This is part of a series (a long-running series at this point).
- Here’s the last post on Planes, Pacific Rim, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117113
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.
Behold, my attempt at keeping these write-ups a bit more succinct falls flat on its ass!
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Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) - **
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Dominic Lewis & Matthew Margeson; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman; conducted by
Gavin Greenaway; score technical engineers Vivian Aguiar-Buff & Jason Soudah; music sound design Victor Chaga
This Captain America sequel remains not just one of the best films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but also one of its most consequential - it revealed that the government agency S.H.I.E.L.D. contained the remnants of a secret Nazi cult (necessitating a complete rip-up of the plot of concurrent TV series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), its pivot to a modern paranoid thriller setting morphed Cap from a historical figure into a cool action hero, and it catapulted the Russo brothers from respected television directors into the helmsmen of billion dollar blockbusters. It would also lead to a huge shift in the character’s music, as Alan Silvestri’s memorable idea from the initial World War 2-set film was completely jettisoned by Henry Jackman.
There were definitely intellectual arguments for not reusing the rousing identity for the character, what with this being a different time setting and honestly a different movie genre (plus Cap was fighting for his country in that first story and questioning it in this entry). “It was aesthetically far from the first one. [We needed] a theme that doesn’t sound nostalgic that can still emerge from under the action.” But the new theme, largely based on an ascending three note idea, felt a little too close to Dark Knight territory, even if Jackman was doing different things with it (chopping First Class strings, manipulated percussion, and so on). It maintained the requisite level of activity, but at the cost of genericizing the character. Never mind that other composers on later MCU entries found ways to reinterpret Silvetri’s theme in ways that didn’t reek of rah-rah patriotism.
More astonishing was the intentionally abrasive music for the Winter Soldier villain which pushed Jackman’s earlier attitudes about toggling between symphonic and pop-adjacent fare to the extreme and doubled down on the Dark Knight hero/villain dichotomy. “The suite is un-orchestral, brutal, unrelenting and mechanized, industrial noise, and deliberately hideous. Had it been another period film, I would have engaged in a traditional symphonic score and that would have been fantastic. However, there’s something incredibly contemporary about the film. [The Russos were] either going to love it or never put it in. And they were really receptive. This guy’s trapped in a Kafkaesque scenario, a cross between RoboCop and Terminator.”
Another 6-minute Hydra suite and 40ish minutes of score would round out the album, all basically sitting within the contemporary wheelhouse of those aforementioned Cap and Winter Soldier suites. Perhaps it’s a small surprise that much of it ends up just being shrug-inducing and predictable instead of the obnoxious avante-garde screech-fest it could’ve been. Still, fans of more traditionalist film scores (even those who liked but didn’t adore Silvestri’s entry) ran for the hills. Of the many examples of Marvel’s decisionmakers eschewing musical continuity in their sequels, this one is perhaps the most frustrating.
Game of Thrones Season 4 (2014) - ***
Ramin Djawadi; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman; technical score advisors Brandon Campbell & William Marriott
Season 1 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=112891
Season 2 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113090
Season 3 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117113
The hit show would unleash what is now generally regarded as its finest season, with the debut of the charismatic Oberyn Martell, another deadly wedding, and the impressively-realized Battle for the Wall. Like Season 3, there would be a few new elements to the score (the stomping music for the cannibalistic Thenns, for example) but the bulk of the runtime would be dedicated to new takes on existing themes. The result was enjoyable enough but a tad familiar, and listeners would also have to contend with an abundance of functional action/horror music that didn’t consistently translate into an engaging album experience.
Rio 2 (2014) - ***½
John Powell; add’l music, MIDI orchestration, arranging and/or programming by Paul Mounsey,
Anthony Willis & Germaine Franco; orchestrated by John Ashton Thomas, Rick Giovinazzo, Andrew Kinney,
Randy Kerber, Mark Graham, Nicholas Pike, José Serebrier, Germaine Franco, Dave Metzger, Jeff Atmajian,
Brad Dechter, Victor Pesavento & Greg Jamrok; conducted by José Serebrier; a TON of featured instrumentalists;
songs written and/or produced by John Powell, Sergio Mendes, Carlinhos Brown, Andre Hosoi, Renato Epstein,
Bruno Mars, Philip Lawrence, Taura Stinson, Jeeve, Michael Diskint, Flavia Maia, Siedah Garrett, Randy Rogel,
Jemaine Clement, Yoni Brenner, Mikael Mutti, Janelle Monae, Nathaniel Irvin III, Roman Irvin, Nate Wonder,
Chuck LIghtning, Roman GianArthur & George 2.0; digital score production by Beth Caucci & Victor Chaga
Rio was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=112891
This jungle-centric sequel to 2011’s hit macaw musical featured the first score by John Powell in almost two years, as the composer had taken a sabbatical following his 2012 output. “I’d spent 15 years feeling I was behind on my homework. You’re on a film and you have to start writing the next one. Having a year off was fantastic. And then I had to do this, but I was warmed up again.” Powell used the Amazon setting as an opportunity for all manner of flutes, woodwinds, and vocals. The music is a little less slapstick than the first film’s, resulting in a more coherent listening experience but perhaps disappointing for listeners who found the wilder moments of Rio to be highlights. The composer also introduced a number of solid new themes alongside adaptations of his legacy ones, though the jumbled plot meant that none of these ideas really got a lot of opportunities to shine.
It was also another opportunity for Powell to indulge in a host of Brazilian musical styles and collaborate with various regional stars and pop artists on songs - all contained on a separate song album (as with Rio and the first Happy Feet) which likely frustrated fans who wanted an integrated listening experience. A gleefully over-the-top piece for Kristin Chenoweth’s lovelorn frog character was the easy highlight of the otherwise sufficient songs, while an energetic track covering the mid-film bird soccer game played more like a score track and honestly would’ve made more sense on the other album.
LIke Rio, the songs and score of Rio 2 made for an above-average good time, though I wouldn’t blame you if you forgot about the music in the wake of the other Powell animated sequel score that was unleashed a few months later…
How To Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) - *****...but really it’s a scale-breaking 6 stars
John Powell; add’l music, arranging, MIDI orchestration & programming by Paul Mounsey & Anthony Willis; orchestrated by
John Ashton Thomas, Randy Kerber, Dave Metzger, Tommy Laurence, Pete Anthony, Germaine Franco & Jeff Atmajian;
conducted by Gavin Greenaway; digital score production Beth Caucci & Victor Chaga; songs by Powell & Jon Thor Birgisson
HTTYD was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=112368
“Film scores tend to be a bit donut-y, lots of whole notes that just sit there and don’t do much. I hate [to bore] musicians. They’re virtuosos, used to playing incredibly difficult music. I love fucking around with the brass. It’s not just stupidly difficult; hopefully it has some kind of emotion that’s worth listening to. When it’s got that fast-moving intricacy played properly, it’s very exciting.”
It was tempting at times in the late aughts and early 2010s to muse about combining the brief highlights from John Powell’s zanier efforts into one massive opus, daydreaming of some nothing-but-highlights album for a theoretical score that would never actually be written. Welp, for me, How To Train Your Dragon 2 was basically that theoretical highlight score made real. It is entirely possible that I, a guy who usually avoids back-to-back listens to anything, played that album 30 times in a row when it came out. Perhaps the only reason I didn’t do that for the recent expanded album release is because it came out only a bit before I started this rundown. A recent reshuffling of all my 5-star scores put this at my #15 score all time, easily the highest ranking for an animated film, cementing its place as the finest score outside of Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings since the mid-1990s.
It is almost impossible for me to write about this score without turning into a fanboy lunatic (never mind that it was the last score perspective I completed in rundown part 8, a case of procrastination and / or writer’s block probably not seen since I wrote about the first How To Train Your Dragon months ago), but I’m gonna try!
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“I remember Jeffrey on Antz saying, ‘You're not scoring an animated film. Think of this as live action.’ He's now ironically relaxed that. If anything, he was the one on this one who probably got me to lighten the score a little bit for a younger audience.”
How To Train Your Dragon was an undeniable success. With Dreamworks rarely hesitating to pump out follow-up films for anything that did well at the box office, a sequel was given the go-ahead in 2010 with an original release target of 2013, a date that eventually moved to 2014 in part because studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg would push back on some of the darker elements of director Dean DeBlois’ vision for the lead character Hiccup reuniting with his long-lost mother. Composer John Powell’s work for that earlier film was widely considered the high point of his career and film music in 2010 (and possibly the finest of the MV / RC musical lineage), even getting an Academy Award nomination for his work, and his assignment for the sequel was no surprise even accounting for the sabbatical he took during part of the film’s production process.
“I’ve seen plenty of films with music with no connection to the story. Casino, they’re all needle drops, [but it’s a] fantastic movie. Dean seems to appreciate attention to the form of storytelling, so I try to stay attached to those ideas.”
Powell would later relay a funny story about encountering DeBlois at an awards party and (possibly drunkenly) demanding DeBlois not put any of his music from the first film in the temp track for the second film. Powell would get his wish - “it was [almost] all Dark Knight in the temp” - though with the hilarious unintended consequence of getting Zimmer’s famed Journey to the Line from The Thin Red Line (a score Powell had worked on) in there as well. “When that's in your temp, it's hell. You won't spot it though, because what I ended up with doesn’t sound anything like it.” Powell couldn’t quite escape the former score, as there were a few minutes that ended up being very familiar, perhaps an inevitability given the tight timelines composers sometimes operate under on franchises. Still, one of those passages, Dragon Racing, was a hell of a way to open the film. “In the first five minutes I did basically every tune from the first movie in a new version. An overture, really. I knew I had to make everybody comfortable, back in a sound and a world we recognize. And from there onwards you look for moments at which the audience feels the story is really moving forward, and that's when you start to carefully introduce a new theme.”
Over-indexing on familiar components (in a score 80+ minutes long!) obscures just how note-perfect the balance is between old and new in the rest of it. Nearly every theme from Dragon returns with new variations, and Powell added a bunch of new ones (all bangers). The two that function as the sequel score’s main themes were both related to the character Hiccup’s adolescence and maturity, one a mournful-yet-triumphant “lost and found” idea that orbits around his relationship with his mom and the other an elegant-yet-playful “mapping the world” idea that doubles for his adventures. A mid-film sequence accompanied by buoyant takes on both ideas (Flying With Mother on album) would win Powell an award for track of the year from the International Film Music Critics Association, though its creation wasn’t the smoothest process. “There used to be a song. It wasn’t working; kid test audiences were getting bored. Dean didn’t want to take [the scene] out. I loved it - you’re finally meeting [your mom] and she happens to be into exactly what you’re into, it’s the greatest day. But it was hard to [score]. I started too slow and Katzenberg said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I [found] the right tempo, the right key, but to get to that point [took] 99% of the time.”
Other elements in the strong roster of new themes included a magisterial Alpha dragon idea with subtle touches of antiquity (almost suggesting Hungarian composer Miklós Rózsa at times) and a love theme for Hiccup’s reunited parents. Choral outbursts abound throughout the film, taking the composer’s talent for exultant vocals to new heights. And the enormous finale, with its gargantuan outburst of the friendship theme and Toothless rhythm played in parallel, will give any good speaker system a healthy workout. I’m sure there are 50 other amazing things I could mention if I took the time to truly indulge in the fanboy lunacy I warned about earlier. Like I said, nothing but highlights.
“I was getting old, the characters were getting old, and my style was getting old. So I just had to be happy with the fact that I was sounding old-fashioned. I used to be hip, apparently, and now I’m this old fart that does only orchestral music and tunes.”
One more thing! Years later, Powell and DeBlois were drinking in Powell’s studio and the director copped to making two temp tracks: one for everyone else (which had some of the music from the first Dragon) and one for the composer (which didn’t).
Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) - **
Steve Jablonsky; add’l music by Jacob Shea, Joseph Trapanese, Dave Fleming & Michael Yezerski; add’l music sound design
by Skrillex; orchestrated by B&W Fowler/Moriarty, Carl Rydlund & Jennifer Hammond; conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith; technical
score engineer Lori Castro; songs Imagine Dragons; add’l music production Hans Zimmer; thank you to HGW & Bob Badami
TBTF discovery #15.
Transformers was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=109608
Revenge of the Fallen was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=111761
Dark of the Moon was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113009
“Now it’s full of action, but in that early stage the film was a lot of sweeping, panning shots of nothing. I would call Michael regularly and say, ‘What is happening? Can you describe it to me one more time?’ But that’s the nature of these movies.”
The fourth Transformers film would be somewhat of a soft reboot, jettisoning Shia LaBeouf and many of the original trilogy’s bots in favor of Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci’s tech guru, Dinobots, and subservience to the Chinese government. The latter was perhaps a reflection of these movies now being far more successful overseas than they were at home; the movie’s grosses in China would surpass those from the U.S. Director Michael Bay would at least keep franchise mainstay Optimus Prime and his regular composer Steve Jablonsky. “My initial approach was writing new themes; all the humans are new. Midway, we started feeling we needed to refer back to some original themes. But for the most part it’s brand new material.”
Granted, that inclination towards reinvention wasn’t new to the music of the franchise; large swaths of Jablonsky’s Dark of the Moon score played like epic Remote Control library music with little relation to the prior films’ scores. But how the saga’s music had evolved (transformed?) was still rather frustrating, as Age of Extinction was perhaps the first summer blockbuster score to be heavily influenced by the success of what Hans Zimmer and Tom Holkenborg did for Man of Steel. If several passages featuring BIG. DRUM. RHYTHMS aren’t a dead giveaway of that, the moments of outright temp track imitation certainly will be. A few other pieces sound like carryovers from Tron: Legacy or Oblivion, no surprise as their composer Joe Trapanese was an additional contributor here.
Linkin Park had played a prominent role in the music of the original trilogy, with one of their songs used in the first film’s end credits and the band even contributing a theme for Revenge of the Fallen, but would seemingly have no role in this entry (though lead singer Chester Bennington claimed some discussions were going on earlier in the year). Instead, the pop rock band Imagine Dragons would be heavily featured. A song the group wrote was integrated into the score by Jablonsky, and the group’s vocals were even used at several points. “It’s like a score-song piece, a little bit different from what we’ve done in the past. Hans was kind enough to offer his giant room for a weekend and we just jammed and came up with some cool ideas.”
If you’re a little more wired for this score’s style than I am (or just enjoy the work of the DJ Skrillex, a key contributor here), you should be warned that finding the score is now quite tricky. An unwillingness by the rights holders to pay certain re-use fees, the case with Dark of the Moon but not with the prior two scores, led to the album being pulled from digital stores after a set number of purchases; Jablonsky lamented this on Facebook. Fans these days have to content themselves with an EP containing four of Jablonsky’s suites on streaming services or hunt down a CD from La-La Land Records that’s now out-of-print and being offered at ludicrous prices by resellers. But for many listeners this score won’t be worth the trouble, save perhaps for the guilty pleasure joys of Autobots Unite and Dinobots Charge as well as the fleetingly few moments that quote the memorable themes from earlier films which were the whole reason this heavily derivative musical concept even worked in the first place.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) - ***½
Hans Zimmer, Michael Einziger, Tom Holkenborg, Andrew Kawczynski, Johnny Marr, Steve Mazzaro & Pharrell Williams;
add’l music by Andy Page, Adam Peters, Czarina Russell & Mario Reinsch; orchestrated by B&W&R Fowler/Moriarty &
Kevin Kaska; conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith; technical engineers Chuck Choi, Stephanie McNally & Jacqueline Friedberg;
soloists Dominic Lewis, Tom Boyd, Ann Marie Simpson, Stuart Clark, Randy Cooke, Steve Erdody, Walt Fowler,
Satnam Ramgotra & Arturo Sandoval; score wrangler Bob Badami; produced by Zimmer & Stephen Lipson;
songs also by Alicia Keys; ‘It’s On Again’ featuring Kendrick Lamar; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant; thank you to Skrillex
TBTF discovery #16.
Not learning any lessons from having too many villains in the third entry of its Tobey Maguire-starring trilogy from the aughts, Sony put too many villains in the second entry to its Andrew Garfield-starring franchise in the next decade, perhaps betraying insecurities over lacking a shared cinematic universe like Marvel’s. Critics would heap scorn on it, and its disappointing box office performance would push the studio towards producing spin-off films involving villains while letting Marvel Studios take a crack at the character. For the 2012 entry, Titanic composer James Horner had been a surprise choice yet had managed to deliver a terrific score, possibly his last consensus great work of his career (tragically cut short a few years later by a plane crash).
A making-of video about the music featured glowing comments from director Mark Webb, who would return for the sequel. And yet Horner wouldn’t follow, as Zimmer was announced as the composer only a month after Man of Steel came out. Horner claimed he and Webb had a great relationship and “there was a chance to write something for the two lead characters and then she dies, but the studio only wanted action [and] the movie ended up being just dreadful,” so he dropped out. Yet the studio may have wanted to move on from Horner anyway, as the aforementioned infamous Sony communications leak would show co-chair Amy Pascal enthusiastically forwarding an email about how millennials love electronic dance music (EDM) and that it would be great to have a ”killer DJ.” Later tawdry rumors about Pascal and Zimmer having an affair were never substantiated.
A whopping seven composers would be credited - Zimmer, singer/songwriter Pharrell, Inception guitarist Johnny Marr, the artist formerly known as Junkie XL, Incubus guitarist Michael Einziger, and two of Zimmer’s team members - plus another seven additional composers / technical engineers (plus violinist Rhea Fowler, the daughter of longtime Zimmer orchestrators Bruce Fowler & Suzette Moriarty, as one of the orchestrators). The more famous contributors joined Zimmer for a three-day jam session, with the massive support team likely tasked with translating said brainstorming into a workable score. It was nice to have more than just Zimmer’s name on the album cover given how many others were involved (as opposed to, say, the Madagascar scores). But while the approach did lead to some wild creativity, it also produced an all-over-the-place work that doesn’t quite congeal.
That aforementioned EDM element did show up in one part, a part that many entertainment journalists and film reviewers (who on average don’t consistently mention film music) mentioned: the Electro theme. Fat synth pulses. Dance music sounds. Even lyrics mirroring the character’s madness and paranoia, courtesy of Pharrell after he took a break from the gang’s jam session to walk around the block. And Zimmer wouldn’t even stop there, also adding in a bunch of guitar shrieks and pulsing woodwinds. It was almost hilarious how unsubtle the approach was, and yet it was hard to argue with its general effectiveness. Not quite as effective was the Harry / Goblin material which generally played more like par-for-the-course Remote Control villainy music, complete with the obnoxious guitar wail that had defined Zimmer’s contributions to Crysis 2. It may seem silly to some to quibble with the carryover of an idea from a forgotten 2011 video game, especially with Horner reusing several of his own musical devices in the prior film, but it was still an odd moment of redundancy from a composer seemingly obsessed with reinvention.
Zimmer’s heroic theme would fare better, especially in its most prominent Copland-like brass outbursts at the film’s bookends, with a welcome appearance from regular orchestrator Walt Fowler on solo trumpet (catnip for those who loved his performances on Broken Arrow). The team would extend the idea into a variety of light rock settings for more personal moments, providing a nice point of differentiation from earlier Zimmer blockbusters which had tended to only make their themes louder or faster. At times, you can barely tell you’re listening to a superhero score. Alas, few of these ideas interact with each other (save maybe for some occasional collisions between the Spidey and Electro material), creating a disparate experience that might trick some listeners into thinking Zimmer and crew were doing a last-minute replacement job. It was fascinating and frustrating in equal increments, and if nothing else it was a nice change of pace from Zimmer’s typically portentous, self-serious superhero fare.
If you wanted the more self-serious version of Zimmer’s music, you just had to wait a few months…
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Next time: “My pitch was something I could’ve shown to my music professor. Dead straight, strict, pompous as hell.”
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Will probably give the HTTYD trilogy a re-watch in January and see how 2 stacks up now.
