This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Interstellar, Kingsman, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117324
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.

-----------------------

Chappie - or should it be CHAPPiE? (2015) - ***
Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Steve Mazzaro & Andrew Kawczynski; sound design Tom Holkenborg; synth programming by
Zimmer, Andy Page & Rich Walters; analogue synth design Ed Buller & Michael Tritter; sequencer programmer Nathan
Stornetta; technical score engineers Chuck Choi & Stephane McNally; technical assistants Jacqueline Friedberg & Julian
Pastorelli; music consultant Czarina Russell; digital instrument design Mark Wherry; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant

TBTF discovery #19.

Neill Blomkamp’s bizarre movie about a South African police robot who goes gangster (yes, really) thankfully faded from sight almost as soon as it was released; neither critics nor audiences seemed interested in robot rage-rapping (among other things). Blomkamp’s previous film Elysium had featured an intriguing mainstream debut from composer Ryan Amon, and in late 2013 Amon was announced as this film’s composer alongside the British electronic musician Clark. But a year later, with only three months to go before its premiere, it was announced that Zimmer was taking over; no reason was publicly stated, but we can safely assume it was to “save the movie.” Zimmer seemed to relish the opportunity to supervise a completely electronic score, almost as if leading another all-hands-on-deck rush-job effort was worth it just to have a big analog synth sandbox to play in.

CHAPPiE is a fascinating artifact, one that seems to delight as much in its retro beeps and boops as it does in churning out aggressive sounds halfway between the car horn zoom sounds of Zimmer’s earlier Rush and the dance music material Junkie XL was more known for at the time. It has a bunch of drifting keyboard tones that seem as much a callback to Zimmer’s earlier days as they are a love letter to Zimmer’s hero, the Greek electronic music pioneer Vangelis. And there’s also tons of random material thrown in: bits of Man of Steel, video game noises, dial-up internet noises, casino noises, even ersatz Bane choir noises! It’s a glorious mess, and a brazenly derivative one too, but there was no time for anything else. Assuming you can stand the overabundant electronica (not guaranteed), the ridiculous nature of the whole thing just might put a smile on your face.


Game of Thrones Season 5 (2015) - ***
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
Season 4 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117220

Today the fifth season of HBO’s hit fantasy series is generally thought of as one of the weaker offerings of the series, with the showrunners seemingly wheel-spinning as they started running out of novels to adapt. It was the drabbest, grimmest year for the show to date, and Ramin Djawadi’s score would largely follow suit with drab, grim variations on preexisting themes. Some of those takes were impressive, but they made the corresponding album a tad glum and thus the least essential of the series, although the midseason Hardhome sequence did feature perhaps the first great stretch of action music for the show.


Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) - ***
Tom Holkenborg; add’l music by Christian Vorländer; add’l programming by Stephen Perone; orchestrated by Emad Borjian

TBTF discovery #20.

After decades of delays, a recasting of the lead role, and multiple production mishaps, the fourth film in George Miller’s Mad Max franchise finally arrived. Unlike similarly troubled blockbusters of the era like The Lone Ranger, Fury Road turned out to be an all-time classic, winning raves from critics and audiences and even getting a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars. The dang thing was in development for so long that it ended up having three composers attached at various points - John Powell was hired when he talked to Miller about Happy Feet in 2002, Marco Beltrami would say he was doing the music at a Fans of Film Music gathering in 2012, and the ascendant Tom Holkenborg would come on board shortly after 300: Rise of an Empire.

“I’ve got an insane fear of flying, and this is a 17-hour flight. I finally get to his Sydney office at 8:30 in the morning. I’ve been up for god knows how long, and I see the film. It doesn’t have a beginning. The first shot I see is a crazy red guy on a truck playing guitar. And the rest is one big chase. I came out of that room like, ‘What the hell just happened to me?’ In the beginning, George felt he didn’t need any score. There was the sound of the cars, the drummers in the back and the guitar player. But the music [they had] didn’t make sense. So I had to redo that, which was tricky because it had to look as if they were playing [what] I wrote.”

On screen, the relentless percussive intensity matches the insanity of the visuals; there is no argument that the score fits the film like a glove. But on album the score’s similarities with Man of Steel are just as face-smackingly obvious as they were in Age of Extinction - the feel of the drum rhythms, the manipulated sound of the instruments, and especially the resilient finale. Not helping matters was the redundancy of some of the thematic material, including Holkenborg mimicking a classic Zimmer approach for dramatic tension (hammer away at the same note again and again) with the first recurring idea heard in the film. But me thinking the score was overrated (and the work’s muted reception from film music critics in general) didn’t matter, as Holkenborg’s standing in Hollywood was elevated. After years of backing up Zimmer, he was now seen as an independent brand.

He would immediately take that brand in a very different direction.


Black Mass (2015) - **½
Tom Holkenborg; add’l programming by Stephen Perone, Emad Borjian & Aljoscha Christenhuß;
conducted by Nick Glennie- Smith; score technical engineer Ryan Robinson

TBTF discovery #21.

“When you’re a composer you always want to showcase that you’re capable of doing multiple genres. That you’re not only the action guy. I feel comfortable being larger-than-life in music and in song production. That’s usually what is required for these superhero films. On the other hand, there’s something like Black Mass—very minimal scoring, very small in tone.”

Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper’s dramatic telling of mobster Whitey Bulger’s life, heavy on makeup and Boston accents, brought in Holkenborg relatively last minute - ”Tom, please help, we have [six] weeks left”. He largely kept to the standard Remote Control serious drama style: semi-restricted soundscapes, mysterious piano / keyboard textures, and an emphasis on low strings. The drabness was somewhat by design. “You see the gruesome truth. There’s nothing glorifying. I used acoustic instruments but I instructed them very clearly that they play with no vibrato, so you get this really cold quality.”

The predictable brooding and churning didn’t make for the most distinctive work - some grim passages played like a hybrid of the detuned plonking from Holkenborg’s earlier 300 music and the darker atmospheric moments from Interstellar - but it was intriguing to hear the former DJ pushing himself outside his comfort zone (basically in Frost/Nixon music territory).


Skylanders: SuperChargers (2015) - **½
Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Max Aruj, Steffen Thum & Thomas Farnon; digital instrument
design Mark Wherry; drums Satnam Ramgotra; technical assistant Hal Rosenfeld

Skylanders was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113090
Giants was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113153
SWAP Force was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117113
Trap Team was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117324

TBTF discovery #22. This fifth entry in the Skylanders franchise would certainly indulge in some eccentric delights, including one track mixed with goofy laughter that has to be heard to be believed. But it still played like the least essential of the series so far, and one got the sense that Balfe had outgrown stuff like this, especially with comments like “it feels like 15 years [on this series], but I think it’s only about four.” The following year’s sixth game would recycle music from previous games.

I’m not kidding about that track. Someone must have spiked Lorne’s hummus! Listen to this madness: https://open.spotify.com/track/0rG2aeqIW5baCefYaLYrj9?si=220cae029b3047ad


Terminator Genisys (2015) - ***
Lorne Balfe; executive music producer Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Andrew Kawczynski & Dieter Hartmann;
hybrid production Daniel James; ambient music design Mel Wesson; orchestrated by Oscar Senén & Joan Martorell;
conducted by Gavin Greenaway; technical score assistant Steffen Thum, technical score engineers Chuck Choi & Stephanie
McNally; digital instrument design Mark Wherry; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant; Kelly Johnson as Balfe’s assistant

TBTF discovery #23.

“I remember getting hate mail on Assassin’s Creed. ‘What have you done to his music?!’”

Paramount’s umpteenth attempt at rebooting the Terminator franchise led once again to a vastly inferior entry compared to the two original works helmed by James Cameron. The franchise’s music has a mixed history, with a glorious heroic theme penned by Brad Fiedel contrasted against Fiedel’s grating electronic sounds and the later contributions from Marco Beltrami, Danny Elfman, and Bear McCreary ranging from sufficient to underwhelming. Christophe Beck, then perhaps best known for Buffy and Frozen, was originally hired as composer in late 2014 but was replaced by Lorne Balfe several months later with Zimmer in tow as an “executive music producer”; Balfe would claim he got involved “after someone heard my music and Hans’ studio is right next to mine.” It would be the second straight blockbuster helmed by Alan Taylor to swap composers, following Carter Burwell getting dropped for Brian Tyler on Thor: The Dark World almost two years earlier.

“It’s a fun film. You wonder if [critics] thought they were going into The King’s Speech.”

Balfe would show some fealty to the franchise’s signature sound (“there are scenes where are identical to the original [that] I scored as close as I could possibly get”) but otherwise delivered a work at home in the sonic universe of Transformers and various other Remote Control mannerisms. “The storyline moves on, John Connor is different. It’s not meant to sound strictly like a Terminator score.” You could choose to lament the continued homogenization of the scores of action/sci fi tentpole films, or you could instead celebrate that the franchise had received surprisingly orchestral and generally competent music. My resulting rating is basically a compromise between those attitudes.

“There were versions of the end credits I wrote with Brad’s theme where my orchestration teacher would’ve been very impressed. But you don’t need interesting string lines with this.”

And Genisys wasn’t even the only film Balfe scored that year that got a mixed commercial and critical reception!


Home (2015) - ****½
Lorne Balfe; orchestrated by Oscar Senén & Joan Martorell; orchestra conducted by Gavin Greenaway;
woodwinds & choir conducted by Ben Foster; score technical engineers Max Aruj, Thomas Fannon,
Laurence Anslow & John Prestage; score technical assistant Steffen Thum; thank you to Hans Zimmer

TBTF discovery #24.

“I spent ages trying to write the theme for Oh for Home. Someone said, ‘it’s simplistic.’ What’s wrong with that? Baa, Baa, Black Sheep is simplistic. It’s [also] memorable!”

This goofy Dreamworks adaptation of the alien invasion-themed children’s book The True Meaning of Smekday came and went without making much of a blip. The marketing of Rihanna’s involvement in the cast and in contributing songs was almost a throwback to the studio’s early days of having artists prominently involved in the development of a film (think Elton John on El Dorado and Bryan Adams on Spirit), and it arguably came at the expense of having any promotion of Lorne Balfe’s exceptional score. The composer would arguably overachieve by not only writing a few catchy themes but also by adapting some of the song passages into recurring melodies in his score, not to mention writing several short snippets that bridged in and out of the many popular songs needle-dropped throughout the film. The resulting score is overflowing with memorable ideas and bubbly optimism, a gleeful spin on the usual bustling Dreamworks “house style” of music that was laced with some of the off-kilter instrumentation and zaniness that had defined Balfe’s contribution to the Skylanders series and was as infectiously tuneful as some of Hans Zimmer’s earlier comedic and dramatic works. The music of Home received relatively little attention from film score reviewers and fans when it came out, a shame as it’s a giddy joy that deserves a bigger audience.

Proving that some things change and some things don’t - in the glorious Media Ventures tradition of composers working on vastly different works in close proximity to each other (think Klaus Badelt detoxing from Gladiator by walking over to listen to what Harry Gregson-Williams was doing on Chicken Run, or Zimmer noting that Harry and John Powell were using chord progressions in their Shrek score that were also in Hannibal), Balfe was composing this jubilant score as Tom Holkenborg wrote the aggressive Mad Max: Fury Road nearby.


Pan (2015) - ****½
John Powell; add’l music, arranging & MIDI orchestration by Anthony Willis, Batu Sener &
Paul Mounsey; orchestrated by John Ashton Thomas, Andrew Kinney, Jon Kull, Mark Graham,
Rick Giovinazzo & Tommy Laurence; conducted by Gavin Greenaway; ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’,
‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, and ‘Something’s Not Right’ produced by Powell, Matthew Margeson and/or Dario Marianelli

“On Pan they just let me go in a direction that struck me as making sense. I love waiting till the last minute sometimes.”

You’d think in the modern age we wouldn’t get a Peter Pan movie more ill-conceived than Steven Spielberg’s loud Hook, but this prequel was exactly that, an enormously costly stumble pummeled by poor reviews, accusations of whitewashed casting, and confusion over the cast occasionally singing songs like Smells Like Teen Spirit and Blitzkrieg Bop. One might even wonder what director Joe Wright (perhaps still best known for his English period piece adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Atonement) was doing attached to this. Wright’s usual composer Dario Marianelli was initially involved, including when the film was originally planned as a summer blockbuster, but in the midst of its multiple release date postponements Marianelli’s work was eventually tossed; unconfirmed reports suggested he had written the score in demo format but not recorded anything yet.

One might think that this was going to turn into another classic case where Zimmer or someone on his team or one of his alumni were brought in to “save” the movie with something sounding like The Dark Knight or Transformers or Inception - heck, it’s already what had happened with CHAPPiE and Terminator Genisys in the same year! This ended up being half-true, as the producers did bring a former Media Ventures composer on board, but it was John Powell doing something closer to How To Train Your Dragon than the typical Remote Control score. “Lots of things had come up earlier in the year but I told everybody ‘I’m doing my oratorio’. My agent said, ‘it’s Joe Wright, they haven't got much time, and it’s a big orchestral score.’ I liked the director. [but] Dario has written nothing but brilliant scores, [so] I [felt] like a homewrecker. I was probably getting stuck writing the oratorio, and I [could] go back to doing what I know for five weeks. Halfway through I got the feeling they were making the film for an older audience and then pulled it back for a younger audience. I tried to bridge the change of tone.”

Powell did have to deal with those anachronistic songs. “[Joe] didn’t want his pirates to sing shanties. It’s interesting. It’s also a bit difficult for people to not jump out of the storytelling. In Happy Feet we did it from the get-go. Our problem [on Pan] was that Nirvana came late. Dario [did] vocals with the cast. Matt Margeson had done work. The only thing I could suggest was [making] the arrangements more embedded, doing stomps - what you see is what you hear.” Otherwise, Powell’s music is the kind of enormous, densely thematic, often thrilling, occasionally gorgeous, and wildly orchestrated work that his fans loved. By the time anvils are smashing away in the final battle (the stupendous 13 minutes in Flying Ship Fight and A Boy Who Could Fly), one could almost have visions of X-Men: The Last Stand dancing in their head, what with this score seeming to match that one’s “everything but the kitchen sink” feel. You might even be tricked into thinking you were watching a good film at times.

Sure, it wasn’t in the neighborhood of How To Train Your Dragon or the music of its sequel - but then how could it be, with Powell only having a little over a month to write and record the dang thing? It was still a bombastic delight that stood among the best that film music had to offer in 2015. Put it in the pantheon of the all-time great scores for abysmal films.

“My assistant sent me reviews complaining about how loud the music was [in the final mix]. I got the best review I’ve ever got - complaining about the whole film, saying ‘the composer’s trying to sound like the greatest hits of John Williams’, not just John Williams but the greatest hits - and thinking ‘holy shit, they must have cranked it up too much.’”

-----------------------

Next time: “I remember the first time being in awe of the music of John Powell and felt there’s no way I can get through this.”