between elements right. If everything is too orchestral, you’re missing that Spanish beat. If the whole score is flamenco guitar, castanets, and shakers, you miss the richness of symphonic score. What defines the Iberian quality is the harmony and the inflections. You can take the Puss theme off the guitar and put it onto an orchestra and still retain that. If you think about jazz, there’s what you might call “pure” jazz with Duke Ellington, but Gershwin’s An American in Paris can have a jazz influence.”
The score certainly wasn’t shy about its influences. “Halfway through, I was listening to Also sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben. You’d never think I’d be listening to stuff like that for a movie like Puss in Boots. But it’s a testament to the variety in the film. I’ll be thinking about Sergio Leone films, and then legitimately 26 minutes later it might behoove me to have a listen to a Strauss tone poem. It’s all in there.” Astute listeners might also pick up on hints of James Horner’s Mask of Zorro and the classical music that informed it, the animated adventure music of John Powell (his primary orchestrator was part of the team), and even an intentional tip of the hat to Ennio Morricone with a very Spaghetti Western whistle. But Jackman managed to weave all these elements together with flair while still giving the score plenty of its own personality, while also making the fairy tale and Iberian elements sound cohesive enough that the score didn’t sound schizophrenic when it pivoted to different settings.
Helping were three knockout themes. A spirited, Zorro-like melody for the titular character wasn’t the most original theme of the year, but dang if it wasn’t also among the catchiest. “I came out of a preview and walked up to a piano and the whole theme just happened immediately.” A malleable theme for the hero’s relationship with Humpty would entertain in both lighthearted and tragic settings. And an ascendant fantasy idea would gorgeously unfurl in the middle of the film before its first four notes were converted into menacing variations for that giant goose. Spirited contributions from the guitar duo Rodrigo Y Gabriela (including two of their preexisting recordings) would be the icing on this outrageously entertaining musical cake.
“The grass is always greener. If I spent my career only doing fantasy movies, then every time I saw a movie like The Town or The Dark Knight I’d be like, ‘Ugh, when am I going to stop with Williams- and Silvestri-influenced orchestra and get down to intense contemporary music?’ Conversely, if you spent your entire time doing thrillers it’d be like, ‘Ugh, when am I going to get to unleash my Harry Potter chops?’ If you eat steak all the time, at some point you’re going to fantasize about a Caesar salad.”
Arthur Christmas (2011) - ****
Harry Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Halli Cauthery & Chris Bacon; add’l arrangements by Philip Klein & Hybrid;
orchestrated by Ladd McIntosh & Jennifer Hammond; conducted by Gregson-Williams & Nick Ingman
“If Hans’ is an industry, mine is very much a cottage industry. It’s a small place by the beach, and it’s very much a family.”
Aardman’s second computer animated feature proved much more successful than their first one (Flushed Away), charming critics and audiences with a tale of Santa Claus’ kids trying to deliver a missed present. Composers Michael Giacchino (no stranger to animated films after multiple Pixar entries) and Adam Cohen (who’d orchestrated a few Giacchino scores and scored the TV series Psych) were originally tagged to film, but for whatever reason their score was tossed and Harry Gregson-Williams (no stranger to doing music for Aardman) was brought in with about a month left to write 75 minutes of music. The result was a serene holiday joy. Sure, a few suspense bits suggest Alan Silvestri was in the temp track (probably an inevitability since the man had written two animated Christmas scores in the past 8 years). But Harry’s themes were charming and exultant in equal measure, with several big sweeping moments, and the rhythmic “elves on a mission” spy music was a fun diversion. And the orchestration often had that delightful “spirit of the season” feel without tipping into festive pastiche. “I had this cue when Arthur’s trying to deliver this present. I had this banging orchestration and some loopy drums. It seemed to drive the scene. And [the] director said, ‘Listen, the music, keep it. Everything else, junk it. Can you just check a list of Christmassy?’ So a tubular bell, a triangle, a tambourine, whatever it was. I ended up with something that sparkles a bit in the film.”
Happy Feet Two (2011) - ***½
John Powell; add’l music, arranging, MIDI orchestration and/or programming by Paul Mounsey, Hélène Muddiman,
Victor Chaga, Michael John Mollo & Beth Caucci; orchestrated by John Ashton Thomas, Dave Metzger, Jessica Wells,
James K. Lee, Angus O'Sullivan, Geri Green, Daniel Baker & Germaine Franco; conducted by Brett Kelly, Brett Weymark &
Dan Walker; LA vocals conducted by Edie Lehmann Boddicker; songs produced by Powell, Wade Robson, T Bone Burnett,
Billy Mann & David Hirschfelder; vocal arrangements by Powell, Boddicker & Carmen Twillie
RC discovery #92.
“Only animation this year. Literally. It’s just come this way - sequels, Lorax I’ve been on a couple of years, these long-term animated musical numbers where you have to come in and out of songs and score.”
This sequel to the 2006 hit animated film would flop critically and commercially, suggesting that a dancing penguin jukebox musical may have not been the best foundation to try to build a franchise on. Composer John Powell was of course involved in the sequel, as he was a huge part of the first entry’s success after working for nearly four years on the songs and score, though surprisingly he wouldn’t carry over many of the memorable score elements. The emperor penguin theme that opened the first film’s first pure score track in haunting choral tones is restricted to a few midfilm performances. Nothing approaches the David Arnold-like magnificence of the aliens theme from the first film or the rock cool of Wives Ho!, the personal themes are gone, and even the slightly anachronistic Latin sounds for the Adélie penguins are minimized.
A new family theme would appear near the end of the initial score track and be treated to a marvelous choral performance to close the film. The two adventurous krill voiced by Brad Pitt and Matt Damon would be supported by an innocent idea often performed on woodwinds and choir which at times suggested an embryonic version of ideas and styles that would be fully unleashed in the second How To Train Your Dragon score a few years later. Some of the new choral music would feel like an oratorio, suggesting Powell may have had his future concert work A Prussian Requiem on the mind. But most of the score was stylistically quite similar to the composer’s many prior works in the genre, and with a hit-and -miss collection of songs it wouldn’t be surprising if this is lower on most folks’ rankings of Powell’s animated works.
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) - ***
Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Lorne Balfe; add’l arranging & programming by Dominic Lewis;
orchestrated by B&W Fowler, Liz Finch, Rick Giovinazzo, Kevin Kaska, Carl Rydlund & Andrew Kinney;
conducted by Gavin Greenaway; Schubert’s Die Forelle tortured by Mel Wesson; Mozart’s Don Giovanni
orchestrated by Matthew Margeson; Strauss II works re-orchestrated by Lewis & Aleksey Igudesman;
sequencer programmer Andrew Kawczynski; technical assistants Jonas Peterson & Jasha Klebe;
thank you to Satnam Ramgotra and…Madeline Albright?
RC discovery #93.
Two years after the smash success of their gritty, offbeat take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective, stars Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law and director Guy Ritchie would return with another action-packed sequel that brought Holmes face-to-face with his archenemy Professor Moriarty (played by Jared Harris, a casting masterstroke and probably the best part of the movie). The film would do well at the box office but get a middling reception from critics, and a third sequel would remain in development hell for the rest of the decade. Composer Hans Zimmer would unsurprisingly return and take the same attitude that he’d taken on many sequels in other franchises - “forget everything we had done on the first film, because I’d done it.” The Sherlock theme and some secondary ideas would recur, with one in an amusing Morricone-like funeral arrangement, but the focus would be largely on new material, making this sequel score almost the polar opposite of the dreadfully derivative On Stranger Tides.
Gypsy music had somewhat informed the first score’s style. Here, Hans would go full gypsy. “On page 5, there is the Gypsy fortune teller. I phoned Guy and said, ‘road trip.’ We went to villages in eastern Slovakia. We’d hear these incredible musicians, but at the same time, we were incredibly moved by and found out more about the lack of opportunities that exist for these communities that are really cut off from the world and not given a voice in government. That became an important part of it. At one point, I had to pick a band. We put them on a train and then a bus, and we took them to Vienna to spend a week or so in the studio. Terrible air conditioning, but technically it was great.” Many of the gypsy ensemble performances would be relegated to source music, although a few of the ensemble’s takes on Zimmer’s Holmes themes would make the album.
Moriarty would be backed by a number of ideas including Zimmer’s attempts at twisting the character’s Schubert fandom, while Sherlock’s brother Mycroft would receive a theme that sounded like a more refined version of the main character’s idea (a clever touch on Zimmer’s part). Several classical works by Mozart, Schubert, and Johann Strauss II would be remixed or rearranged by Zimmer’s team into grimmer, bass-heavy beasts. Never mind a litany of ticking sounds, pitch distortions, and BWAMs, as well as the feeling that there was a synthetic sheen glossed over the mix. Zimmer conceded the work was “lopsided” by design but thought having these “worlds collide constantly was a lot of fun.” But these elements rarely ever interacted, leaving the listener with a disappointingly disparate collection of ideas. It was fine enough, but it lacked its predecessor’s charm.
An added bonus: another album-ending remix.
Dr. Suess’ The Lorax (2012) - ***
John Powell; add’l music, arranging, and/or programming by Paul Mounsey, Beth Caucci,
Victor Chaga & Michael John Mollo; orchestrated by John Ashton Thomas, Dave Metzger,
Andrew Kinney, Rick Giovinazzo, Pete Anthony & Germaine Franco; orchestra conducted by
Pete Anthony; choir conducted by Edie Lehmann Boddicker; score production coordinator Germaine
Franco; songs by Powell, Cinco Paul, Kool Kojak, Tricky Stewart, Ester Dean, Aaron Pearce & Ed Helms
RC discovery #94.
Illumination’s second fully animated feature would adapt Dr. Seuss’ famed environmentalist story, complete with seemingly perfect casting of Danny DeVito as the titular creature. Audiences would make it a moderate hit in spring 2012, though many critics would note that turning the tale into a sleek commercial product may have missed the point of the novel. Composer John Powell was no stranger to Seuss, having done the music for Blue Sky’s Horton Hears A Who! a few years earlier. The score was enjoyable, but also generally indistinguishable from other animated works that Powell had done over the last decade. It felt a bit like the composer on autopilot, suggesting perhaps that there was value in that sabbatical he would start later in the year. But that’s not to say there wasn’t any creativity exhibited! An unused track did result in one of the funniest bits of Powell’s career: fish beatboxing the theme to The Bourne Identity with lyrics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s75JGNwf4Ps
Safe House (2012) - **
Ramin Djawadi; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman & Matt Dunkley; conducted by Gavin Greenaway;
technical score advisors Brandon Campbell & Catherine Wilson; thank you to Hans Zimmer
RC discovery #95.
The makers of this adequately received twisty spy thriller with Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds seem to have asked composer Ramin Djawadi not to stray too far from the modern thriller styles of Harry Gregson-Williams, John Powell, and Brian Tyler. The end result was functional and rarely obnoxious, but largely gave off a feeling of been-there-done-that.
Game of Thrones Season 2 (2012) - ***½
Ramin Djawadi; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman; technical score advisors Brandon Campbell & Catherine Wilson
“In the first season I saw the first two episodes and started working based on what I saw there. In season two I had [more] episodes so I could see where we’re heading [and] plan very well.”
Djawadi would maintain the general style and key themes of the first season (the title theme and those for House Stark, House Baratheon, Danerys, Arya, and the Night’s Watch), so if you weren’t a huge fan of the concept then the music for season 2 wouldn’t change your mind. Still, Djawadi would follow the show’s significant expansion of characters and locations, with the most memorable major new identity being a haunting, repeating four note figure and accompanying weird tones for wannabe king Stannis Baratheon, the lady Melisandre, and the Lord of Light’s religion. “It’s almost like a hybrid of a string instrument with some kind of…not really a flute. You can’t put your finger on it and say what that sound is.” Astute readers will note that his mentor Hans Zimmer was saying something like that decades earlier about Pacific Heights. Djawadi would morph the idea into more brutal variants for episode 9’s Battle of Blackwater, sometimes in counterpoint with the title theme.
Others would include an ascendant theme and rolling string figures for House Greyjoy, as well as a theme for House Lannister that Djawadi intelligently structured to sound like a medieval court song. “One of the first things we discussed was how we can make this score cohesive without trying to capture every character too on the nose. We have a Stark theme, but we did not introduce the Lannister theme until the second season with The Rains of Castamere. Theon had no theme in the first season, but in the second we decided, ok, now it’s time he gets his own theme.”
Also a nice touch: the twisting of the title theme’s repeated string rhythm into a grim march for the final episode reveal of the Army of the Dead, with an unsettling off-key piano now part of the show’s soundscape.
Battleship (2012) - *½
Steve Jablonsky; add’l music by Jacob Shea; add’l programming by Nathan Whitehead; ambient music design Clay Duncan;
orchestrated by B&W Fowler, Rick Giovinazzo, Kevin Kaska & Jennifer Hammmond; conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith;
‘Super Battle’ by Tom Morello; thank you to Hans Zimmer, Harry Gregson-Williams & Bob Badami
RC discovery #96.
“On Gangster Squad I did some strange things to create this pulse sound for Mickey Cohen and [the director] really liked the sound. It seems like I do something like that on every movie. Filmmakers I work with all respond to it because they’ve never heard it, or maybe they come to be because they know I do this stuff. You’re going to inevitably borrow from something you’ve heard in the past whether you even realize you’re doing it or not. The sound design stuff, it’s a cool way to be more specific with a movie.”
Having director Peter Berg turn the board game Battleship into an ersatz Michael Bay movie about fighting aliens on water went about well as expected; the film bombed commercially and critically and also seemed to be the nail in the coffin for film stardom for Taylor Kitsch, singer Rihanna, and swimsuit model Brooklyn Decker. But hey, if you’re going to make an ersatz-Bayhem picture, why not at least get his composer? Jablonsky would indeed provide plenty of music that gave listeners the same feel of “Remote Control library music” that Dark of the Moon provided the year before, though that would not be the work’s dominant trait.
Instead, Battleship would foreshadow what would be commonplace in the second half of the Remote Control era, not just from this musical lineage but from Hollywood film scoring more broadly: sound design first, music second (the next step in the evolution of the Joker’s razor and the Inception BWAM). “One day Peter came to me after getting an MRI and said ‘oh man I was thinking about you because it was making these crazy noises.’ So we got microphones and recorded the machine. I manipulated miles of raw file into the theme for the aliens. When I played that for Pete he was so excited because it was an idea that he inadvertently came up with but it paid off.” Large portions of the work were repeated hits of ear-splitting noise, making for one of the most arduous standalone album listens in recent memory (at least if you were a more traditionalist score fan, and probably even if you weren’t).
A 77-minute album at that! Why were Transformers albums so short but this sucker almost hitting the maximum amount of space you could put on a CD?
“I was with Marco Beltrami doing a panel for Billboard and he was talking about his score for Carrie. He recorded an old radio and did some cool things with static and I immediately went ‘oh that’s cool that’s exactly what I did for Battleship.’”
-----------------------
Next time: “I didn’t want to go down the road of loops. That said, authentic 18th Century music would’ve been boring.”
