This is part of a series. The third post for 2011-12 is here - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113090
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Prometheus (2012) - ***½
Marc Streitenfeld; add’l music by Harry Gregson-Williams; orchestrated &
conducted by Ben Foster; music programmer Sunna Wehrmeijer
RC discovery #97.
Director Ridley Scott would return to the Alien franchise with a visually stunning, well-cast prequel whose heady ambition couldn’t quite compensate for its confounding-plot (though that wouldn’t stop Scott from mounting a direct sequel years later). Along for the trip would be Zimmer’s former assistant Marc Streitenfeld, who had rarely strayed from Scott-land since contributing to 2006’s A Good Place (the early 2012 release The Grey a notable exception). It would be quite a pivot for the composer, not sitting within the textural wheelhouse of his early Scott scores but instead going right into grand science fiction / horror sounds. “Ridley gave me a lot of freedom for experimentation. I spent months recording things to make it sound unusual. Many of the orchestral parts were notated in reverse on paper and then digitally flipped around, so the result was the parts playing back with an awkward sound. The woodwind players sang and blew into their instruments at the same time, which resulted in a spooky sound.”
Streitenfeld would also pay homage to the series’ musical legacy, with instrumental and electronic effects recalling the prior works by Jerry Goldsmith, Elliot Goldenthal, and John Frizzell, and even a few quotes of Goldsmith’s original theme from the 1979 film, a small irony given how much of Goldsmith’s composition was tossed or reworked as part of that film’s infamous post-production process. On the whole, Streitenfeld’s work was technically impressive but mostly seemed simmer in an indistinctive grim eeriness, though it was still a notable improvement on the blandly functional material produced for Robin Hood.
At some point Ridley wanted something extra, and reached out to Harry Gregson-Williams; their collaboration on Kingdom of Heaven remains one of the highlights of Harry’s career, even with Scott butchering its use in some spots. “Ridley came to me quite late. It wasn’t like he was throwing out other composers’ work, he was just augmenting it. I was careful to make it homogeneous with everything else. I wrote a high G, I played it, and I thought it was high. I called the lead horn player in London who would be playing it and asked him. He said ‘if there was a manual for the French horn, it would say no, but I can play it.’ Fortunately Ridley was immediately receptive, possibly because time was very limited.” The gorgeous, resolute idea was worth a half star on its own.
Harry would also provide some last-minute music for Scott’s 2014 biblical film Exodus: Gods and Kings, and also claimed he was assigned to the sequel Alien: Covenant in early 2016, but for whatever reason Scott later hired Jed Kurzel to provide a nondescript accompaniment heavy on sound design, though it too would oddly feature adaptations of Goldsmith’s theme.
Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (2012) - ****
Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Lorne Balfe & Tom Holkenborg, add’l arrangements by Stephen Hilton & Jasha Klebe;
orchestrated by B&W Fowler/Moriarty, Rick Giovinazzo, Kevin Kaska, Ladd McIntosh & Ed Neumeister; conducted by
Gavin Greenaway; technical assistants Andrew Kawczynski, Max Aruj & Will Greig; music wrangler Bob Badami;
songs produced by Zimmer, Hilton & Peter Asher; ‘Afro Circus’ by Chris Rock
RC discovery #98.
Madagascar 3 would take the series out on a high note, with the film fully leaning into daffy, physics-defying comedy and adding a hilariously determined animal control officer. Hans Zimmer would return, though he seemed to have been in a largely supervisory role this time. Lorne Balfe (who had contributed to significant parts of the second film) had a hand in most of the score. Tom Holkenborg was given much of the early delirious casino escape and a few other passages. Jasha Klebe handled most of the parody adaptations of prior works, while Stephen Hilton mainly helped on the song arrangements.
The use of the two franchise identities (Best Friends and the escape/rescue theme) was stupendous, with both adapted into a variety of playful and heartwarming settings, and the energetic action material was often a toe-tapping delight. John Barry’s Born Free tune got another amusing cameo. Best of all, the gang would provide an over-the-top, gypsy-inflected idea for the villain DuBois, complete with some Jaws-like churning that lent additional comedy to the character's dogged pursuit of the zoosters.
Like the prior two scores in the series, Europe’s Most Wanted was poorly represented on its album release but would have a longer program eventually leak out as a bootleg. It does require some pruning to enjoy as a standalone experience (namely most of Klebe’s classical parodies and some source music jams that suggest Holkenborg’s underground music days), but there’s still a solid hour of smile-inducing music waiting to be discovered by most folks. The film exceeded expectations, so perhaps it was only fitting that the music followed suit.
The Dark Knight Rises (2012) - **½
Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Lorne Balfe; ambient music design Mel Wesson; synth programming Howard Scarr;
sequencer programming Tom Holkenborg, Andrew Kawczynski, Jasha Klebe & Steve Mazzaro; orchestrated by
B&W Fowler/Moriarty; Liz Finch, Rick Giovinazzo, Kevin Kaska, Carl Rydlund, Andrew Kinney, Geoff Strandling &
Ed Neumeister; conducted by Gavin Greenaway & Matt Dunkley; solo cello Anthony Pleeth & Martin Tillman;
thank you to James Newton Howard, Ryeland Allison, Max Aruj, Bob Badami, Ramin Djawadi, Henry Jackman,
James S. Levine, Giorgio Moroder, Heitor Pereira, A. R. Rahman, Jacob Shea, Noah Sorota, Eric Whitacre,
and…Deadmau5?
RC discovery #99.
“This has been an eight-year constant relationship with Chris, in a funny way. ‘So what are we doing next?’”
Coming four years after The Dark Knight took the world by storm and two years after director Christopher Nolan blew everyone’s minds with Inception, the final film in the Dark Knight trilogy would be a financial success, though audiences would come question certain aspects of it (How did Bruce get back to Gotham so quickly? Why did every cop in the city have to go underground? Did someone really know Bruce was Batman because of how he SMILED?) and Tom Hardy’s Bane voice would become increasingly parodied, even in the recent Harley Quinn animated series. The messy film - adding in elements of Occupy Wall Street and nuclear terrorism to an already dense saga - is now generally regarded as the weakest of the three films.
“I never thought of it in terms of something where we would have to do a sequel. You have no idea how I’ve been sitting here trying to complete the story. I need to bring everything full circle. I’ve forever been trying to work out how to give Gotham its own tone. It needs to convey that everything isn’t all right, a sort of unbalancing of that world, with little undercurrents of danger and unrest.”
The prior two films in the franchise had featured popular scores co-composed by friends Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard along with a rotating cast of Zimmer assistants, but the third entry would be spearheaded by Zimmer alone. Rumors would persist over creative differences, especially with the earlier scores feeling more like Zimmer works, though Howard would claim he was busy enough already (his last-minute rescue job on the first film in the Hunger Games franchise came during post-production for this movie) and that Inception was evidence enough that Nolan and Zimmer were “killing it” on their own. Zimmer would write close to two hours of pre-film suites, a huge amount even by his standards. Some of them were remixes of Bruce / Batman identities, including a slow, abstract electronic track that practically drifted into Craig Armstrong territory. But the bulk of Zimmer’s focus would be on Bane. “Before I started Sherlock 2, I dreamt [an] insane Bane opus. I said to Chris and Warner Brothers, ‘Would it be okay if I got the most outrageous orchestra together and tried this thing?’ I had written it all out, and I would go and say ‘here are the notes, let’s see what we can do’, and start experimenting. It was about how to reinvent working with the orchestra. Chris said, ‘Well, you’ve done half the movie now.’ I don’t think that’s true, but I figured out my cornerstone.”
Much would be made of the Bane chant. “Chris sent me over a couple of words, deshi deshi basara, meaning rising up. It started with 11 of my closest friends, double-tracking, mangling it, making it sound like it was a found tape. I wanted hundreds of thousands of voices, so we posted on the internet for people who wanted to be part of it. The first Tweet that went out just melted our server because we had tens of thousands of people a second, trying to get onto the site.” The talk of how innovative it all was seemed silly when you heard the end result; the distant crowd of voices was certainly an effective addition to the film but also one that normal groups and recording methods could have achieved. The orchestra certainly didn’t sound “reinvented”, at least no more so than the modernist conducting techniques we’d seen on video a decade earlier for Black Hawk Down. The music for the climactic fistfight was a transparent resurrection of mannerisms from the Moroccan arena music in Gladiator. And some of the undulating synths reeked of Scorponok from Transformers, though since Steve Jablonsky’s music for that franchise had started sounding like the Nolan-verse perhaps it was only fair for Zimmer to return the favor.
The score wasn’t all brutal brooding. Zimmer would also write a slinky Catwoman theme that provided an element of light-footed mystery, though that idea would be marginalized on the corresponding album release. But the score would do very little that felt new or boundary-pushing with its prior Bruce / Batman ideas - the two note motif, the longer Batman theme, the bubbling synth / string ostinato, the bat wings, the drums, and so on. If you weren’t a fan of these elements, their use here wasn’t going to change your mind. If you were a fan of them, you still might’ve found their use here to feel a bit too much like regurgitation.
And there was one other nagging issue: the score felt largely bereft of the occasional personal tones and moments of warmth that had been exhibited in the entries Howard had participated in. Sure, you could claim Rises is a darker film, but that still wouldn’t help the music align with Zimmer’s assertion that he wanted to bring everything from the first film “full circle.”
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Well-intentioned as the chant lyrics may have been, to a number of listeners they sounded like distant voices shouting FISHY FISHY PASTA PASTA, helping to inform many of the parodic Bane memes that populate the internet to this day.
Also, while the methods for creating the chant certainly seemed gimmicky, at least they weren’t as obnoxious as the new iPhone app that Zimmer extolled the virtues of - unless you were the kind of person who really wanted iTunes to adjust how the Rises score played based on your pace and location or the time of day, in which case it was the Holy Grail of gimmicks.
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Steve Mazzaro would give some great insight earlier this year about what a sequencer programming credit typically means, at least on a Nolan film. “The music editor would take suites in stem form, like a piano separate from brass, and basically score the film. What [they] cut together doesn’t exist anywhere other than [their] computer. It’s my job to figure out ‘ok, where did he pull this from, did he pitch shift or time change anything?’ and make that in MIDI, along with additional writing, so people can play the notes.”
Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012) - ***½
John Powell; add’l music & arranging by Paul Mounsey, Helene Muddiman, Beth Caucci & Victor Chaga;
orchestrated by John Ashton Thomas, Dave Metzger, Andrew Kinney, Rick Giovinazzo, Pete Anthony, Randy Kerber,
Brad Dechter & Germaine Franco; orchestra conducted by Pete Anthony; choir conducted by Edie Lehmann Boddicker
The Ice Age franchise may have been running on creative fumes at this point, but that didn’t stop Blue Sky from pushing out another slapstick sequel in summer 2012 (and one more for good measure four years later). Whereas John Powell’s work for the prior sequel Dawn of the Dinosaurs introduced a ton of new themes at the expense of revisiting ideas from 2006’s The Meltdown, his third trip with this franchise would be a lot more reliant on legacy ideas, some taken in entertaining new directions but a lot feeling like cut-and-paste. Thankfully, the brand new stuff was quite entertaining, with Powell and team taking inspiration from the seafaring nature of the plot to compose multiple swashbuckling passages, including a climactic action track that should contend for a place on any fan’s Best of Powell playlist. They even utilized an 18-member accordion ensemble, something that would receive a glowing write-up from the National Accordion Association (“a very positive showcase for the accordion”).
Powell wouldn’t return for the fifth film in the franchise. As with Kung Fu Panda 3, it’s possible the film’s production schedule overlapped with Powell’s second sabbatical. John Debney would take over on Collision Course and do his own thing, though there would be token references to Powell’s material.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012) - **½
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Dominic Lewis & Matthew Margeson; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman;
conducted by Gavin Greenaway; score technical engineers Alex Belcher, Ben Robinson & Jason Soudah;
additional synth design Tom Holkenborg; thank you to Hans Zimmer & John Powell
RC discovery #100.
“You can’t go, ‘We’re gonna have a big, sweeping orchestral score,’ because there are gonna be scenes where Lincoln’s badass and kicking the crap out of vampires. But on the other hand, you can’t go, ‘Let’s get a load of needle drops that sound like The Prodigy, so he’s busy kicking the crap outta vampires, right?’ because it’s also a long, historical story.”
Wanted director Timur Bekmambetov’s stylized adaptation of the recent revisionist book of the same name was essentially laughed out of theaters in summer 2012. Social Network composer Trent Reznor was briefly attached in early 2011 but quickly backed out, and when it came time for post-production ascendant Remote Control graduate Henry Jackman was assigned. Jackman admitted he “probably started out a little too close to a kind of Kick-Ass, Tarantino thing, a little too heavy on it being self-consciously cool” but once he cracked the code on balancing that with more “meaningful symphonic music - the adagio for Adam, the theme for the death of Abraham’s mother, especially the Mary Todd theme” it got easier to make the whole thing work. The resulting score is an adequate stylistic extension of the prior year’s X-Men: First Class (but with a less memorable thematic base) that also anticipates Jackman’s work on the Kingsman series, with only the credits piece The Rampant Hunter perhaps leaning too much in the direction of abrasive electronics.
Total Recall (2012) - **½
Harry Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Hybrid; add’l programming by Halli Cauthery & Andy Page;
orchestrated by Alastair King & David Butterworth; conducted by Gavin Greenaway; electric cello Martin Tillman
RC discovery #101.
“I remember Len calling me up [about] the elevated car chase. ‘I’ve got the first cut of it and I need music, it needs to be kicking.’ There were green screens. They’re filming on an airport runway! How am I supposed to add kicks? It was difficult to get serious about it, but it was necessary. It’s part of the job.”
This sci-fi actioner was either a remake of the awesome 1990 Schwarzenegger flick or the original Philip K. Dick book of the same name (quotes supported both options), though it also seemed to borrow heavily from more recent “man on the run” films like The Bourne Identity and Minority Report. Regardless of what it actually was intended as, the film would be met with poor reviews and tepid stateside box office, and lacked the memorability of lines like “See you at the party, Richter!” For the prior action classic Jerry Goldsmith had delivered a dense, muscular score that is generally regarded as one of the finest works in his storied career, though that sound likely wouldn’t have been a perfect fit for a remake that took on more of a modern thriller aesthetic.
Director Len Wiseman had worked with composer Marco Beltrami on his last two films, so it was surprising when Harry Gregson-Williams got the gig instead. “Purely came about because [movie actress and the director’s then-wife] Kate Beckinsale’s daughter goes to school with my daughter - best of friends!” Recall would give a prominent role to Gregson-Williams’ longtime collaborators Mike and Charlotte Truman (known as Hybrid), who contributed roughly 50 minutes of additional music and ideas over the four-month composing period. If you wanted to hear the halfway point between Harry’s action music of the aughts and his electronic experiments for Tony Scott, then this is the score for you. But most found it to be all-too-familiar territory for the composer, lacking even the decent themes that helped save similarly underwhelming scores for Wolverine and Cowboys & Aliens, and it wouldn’t be surprising that Gregson-Wililams took a year off from composing after this to return to teaching.
Red Dawn (2012) - **½
Ramin Djawadi; add’l music by Bobby Tahouri, Bryce Jacobs & Dominic Lewis; orchestrated
by Stephen Coleman & Tony Blondal; technical score advisor Brandon Campbell
RC discovery #102.
Total Recall wasn’t 2012’s only unnecessary remake. This do-over of the famed 1980s actioner about young people defending their hometown against an invading army wouldn’t feature anything quite as memorable as its studio’s decision to change the villains from Chinese to North Korean in post-production to avoid irritating the former country. Ramin Djawadi would be seemingly tasked with providing music that was halfway between the jagged cello-driven action sounds of Clash of the Titans and the Powell-adjacent modern thriller material he’d provided for Safe House. It wasn’t anything you hadn’t heard before, and it definitely wasn’t in the same league as Basil Poledouris’ music for the original film (not one of that great composer’s better works but one still laced with his distinctive orchestral/synth blend and muscular heroic tunes). But it proved adequately energetic and had several rousing stretches, plus a few passages would intriguingly foreshadow some of the cool rhythmic style Djawadi would unleash in more developed forms in the following summer’s Pacific Rim.
Skylanders: Giants (2012) - ***
Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Dave Fleming, Andrew Kawczynski & Jasha Klebe; add’l
arrangements & technical score engineering by Max Aruj; Kelly Johnson as Balfe’s assistant
RC discovery #103. If you liked the first entry, you'll like this too. “By the end of Spyro’s Adventure, we had figured out a sonic world. This made it easier to try different things. You’re able to incorporate strange time signatures in conjunction with strong melodies. That’s not normally the case when you’re using strange time signatures, because you need to grab on to something. In addition, I often avoided using the orchestra as the prominent force in favor of dulcimers, banjos, and other unusual instruments.”
Assassin’s Creed III (2012) - **½
Lorne Balfe; add’l music & arrangements by Max Aruj, Dave Fleming, Andrew Kawczynski, Jasha Klebe & Steve Mazzaro;
add’l music programming by Andrew Christie, Gary Dworetsky & Satnam Ramgotra; orchestrated by B&W Fowler/Moriarty,
Kevin Kaska, Carl Rydlund & Geoff Stradling; featured musicians including George Doering, Noah Sorota and Blazin’ Fiddles
RC discovery #104.
With the extension of the Assassin’s Creed brand into the American Revolutionary War, Balfe would also have a hand in an entirely different video game score. “III is different from Revelations. The visuals were bigger, so we kept trying to push the music too. I didn’t want to go down the road of drum loops. That said, authentic 18th Century music would’ve been boring.” Despite token nods to the era including whistles, fiddles, and manipulated percussive chants, most of the soundscape plays like Remote Control library music - nothing inherently problematic, but most of it a tad too familiar to be distinctive.
But then being distinctive had rarely been what game makers had asked of Remote Control from 2005-2012 - and Lorne should know as he helped on the 2005 game Battlefield 2. It would take a movie about video games to really move the needle.
Wreck-It Ralph (2012) - ****
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Dominic Lewis; add’l arrangements by Matthew Margeson; orchestrated by
Stephen Coleman, Andrew Kinney, Dave Metzger, John Ashton Thomas & Larry Rench; conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith;
score technicians Alex Belcher, Victor Chaga & Jason Soudah; ‘Bug Hunt (Noisa Remix)’ by Scrillex
“For something like Puss in Boots or Wreck It Ralph, some people say ‘it’s proper music!’ But people who are into slightly cooler music, ‘I don’t know about that, it’s a little family.’ But if you try to please everyone you’ll end up in some horrible point in the middle. You have to accept you can’t take everyone with you.”
This long-gestating Disney film about an arcade villain who escapes his game Fix-It Felix to prove he’s a good guy turned into a heartwarming hit, and also another opportunity for composer Henry Jackman to continue to demonstrate his prowess with animated scores and (as with Puss in Boots) his talent for weaving together disparate elements into a cohesive whole. This is arguably the only score of this era that required baroque fanfares, teen rock, Danny Elfman ‘la la’ vocals, and muscular Alan Silvestri-style action material (never mind the obligatory video game sounds), and yet the work never feels scattershot. “There’s a character story, so not everything is bleeps and blips. You can put on a whole lot of textures - 8-bit, dubstep, orchestral”. Jackman, whose childhood had involved plenty of arcade games and who as a teenager had programmed music for the game M.C. Kids, even bought a classic Donkey Kong arcade game so he could figure out the right frequencies to program into his music.
“If you had a clipboard with parameters for [a] complete winner, you’d be going tick, tick, tick, ok, where do I sign? It was a giant opportunity for every conceivable thing you might want to do as a film composer, and as long as you’ve got some thematic material hopefully it’s not a musical free-for-all.”
Jackman’s work isn’t densely thematic, but it does weave two main themes throughout the work, a malleable idea largely associated with Ralph and a descending idea usually accompanying the King Candy villain. Intriguingly, at times the composer seems to use these ideas for good guys and bad guys more broadly; an earlier sequence where a candy-coated, misunderstood Ralph rampages through a racetrack is covered by a comic version of the villain theme, while a midfilm rescue by Felix is supported by a romantic version of the heroic theme. Outside of passages involving those themes, various little sequences throughout contain joys. An early bit where Ralph is saluted by a digital military for “winning” a medal in a game has Jackman almost doing a parody of a classic Media Ventures power anthem (Bruckheimer would be proud). And the defeat of King Candy features an ecstatic statement of the villain theme, one of the most delightfully grand musical takedowns in recent memory.
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Next time: rankings. Otherwise, that’s it for this time period. The next series of posts will cover the second half of the Remote Control era. Name TBD, though I have ruled out the “Bleeding Fingers era” for several reasons.
Also, wow, 2005-2012 took over four months. Granted, nearly a month of that was being relentlessly busy at work when probably 90% of what I listened to was Intrada’s Willow expansion over and over and over. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
The series will go on hiatus for the month of September (and possibly longer) due to a mix of vacation travel, moving houses, McCreary’s Rings of Power taking over the Willow spot as my default listening choice, and other shenanigans. I would love to be done with the saga before the end of the year, but with another 150+ works to go (including almost 20 from this year, only one of which I’ve heard) that seems unlikely.
(Message edited on Tuesday, August 23, 2022, at 5:06 a.m.)
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