This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on The Martian, BvS, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117475
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.
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Captain America: Civil War (2016) - ***
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Halli Cauthery & Alex Belcher; score technical engineers
Victor Chaga & Maverick Dugger; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman, Andrew Kinney,
Carl Rydlund & John Ashton Thomas; conducted by Gavin Greenaway
The Winter Soldier was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117220
Half a sequel to Winter Soldier and half a third Avengers movie, the second hero vs. hero blockbuster of 2016 was much more of a critical and commercial success than BvS was. With the Russo brothers returning to helm the film, it was no surprise that Henry Jackman returned as well. The pivot away from being a pseudo-political thriller gave Jackman the opportunity to take “a different approach, more symphonic and less electronic than the second one,” which was great for those who were repelled by his intentionally distorted material for the villain of the previous film (though those elements do still show up).
Jackman had somewhat of an impossible task beyond that: score both sides of the conflict without giving away any preference, while also providing quick musical signifiers for new characters Black Panther and Spider-Man without overwhelming the narrative. He generally succeeded, providing the requisite level of large-scale orchestral energy while also tying the film together with a new descending theme of weighty tragedy. “This is Captain America’s movie. However, you don’t want to let the audience know that he’s going to win. What I ended up doing was making a Civil War theme to balance everything out. Even with that, I had to be a bit careful. There was still that danger of making it too much of a thriller or too heroic.”
The downside is that, perhaps owing to the nature of the film and not wanting to musically pick a side, large stretches of the score play like adequate but largely unmemorable ruckus. Still, one has to keep in mind that it’s very easy to focus on what these kind of multi-hero team-up movie scores DON’T do (the music eschews using an established Iron Man theme, for example - though one could point out similar issues with any of the other Avengers scores, never mind that we now have four Thor movies with four different Thor themes), and if you focus instead on what it does well you’ll find a decent hour-plus of music on album.
The Legend of Tarzan (2016) - **
Rupert Gregson-Williams; add’l music & programming by Thomas Farnon, Tony Clarke & Tom Howe;
technical score engineer James Roberson; orchestrated & conducted by Alastair King; ethnic percussion
Paul Clarvis; solo vocals Zoe Mthiyane; vocals produced by Lebo M; thank you to Hans Zimmer
TBTF discovery #26. Another year, another rush-job replacement effort for Zimmer & team.
It was surprising that the film David Yates elected to direct after supervising four straight Harry Potters was this effects-heavy Tarzan remake - and equally surprising was him choosing the relatively-unknown Bulgarian composer Mario Grigorov to do the film’s music. For reasons unknown, a supposedly fully-recorded score was tossed and Hans Zimmer & Rupert Gregson-Wililams were brought in to “save” the movie only about four months before its release date (the two had shared credit on the truly bizarre 2014 flop Winter’s Tale, though Gregson-Williams would eventually receive sole credit here). The swap didn’t salvage the film, but it still presented an intriguing opportunity for Gregson-Williams to pivot into action blockbusters, something a world away from the comedies that had defined much of his output over the last decade. “Before Tarzan I was Adam Sandler’s guy.”
Alas, the filmmakers seemed to want Rupert to provide little more than a safely predictable sound in line with past Zimmer & co. efforts, like what Lorne Balfe had done the prior year on Terminator Genisys and arguably a tradition going all the way back to what was asked of John Powell on Face/Off. The portions of Tarzan that don’t sound like Remote Control duplicates tend to be the portions that sound like Media Ventures duplicates. African instrumental and vocal additions are there but infrequent, and there is very little about the music rooting you in a specific time or place - and, sure, that last point is true of most of John Barry’s music for Out of Africa, but at least that score has distinctive themes. Rupert was more skilled than this, though his 2016 would soon morph into a year of replacements as this score was exactly what another director thought his film needed.
Hacksaw Ridge (2016) - ***
Rupert Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Anthony Clarke, Steve Mazzaro & Evan Jolly;
orchestrated by Gregson-Williams, Oscar Senén & Joan Martorell; conducted by Cliff Masterson;
technical score engineers James Roberson, Jacqueline Friedberg, Edward Underhill & Drew Conley
TBTF discovery #27.
“We didn’t want the music to sound like it belonged to a conventional war hero; he was bearing his faith and no gun. Andrew Garfield’s performance is so powerful I didn’t need to tell people how brave and special a man he was.”
This Mel Gibson-directed tale of a pacifist medic in World War II achieved decent reviews and awards consideration in late 2016 despite lingering disdain over the various scandals in Gibson’s personal life. James Horner had scored several earlier Gibson films and was slated to score this one but tragically passed away in 2015. Composer John Debney, who wrote the music for Gibson’s controversial Passion of the Christ, was brought on board in late 2015. In an interview only a month before the premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Debney spoke about putting the “finishing touches” on the music (a martial “hero theme” remains on his SoundCloud webpage), but for whatever reason his score was tossed and Rupert was brought in. Whether Gibson liked Legend of Tarzan or just liked that such sufficient music could be done so quickly is unclear.
The score ends up being structured similar to John Williams’ music for War Horse - pleasant material before the protagonist goes to war, brutal passages once he’s in the conflict, and redemptive music for the finale. That early pleasant material (”quite conventional”) finds Rupert operating in territory not dissimilar from Thomas Newman or even something his brother Harry might’ve written - warm yet subdued (the horn usage throughout is a nice touch). The war-focused midsection seems to fall squarely in the Remote Control wheelhouse of tense repeated string figures and quasi-sound design. It was a choice perhaps understandable given the nature of the film - “the sound of war was so ambitious sonically and so ambitious technically that I didn’t try and underscore that” - yet also an undeniably modern-sounding move that may come off as predictable and even anachronistic to some (never mind some brassy statements that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Bruckheimer movie). The last few tracks doubled down on stock Media Ventures / Remote Control heroism vibes, with the shakuhachi flute functioning as both a nice accent and an unintended trigger for memories of The Last Samurai.
On the whole, it’s not as if Gregson-Williams didn’t put any thought into the work; he based his “pious theme” for the character’s spirituality on something like 12th century music, wrote passages for solo cellos in unison with a bassoon “a bit higher than we would normally write for those instruments just to make [the character] feel vulnerable”, and even added his own “very high countertenor” voice singing in a some sections “which added another color.” And it was definitely a more interesting musical achievement than his replacement score from earlier in the year. Its main issue is that what’s familiar about the score is ultimately more memorable than what’s new. It’s not as if this musical lineage couldn’t write action music for older war films in a different vernacular - look at what Trevor Rabin had done with The Great Raid and Flyboys only a decade earlier - but that clearly wasn’t what Gibson wanted.
The most successful thing Rupert worked on that year wasn’t even shown in theaters…
The Crown Season 1 (2016) - ***
Rupert Gregson-Williams; main theme by Hans Zimmer; add’l music & arrangements by Lorne Balfe, Evan Jolly, Max Aruj,
Steffen Thum, Tony Clarke & Guy Farley; orchestrated by Oscar Senén & Joan Martorell; produced by Zimmer;
conducted by Johannes Vogel; digital instrument design Mark Wherry; technical score engineer James Roberson;
Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant; Andy Patterson as Gregson-Williams’ technical assistant; thanks to Paul Mounsey
TBTF discovery #28.
With House of Cards somewhat starting to lose its luster four seasons in (even before actor Kevin Spacey’s scandals), Netflix made a new bid for television prestige with its Peter Morgan-supervised show about the rise of Queen Elizabeth and the lives of those both in and around the British royal family, with the show garnering immense acclaim for its cast including John Lithgow’s magnificent single-season showing as Winston Churchill. Morgan knew Zimmer from their time working with director Ron Howard on Frost/Nixon and Rush, and Zimmer would rave to people about the scripts he’d read, but owing to his busy schedule composing as well as touring that summer (and perhaps also thinking that doing episodic television composing was a bit beneath him at that point in his career) he pulled in Rupert. “Hans said it was going to be the greatest thing on TV.” It’s also possible that this was Rupert’s third 2016 replacement score, as Paul Englishby had been announced as composer in fall 2015.
Gregson-Williams described working on the score as initially a challenge, since his instincts were to write something a little more typically English-sounding, imbuing the royals with a sense of pomposity or stuffiness, but Morgan “felt strongly that this wasn’t a royal story; it was really about these strange human beings. He wanted something edgier. I worked on themes for a good month before I wrote a cue. I hated him for it [at the time], but I loved the end result.” The music was a mix of styles, ranging from more chamber-like and austere to rhythming fluttering to passages adjacent to The Thin Red Line or The Last Samurai, with the overall musical tapestry generally adequate as background music and sometimes even elevating the show. Still, the occasional burst of Zimmeresque modern tones could overwhelm the images (Duck Shoot practically drowns an early scene in unnecessary Inception vibes), and it didn’t help matters that Zimmer’s drab title theme was a bit of a dud.
And it wasn’t even the only television score that had “main theme by Hans Zimmer” on its album cover that fall. It is now time to talk about Bleeding Fingers.
Planet Earth II (2016) - ***
Jacob Shea & Jasha Klebe; main theme by Hans Zimmer; orchestrated by Karen Tanaka & Sean Barrett;
produced by Zimmer & Russell Emmauel; conducted by Goeff Alexander; score technical engineers
Hannah Parrot, Jake Schaefer, Emmanuel El-Helou, Jared Fry & Wayne Ingram; add’l instrument design
Jake Schaefer; score consultant Monica Sonand; thank you to Satnam Ramgotra
“A lot of us grow up with David Attenborough telling us about this world. We were conscious that [his] voice was as much to the forefront as possible and [guiding] us musically, especially speaking with Hans about how to approach this. There are moments where the narration is explaining what’s happening, and the music kind of holds still, maybe a tense atmosphere to keep the soundscape uncluttered so you’re able to take in what he’s describing. [Music] has more of an impact when he’s not speaking.”
Zimmer and his business partner Steve Kofsky had originally set up Bleeding Fingers, an ancillary brand for Remote Control, as a collaboration with Russell Emmanuel and his Extreme Music production wing at Sony to create music libraries for TV miniseries and reality shows. After a few years of that, the gang got the opportunity to try out working on a nature documentary with the large-scale series Planet Earth II thanks to Emmanuel having a longtime friend at the BBC. Seasoned score fans were a tad confused why this series was supporting Zimmer’s “proof of concept” for whether his business could pivot to a new genre, as the notable British-produced nature documentaries voiced by David Attenborough in the last 15 years had tended to have expansive symphonic scores by English composer George Fenton (the original Planet Earth, as well as Blue Planet and Frozen Planet). But that choice was less a rejection of Fenton’s approach and more just that Alastair Fothergill, the chief creative force behind those earlier series, wasn’t involved as he had been leading the nature documentary unit at Disney since 2008.
“If one person was doing 10 minutes of bird scenes in one episode, the other person was getting them in the next episode. You take this bird scene, I’ll take this bird scene. Birds are always funny. Comedy music!”
As with The Crown, Zimmer would craft a theme and be in some meetings, but the bulk of the scoring was done by two associates. Jacob Shea was more of a known commodity; he’d been part of RC credits since 2007 and a frequent contributor to Steve Jablonsky’s scores. Jasha Klebe was a fresher face for many score fans. “My grandparents owned an opera house growing up. I studied piano for 15 years and later got an internship at Remote Control. I went through the path of being a studio assistant to orchestrating for Lorne Balfe to working with Hans on his films.” Shea and Klebe got into a bake-off with other Bleeding Fingers team members by doing demo scores for three scenes (not dissimilar from how Jim Dooley competed to win the SOCOM 3 gig a decade earlier), and both were chosen to co-compose.
Shea would later acknowledge there was no point in trying to duplicate Fenton’s earlier material. “George did an amazing score and there’s no way we can outpace him in orchestral brilliance. I like the music George wrote better than my own music, but you can’t out-Fenton Fenton!” So the composition ended up rotating between a variety of styles while maintaining a kind of “epic” Remote Control cinematic feel. “There’s nothing off-limits, from orchestras to synthesizers to weird instruments that are from around the world. Even incorporating sound design elements that they had recorded when out shooting animals into the score.” It was all competent yet unsurprising, and lacking that beguiling “something extra” that made Harry Gregson-Williams’ music from the prior year’s Monkey Kingdom worth returning to.
Zimmer would admit to being impressed by Attenborough’s tenacity at his age. “During the promotion, I just felt knackered all the time. I asked him whether he was going to go home and rest and it turned out he was off to do a dinosaur dig.” And the proof of concept for Bleeding Fingers would pay future dividends, not only because it set up the entity to work on a bunch of nature series in the future but also because it showed Zimmer’s team could adapt to different types of television, which gave the makers of The Simpsons an easy replacement option when they pushed longtime series composer Alf Clausen out the door the next year.
“I have friends that are very excited to watch the series and chill out. When you're high, everything sounds great, everything looks great on the series. Part of our job is to heighten the experience, whatever experience you're having.”
Jason Bourne (2016) - *½
John Powell & David Buckley; add’l music, arrangements, programming, and/or MIDI programming by
Batu Sener, Luke Richards, Logan Stahley & Anthony Willis; sound design by Michael White; orchestrated by
Geoff Lawson & Tommy Laurence; conducted by Gavin Greenaway; thank you to John Ashton Thomas
The Bourne Identity was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=108240
The Bourne Supremacy was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=108507
The Bourne Ultimatum was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=109726
Green Zone was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=111863
Captain Philips was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=116843
Powell: “[Paul’s] favorite score is Battle of Algiers. A lot of it is just a snare drum.”
This legacyquel, coming almost a decade after the supposedly conclusive Bourne Ultimatum, would reunite Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass for another tale of gritty spycraft, though sadly to diminishing returns. Composer John Powell had accidentally written influential music for the original trilogy, to the point that it was hard for him to not hear it in seemingly every other action scene on television, but he had largely stayed away from live action films over the last several years (in part ambivalent over concerns about glorifying violence but also because the music he was asked to compose for them didn’t interest him too much anymore) and hadn’t worked for Greengrass since 2010’s Green Zone, though the latter was probably for the best since he missed out on the tortured composition process for Captain Philips. It seemed at first like a welcome reunion.
Yet Powell seemed to have next to no role in the finished product. Former Harry Gregson-Williams assistant David Buckley was given a co-composing credit, only one track is solely credited to Powell, and Powell didn’t seem to participate in much (if any) press for the movie. Buckley claimed he was caught in the classic trap of a successful film with successful music making the filmmakers want to repeat that music in later ventures; heck, that had already happened on Bourne Ultimatum. “Paul said we’ve got the tunes. I did try to reinterpret things a bit, but there was a limit to how far I could stray. It wasn’t my place to resist the party line.” The end result was a disappointingly dull retread of Powell’s style without any of its heart or wilder action flair. Maybe Buckley should’ve started a Greengrass music support group with Captain Philips composer Henry Jackman.
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Next time: “We know if something's fabricated.”
