This is part of a series (a long-running series at this point).
- The first post covering part 8 is here - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=116843
- If you want the full set of links, click on my profile.
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The Bible (2013) - **
Hans Zimmer & Lorne Balfe; add’l arrangements by Jasha Klebe, Steve Mazzaro, Dave Fleming,
Satnam Ramgotra, Gary Dworetsky, Andrew Christie & Max Aruj; vocal soloist Lisa Gerrard;
technical assistant Nathan Stornetta; thank you to Andrew Kawczynski
TBTF discovery #4.
Reality show producer Mark Burnett and his wife Roma Downey would pivot into Christian media with this miniseries. Burnett already had a relationship with Zimmer from shows including The Contender. Hans would reunite with Lisa Gerrard and work with her and his team in the manner of his aughts jam sessions. “[We’d] meet in London and throw out ideas like a band.” The music was a prisoner of its budget - Gerrard’s voice may be the only non-sampled element - bringing to mind Zimmer’s earlier cost-conscious works like Millennium. The duduk was the only giveaway that this wasn’t a lost pre-Media Ventures artifact. It’s worth exploring if you don’t mind a repackaging of structures and sounds you had heard this crew (and imitators) blend before.
Man of Steel (2013) - **½
Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Tom Holkenborg, Andrew Kawczynski, Steve Mazzaro & Atli Örvarsson;
add’l arrangements by Jasha Klebe; orchestrated by B&W Fowler/Moriarty, Kevin Kaska & Carl Rydlund;
conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith, Tom Holkenborg & Atli Örvarsson; synth programming by Howard Scarr;
a ton of featured musicians including George Doering, Martin Tillman, Ann Marie Calhoun,
an eight-person pedal steel orchestra, and Örvarsson’s frequent vocal collaborator Hilda Örvarsdóttir,
plus a 12-15 person drum ensemble including Pharrell Williams, Satnam Ramgotra & Ryeland Allison
Zimmer at this point was a seasoned pro at giving good quotes about his upcoming work - sometimes hyperbolic and prone to words like “crazy” or “reinvent”, but often entertaining and usually a window into his process. In the lead up to this film, Zimmer gave folks playing Hans quote bingo at home plenty of boxes to check.
- “I spent three months procrastinating because I was so intimidated.”
- “We’re experimenting. We can go so beyond the symphony orchestra.”
- ”As a foreigner that used to look at America with wonderment, I want to give that back. I have no idea if I’ve succeeded.”
- “It's a little bit like standing naked on a cold day on the beach in front of the most beautiful girl.”
But an Ask Me Anything session for the website Reddit produced a unique one. “For Man of Steel you can expect hope and no cynicism. The opposite of The Dark Knight. Trying to celebrate hard-working blue-collar Midwest people.” Recording videos released on YouTube also seemed to validate this - Nick Glennie-Smith conducting strings, solo violin, steel guitars for a “spiritual and optimistic” feel, and an army of smiling drummers including Zimmer’s pal Pharrell. And then everyone saw the film and heard some of the brawniest, most heavily processed, and most aggressively loud soundscapes ever achieved for blockbuster cinema. Never mind that it sounded nothing like the classic Superman theme by John Williams from the famous 1970s movie with Christopher Reeve. If you had taken that Reddit statement at face value, the music was likely to give you whiplash, or perhaps make you question if you understood the definitions of the words hope and cynicism.
WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED?
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“I thought it was important - a character who is guileless, who isn’t complicated in the sort of flawed way our Dark Knight is, and isn’t political in any way. He’s just striving to become a better part of humanity.”
Expecting anything in the music to stand for Truth, Justice, and the American Way like the character of Superman traditionally had was to miss the point, and that’s not just because director Zack Snyder had relied on harsher tones from Tyler Bates in his prior films. Snyder’s movie was a reimagining of Clark Kent and his alter ego. It did not have any kind of folksy telling of Clark’s youth in the farms of Smallville. It didn’t show the hero as a moralistic do-gooder or overtly position him against the American flag. Even the color palette was muted. This wasn’t a throwback yarn like the 2006 Superman Returns (a film a friend once described as “all he did was lift stuff”), which was set up as a sequel to the Reeves films and had frequent references to Williams’ themes. Man of Steel has certainly developed a divisive reception over the years, but most would agree that having a Williams-style march in what was positioned as a dark, gritty reboot of the character would have been about as out of place as Danny Elfman’s gothic Batman theme would’ve been in the vision of Gotham realized by Christopher Nolan (who was a producer on this film).
And, frankly, why would we have anticipated otherwise with Zimmer involved? I’m not saying that as an inherent negative. A straight-up orchestral romp would’ve been out-of-character for the “don’t do the expected” composer and almost assuredly not what the director was looking for (remember that Zimmer is ever mindful of not being fired off of a film). Zimmer even acknowledged as much in his conception of the score, one he was originally reluctant to say yes to (just like with Batman) but eventually caved on after talking to Nolan and Snyder. “Part of my very simple plan was to exorcize anything that I remember John using, like the trumpet fanfare. By narrowing my palate I felt I was doing something different.” Some folks may recall John Powell’s comments after the 2000 Ghent concert about Zimmer not using trumpets very often and chuckle.
So, with all that in mind, is the thing actually any good?
Zimmer would provide a variety of themes, the two most prominent ones both alternating series of rising two-note intervals. The longer one would intriguingly have some structural connections to parts of Williams’ march, suggesting that Zimmer was perhaps “deconstructing” the original music just as Snyder was trying to deconstruct the character’s traditional appearance, and Zimmer would sometimes have these ideas run concurrently to other ideas (including his bouncing Krypton motif) for some rare instances of melodic counterpoint in his career. A third, longer-lined Superman theme, initially appearing as Clark’s shuttle is sent off of Krypton and then later performed on a violin solo during the planet’s destruction, would be somewhat redemptive, mainly for its use during the mid-film Flight sequence which was arguably the only place that the various instrumental and electronic forces congealed to realize the optimistic thrills Zimmer had seemingly promised in that aforementioned interview. All of these ideas were largely simple in their constructs, with the intent of impressing the listener by performing them at enormous volumes with a textured soundscape behind them. Yet in taking maximalist minimalism to the next level, the end result was that the overwhelming bass sound in darn near every corner of the work ended up being more memorable than any single theme.
Also frustrating was that the composer’s Batman motif had also been a rising two-note interval, making the work feel a tad redundant, as if this were just how Zimmer was going to treat every hero’s origin story going forward. And that’s to say nothing of bellicose voices from the Media Ventures days occasionally appearing (admittedly filtered through the more exultant tones of Zimmer’s Langdon scores), almost tempting one to check the credits to make sure Jerry Bruckheimer wasn’t involved in some way.
Even if you could forgive the themes and their surrounding constructs, the extensive manipulation of the soundscape in vast parts of the score seem to strip out the performative essense that came from getting so many virtuosic players in recording rooms, in essence a perversion of Zimmer’s “jam band” methodology. The drums sound nothing like “the 12 greatest drummers including Sheila E. giving it elegance”, for example. It brings to mind the reaction I had about the crowd-sourced chanting for The Dark Knight Rises - why go through all this trouble with this wildly different methodology if the end result doesn’t reflect that creativity? It was the “pump orchestra through a guitar amp” of the 2010s (a musical solution looking for a problem), but now it was backed by behind-the-scenes featurettes, ecstatic performer comments, and coverage from major news publications.
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If you were being charitable, you could’ve watched some of those aforementioned behind-the-scenes videos and assumed that the resulting sound was due to post-production tinkering and a deviation from Zimmer’s original intent (Snyder at one point called all the recordings they were doing a “big toolbox”), but an expanded deluxe album would disprove that hypothesis, as it contained what seemed to be a first: a release of the composer’s original “sketchbook”. Zimmer had included his suites on albums before, but usually recorded with instruments instead of samples. This deep dive into what was basically a half-hour audition reel (along with other suites including the headache-inducing This is Madness!) revealed that the composer had always envisioned these themes, the BWAMs, and the soundscapes at the core of the work, in effect dragging Zimmer’s “you can't really say what it is and what the instruments are” attitude from the 1990 film Pacific Heights into the 2010s. Maybe the one exception would be the suite Earth, a relaxed pseudo-country take on Zimmer’s personal theme for Clark that now plays like an unused concept idea.
In the wake of Man of Steel, Zimmer would become more comfortable putting such unrefined sketchbook tracks out there for public consumption, to the point that he’s now had multiple scores receive both regular album releases as well as concurrent sketchbook album releases. You can view this as a way to align with an increasing interest in “how this works” content, or perhaps a purely economic decision to monetize more of this material once it turned out people were so interested in listening to it.
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The work was equal parts entertaining and confounding. You could find one of the coolest tracks by Zimmer in recent memory, but you also had to contend with vast stretches of pounding noise that might make you dumber upon contact. It ignored significant aspects of the story, including the Midwest flavor that Zimmer had originally envisioned and any reference to the budding love story between Superman and Lois, the latter creating an intriguing parallel with the similarly underplayed angle in Sherlock Holmes. Zimmer’s public statements had the (probably unfair) effect of clouding one’s impression of the work. And, as with the music for Nolan’s Batman trilogy, there’s a sense that even if we didn’t get this music we were gonna get darn near something like it from someone else, especially given all the scores Holkenborg has delivered for Snyder’s subsequent films.
For some folks in 2013 it was the worst thing ever. For others it was the apotheosis of awesomeness. There seemed to be few folks at the time who resided in between those poles. But I guess I’m one of them.
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“You absolute, conniving bastard of the highest calibre. Fuck you. You continue to expose your tainted bias with Zimmer.”
That was posted on this site four years after Man of Steel, admittedly about a different score, but it is representative of the trends in online discourse that, at least with film music, started to become more commonplace in the wake of Man of Steel.
In receiving 1-star reviews from the “big 3” of online film music criticism at the time (Filmtracks, MMUK, and Movie-Wave), Man of Steel achieved a rare triple crown of lowest ratings (a Superpan, if you will). And they had the words to back them up!
- “When you tackle characters with sound design, perhaps that's to be expected. A stunning miscalculation.”
- “It’s meant to be incredibly serious but compositionally so simplistic that it’s impossible to take seriously at all.”
- ”Witless…predictable…repetitive…disappointing.”
A caustic take from Erik Woods of Cinematic Sound Radio would add to the consensus. Given how anathemic it was to what traditionalist score fans tended to want from music, none of this should have been a surprise.
But the work would have just as many defenders as it did detractors, both here and elsewhere. If you spent some of your time that summer on a webpage involving film music, barely a day could go by without a new post about Man of Steel getting umpteen responses in rapid succession. A lot of the commentary was pretty even-handed. But there were outliers:
- ”Go suck an egg.”
- ”Another wrong rating. another copy/paste rating.”
- “Clemmensen's review is full of hatred and anger.”
- “Anyone can scream at someone like an ill-tempered two-year-old.”
- 99% of the people who bash the score are biased because of Williams.”
- “I know you guys will call me a bitch or similar. But the Zimmer bashing needs to stop.”
Such activity would largely die down by the fall, at least here, though the whole kerfuffle would later be referred to by one of our current regulars, a certain Archibald Heatherington Nastyface, as “the whole Man of Steel business.”
And, frankly, YouTube and Twitter were much better (worse?) places to observe the increasingly toxic direction that parts of online fandom were heading. Exhibit A: ”Any decent superhero film made today is not going to have a friggin 'theme' attached to it! Who gives a crap about wanting to 'hum' a theme - how gay/camp do u wanna be?”
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Never mind that this wasn’t even the only Zimmer score for a blockbuster that year that produced some confounding comments!
The Lone Ranger (2013) - ***½
Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Geoff Zanelli, Rupert Gregon-Williams, Steve Mazzaro,
Andrew Kawczynski, Jasha Klebe & Lorne Balfe; orchestrated by B&W Fowler/Moriarty,
Kevin Kaska & Carl Rydlund; conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith; technical assistants
Chuck Choi, Brian Wherry & Phill Boucher; digital instrument design Mark Wherry
“This is Gore’s vision, and Gore’s vision is always slightly different from what anybody expects us to do.”
Disney hoped Gore Verbinski, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Johnny Depp could duplicate the success of Pirates of the Caribbean, but an enormous budget and various production mishaps for this adaptation of the famous 1950s Western TV series had visions of the famed flop Waterworld dancing in entertainment journalists’ heads, and the film ended up bombing at the box office. In an offbeat choice, blues-rocker Jack White was announced as the composer in early 2012, but for whatever reason Zimmer took over later that year (echoing Alan Silvestri’s comment about Jerry being “more comfortable with people he had worked with”).
Zimmer would claim in that Reddit interview that this “gave me the opportunity to write [an] old-fashioned western,” which you can hear in the use of a folk song and the conclusive Home, but the score also had Morricone tributes, Sherlock antics, portentous choir, and Angels and Demons action. The music omitted the Native American aspect of the story, odd given Zimmer’s focus on marginalized gypsies in Game of Shadows a few years earlier, though this score turned into as much of a messy grab-bag as the Sherlock sequel’s did anyway. Weirdly, one of Jack White’s source music tracks made the album.
One track would be its saving grace. The original series had famously relied on Rossini’s William Tell Overture, and for this film’s train-heavy finale Geoff Zanelli would step in and adapt that piece into one of the most sensational tracks of the decade.
Rush (2013) - ****
Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Lorne Balfe, Bryce Jacobs, Jasha Klebe & Michael Brook;
ambient music design Mel Wesson; featured cello Martin Tillman; featured guitars
Michael Brook, Stephen Lipson & Bryce Jacobs; featured percussion Satman Ramgotra;
score technical engineers Catherine Wilson, Monica Sonand, Andrew Christie & Max Aruj;
digital instrument design Mark Wherry; music consultants Bob Badami & Peter Asher
This acclaimed film would dramatize the famed 1976 Formula One rivalry between James Hunt and Nikki Lauda - and reunite Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon screenwriter Peter Morgan, and Hans Zimmer. The composer, whether in an effort to be consistent with the film’s use of songs or because he didn’t have a large budget, opted for a harder-nosed, stripped-down sound: soloists like cellist Martin Tillman and guitarist Michael Brook (back for the first time since Black Hawk Down) and a mix of samples / electronics. “The music had the spirit of Hunt and the precision of Lauda.” Curiously, no orchestrators are credited.
Arguably this sonic focus works to the score’s benefit, giving it a blues/rock feel that creates some rather dynamic energy in stretches like the Stopwatch / Into the Red montage sequence. If you want a more thematically varied racing score that tickles your nostalgia bone (or if you were fatigued at this point by the man’s occasional habit of slamming the same note over and over to create dramatic tension), then Zimmer’s own Days of Thunder is probably the superior choice. But this score’s edgy sense of abandon (with an action style that occasionally pulled from Inception) is a compelling alternative to that earlier career work, and Tillman’s performances of this work’s theme provide some of the most soulful Zimmer music of the era.
12 Years A Slave (2013) - **
Hans Zimmer; orchestration & add’l music by Benjamin Wallfisch; digital instrument design Mark Wherry;
technical consultants Brian Wherry, Chuck Choi & Victoria de la Vega; score wrangler Bob Badami
TBTF discovery #5.
“You can imagine that we had a vast budget on 12 Years a Slave because every studio’s just dying to make slave movies.”
A year after Django Unchained came this decidedly different, equally praised take on the horrors of American slavery. It was arguably a film that could have gotten by with no original score at all, but director Steve McQueen clearly had an affection for the music of Hans Zimmer given how the music for his earlier films seemed to hew close to Zimmer’s The Thin Red Line material. However, once McQueen actually had Zimmer on his film he seemed to push in him into a hybrid temp track direction, with a primary melody that has distracting similarities to both the aforementioned score’s famed Journey to the Line track as well as Time from Inception (taking me out of the movie a few times). Not helping matters is that the idea is largely static throughout the story so the stylistic overlaps end up smacking you in the face by the end of the film.
Zimmer seemed to have a good time though, both because he understood the score’s function in a film like this - “most of the music is intimate, and I didn’t to get in the way of the performances; [it] was important not to have a heavy hand” - and because of how it was created. With a tiny performing ensemble crammed in one room and the director joining them as they crafted the score, it was almost a throwback to low-budget jam sessions he’d done on things like The Pledge and The Weather Man. And it would end up being the fourth film scored by Zimmer to win the Oscar for Best Picture at the Academy Awards (after Rain Man, Driving Miss Daisy, and Gladiator). Zimmer didn’t seem to mind the lack of awards consideration for his score compared to other parts of the film. “The big prize is the one that matters. It's nice that we're all a part of that movie.”
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Next time: “They’re not really military people, they’re more like cowboys.”
