This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Lego Batman, Geostorm, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119058
- 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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Dunkirk (2017) - **
Hans Zimmer; produced by Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Benjamin Wallfisch, Satnam Ramgotra,
Andy Page & Andrew Kawczynski; sequencer programming Steve Mazzaro; technical score engineers
Chuck Choi & Stephanie McNally; technical assistants Steven Doar & Derrick Werlé; orchestrated by
B&W Fowler/Moriarty, Carl Rydlund, Jeremy Levy & David Krystal; conducted by Wallfisch & Gavin Greenaway;
electric & acoustic cello Tina Guo; exotic instruments Chas Smith; digital instrument design Mark Wherry;
viola, violin & Hardinger fiddle by Michael Levine; synth design Howard Scarr, Drew Jordan & Ed Buller
TBTF discovery #40.
Christopher Nolan’s next acclaimed feature Dunkirk didn’t make any kind of attempt at rah-rah patriotism or typical wartime heroism; it’s a war film in its setting but plays more like a race-against-time siege thriller, and with its three interlinked stories it was also a stealthy extension of the director’s obsession with the perception of time. As such, the types of music one would associate with British war films, like the exciting fanfares of Ron Goodwin, would’ve been wholly inappropriate for the film, never mind that Nolan tended to view typical genre music as cliches to avoid (think his aversion to astronaut and sci fi movie scoring tropes for Interstellar) and Hans was always trying to avoid the expected anyway.
Even with all that in mind, few were prepared for the music Zimmer and team (including Lorne Balfe, who helped while Zimmer was on tour) unleashed. It’s an open question how much of it actually constitutes music in the traditional sense, as so much of its runtime was taken up by sound design. Zimmer himself would even question if it counted as a score during a promotional interview the next year for a different work, an odd thing to say for something getting awards consideration. It was basically the Too Big To Fail era’s take on the music of Black Hawk Down: war is hell, and it should be hell on your ears too.
The composition didn’t have a distinctive singular sound in the way the BWAM was for Inception or the organ was for Interstellar. Instead, it had the use of a Shepard tone, a musical term for ascending scales stacked on top of each other to create musical tension (the magazine Vox would appropriately call it a sound illusion). It was actually mentioned in the film’s script by Nolan. “It’s a continuing ascension of tone, a corkscrew effect. And I interwove the timelines according to that principle. Early on I sent Hans a recording that I made of a watch with insistent ticking and we started to build out of that. There's a fusion of music, sound effects, and picture that we've never been able to achieve before.”
A 100-minute “proof of concept” demo would lead to a score that pushed the Shepard tone idea a step further, with three different themes based on Shepard tones all stacked on top of each other when the various timelines converge in the climactic The Oil. But getting to that point, even on a film Zimmer loved, would be the antithesis of fun for the composer. There was a record going back to The Thin Red Line of Hans saying it was hard to find musical inspiration amidst the visualized horrors of war. But even more challenging was trying to convert Nolan’s experimental ideas into music while conforming to a changing edit. “If they made a cut in reel four, we couldn’t just go fix that bit there. We would have to go all the way from the beginning to the end and redo all those Shepard tone ideas. I kept thinking, ‘I know why nobody has done it before - because it’s impossible.’ But Chris wouldn’t let me give up.”
Folks who gave Zimmer flack for the end product may be surprised to learn he recorded a large orchestra at one point, though that material was tossed pretty quickly. “As soon as you heard conventional strings, you just knew that I was stepping outside the reality of what Chris was showing us, so the instruments had to be reinvented. [Now] it’s basically a string quartet playing at the extremes of their ranges.” Making music that’s hell on your ears, in service of hellish visuals, can apparently be hell for the composer too.
Somewhat amusingly, the score would make one concession to the mannerisms of Golden and Silver Age war film music: putting a classic British piece of music in (think Rule Britannia in The Guns of Navarone). In this case it was bits of classical composer Edward Elgar’s famed Enigma Variations, used mostly near the film’s climax and largely adapted by Benjamin Wallfisch. With the melody being performed via slow-moving, dreamy Vangelis-like tones, it arguably was obscured beyond recognition for some listeners.
Viewed as an audacious musical puzzle box, the composition was remarkable. Whether it was a good fit for its film was open for debate. Some appreciated its contributions to the film’s unease, while others found the ear-splitting noise a distraction from an otherwise exemplary film. Both sides of the argument had merit; there are scenes where Zimmer’s contributions add greatly to the sense of unease, yet I remember being in a theater wondering why there had to be so much screeching when Ken Branagh sees boats in the distance late in the film.
The whole “music” package was intellectually appealing but almost impossible to like apart from its film, far more so than even the heavily atmospheric portions of Batman Begins that made their way onto that score’s album. Large stretches of it are surprisingly dull when evaluated standalone. Several film score critics hated it. Filmtracks called it “laughably terrible” and didn’t even bother to give a split heard-in-film vs. heard-on-album rating for a score it acknowledged might have some academic value. MMUK called it “one-note.“ James Southall gave it a 2/5 rating but only because it didn’t work well for him as an album; he still thought it was “a brilliant accomplishment” for its film.
Awards bodies tended to agree with that last sentiment. The work would get nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score, no great surprise as the institution had nominated at least one atypical, sound design, or drone score annually for the last few years and would often do so in the future. BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations happened too, though Zimmer would lose to Alexandre Desplat’s affecting work for The Shape of Water in each instance.
I understand the logic behind the score but don’t enjoy much of the work itself, though as with Black Hawk Down in the prior decade it was pretty clear it wasn’t designed with enjoyment in mind. On a more personal note, it was fascinating to be at a Hans Zimmer-themed concert by the Metropolis String Quartet last year and hear them perform their take on the thumping track Supermarine which gave the piece a sparser, more haunting feel.
The challenging listening experience of Dunkirk was only a tune-up for what Zimmer and Wallfisch did next.
Blade Runner 2049 (2017) - *½
Hans Zimmer & Benjamin Wallfisch; synth design Howard Scarr; exotic instruments Chas Smith; digital
instrument design Mark Wherry; technical score engineer Chuck Choi; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant
TBTF discovery #41.
Zimmer: “All digital synth, as soon as you put it on a big IMAX sound system it falls apart. But the analog synth maintains its integrity.”
Wallfisch: “The CS-80 is temperamental, like a living creature. Every note, you play it twice and it's [a] different tuning. We never knew what was going to come out. [But] we’d find places where those sounds could enhance the movie.”
Perhaps it was inevitable that a decades-later sequel to a movie that disappointed commercially (and only is now considered a classic thanks to renewed interest over the years and multiple new cuts) was also a box office disappointment. But the comparatively few people who saw Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve’s follow-up to Ridley Scott’s revered science fiction masterpiece, were blown away, and one gets the feeling time will be as kind to it as it has been to the original. The director’s usual composer Jóhann Jóhannsson was linked to the film over a year before its release. “Denis told me at the beginning that he wanted me on board, but obviously it had to go through more people than normal to make the decision. It helped that it’s the same producers [Broderick Johnson and Andrew A. Kosove] that I worked with on Prisoners. It’s a luxury to have so much time.”
However, only a few months before the film’s release it was announced that Jóhannsson was out and Hans Zimmer was in. The cause remains unclear. Jóhannsson was contractually forbidden from speaking about the matter and would tragically pass away from a drug mixture less than a year later. Villeneuve claimed “the movie needed something different, and I needed to go closer to Vangelis” whose moody tones had accompanied the first film. But it’s hard to ignore the presence of Ridley Scott, the producer that Jóhannsson didn’t mention. Scott was very involved in other parts of the film, including the screenplay which he elected not to take any credit for, and he’d engaged Zimmer when Maurice Jarre couldn’t deliver the music he wanted for White Squall.
But Zimmer wasn’t available. “The editor Joe Walker and I worked together on [the] BBC series [First Born] in 1988. Joe asked if I could look at something and I said no way [since] I was about to go on tour the next day.” So in came Benjamin Wallfisch, having recently backfilled for Hans on A Cure for Wellness, to run point on the score while Zimmer was jamming across Europe. Helping matters was that Zimmer had the Yamaha CS-80, the same synthesizer Vangelis had used and “a beast which almost no one has and of course I have. The last time I had used it was on The Dark Knight. If you plug it in wrong it will catch on fire. It wasn’t as much about using the sounds [Vangelis] created as using the tools. That was his orchestra; why don’t we go and use the same orchestra? There was the first night of madness, with me spewing bits and pieces. Then I went on tour. Then I had 10 days between Europe and America, and I think the earliest we went home was 3[am]. There were times I acted more like a record producer - ‘stretch this out.’”
Even if Scott may have had an impact on the composer assignment, Denis Velleneuve’s influence still looms large on this film’s music when you consider the original music of his earlier films. The director has a track record of commissioning scores that provide a constant sonic haze over the proceedings, grounding the audience in his visual aesthetic without doing anything that could be construed as emotionally manipulative, a preference that would become all the more apparent with his later Dune adaptation. This is not to say that Villeneuve abhorred intrusive music; freaking race car sounds seem to populate the music of this movie at times (in part due to the director being intrigued by the random noises that would accidentally emerge from the CS-80), not to mention the gargantuan crashes of sound in the climactic Sea Wall. Rather, Zimmer had found a collaborator with attitudes similar to those of Christopher Nolan, especially with regards to having music and sound effects sometimes be indistinguishable, though Denis would push Hans and his team further into abstract music.
This certainly plays out in the use of recurring themes; they’re there (with the main four-note one entirely a Wallfisch creation), but as with Man of Steel the overwhelming nature of the sonic palette will drown out most folks’ ability to discern them, and thus perhaps mute their ability to explicitly impact the narrative. A pretty easy rebuttal to that was a film about robots in the future didn’t have a narrative requirement for “typical” theme-and-variations scoring, but regardless you should expect to find the music challenging in context and on its album unless you're really into textural music and / or a big fan of Vangelis’ music in general. Jon Broxton’s score review at MMUK perhaps hit the nail on the head that, much like what we were hearing in the concurrent Netflix series Stranger Things (which aired its second season only a few weeks later), the authenticity of the sound seemed to be the overarching imperative, possibly at the expense of trying to fulfill any of the other expected functions of film music.
And for a score that ostensibly existed to resurrect Vangelis’ material, it is shockingly different from the 1982 score. The work mimics Vangelis’ stream of consciousness style of scoring, but has none of the occasional noir ambience or vocal material the Greek composer injected into the original Blade Runner; sure, a last-minute rush job may not have had money in the budget for a saxophone soloist, but isn’t that what extensive sample libraries are for? It also avoids almost any reference to the original themes by Vangelis, save for a late reprise of Tears in the Rain. I suppose one could argue if there was any point of using themes that were rarely deployed by Vangelis in a recurring fashion in the first film (Zimmer would say “it had to be its own thing, otherwise just temp it”), but it felt puzzling to eschew using most of them in a movie that directly continues the original story. It suggests that when Villeneuve talked about wanting to get closer to Vangelis he meant that in a sonic sense more so than in a melodic sense. “We’d try new sounds and Denis would say, ‘No, bring it back to the 80s.’”
If you wanted anything from a Blade Runner sequel score beyond having some of the original’s instrumentation filtered through Zimmer’s 2010s aesthetic, you were likely to be colossally disappointed. To many listeners it was just noise. Appropriate noise that was somewhat a reflection of the extreme time constraints the team was under, especially accounting for how much music was needed for a nearly three hour runtime (“If you spent too much time not being instinctive, it would’ve needed much longer”). But noise nonetheless.
My favorite Zimmer score from 2017 is the one that nobody talks about.
Blue Planet II (2017) - ***½
Hans Zimmer, Jacob Shea & David Fleming; produced by Zimmer & Russell Emanuel;
orchestrated by Oscar Senén; conducted by Johannes Vogel; add’l music by Jasha Klebe; add’l
arrangements by David Naroth; technical score engineers Hannah Parrot & Chris La Rue Horton;
add’l instrument design David Naroth & Jake Schaefer; score supervisor Monica Sonand
Planet Earth II was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117577
TBTF discovery #42.
A year after the sequel to Planet Earth came a follow-up to the BBC’s famed Blue Planet documentary series. Whereas Hans had only written a theme for Planet Earth II, here he actually got involved in the episodic scoring. Planet Earth II composer Jacob Shea remained, but his co-composer this time would be David Fleming instead of Jasha Klebe, though Klebe would still get an additional music credit. Fleming had gotten into Remote Control after winning the BMI Mike Post fellowship (which had earlier helped Atli Örvarsson break into the industry) and later assisting Örvarsson for a number of years. “My dad was a fire sprinkler engineer, and my mom was a literature teacher, which I think makes sense for what we do. But there are no musicians in my family. It was cautiously encouraged. I almost went into the family business, [but] I was terrible at it.” Perhaps helping him get this specific assignment was that Fleming’s wife and fellow composer Monica Sonand was part of the team on Planet Earth II; Sonand more recently has been in various score supervisor roles as part of Black Panther composer Ludwig Göransson’s team.
Scoring was a bit more of a challenge this time as the episodes weren’t locked when the trio started work, and ultimately they had to listen for verbal cues from the filmmakers on what sequences they were most proud of as a sign that they could start composing to picture in those areas. “We knew it was going to be hectic. Everything was kind of in various stages of completion. It helps that most of the narratives are pretty disparate. [The producers would] say ‘we view the open ocean as a desert’ or ‘coral reefs, that’s like the Manhattan of the sea’, so we could get clues of how to approach episodes, but in each episode you have sectioned off parts, so if reel 1 changes you don’t have to worry about continuity.” No Dunkirk problems, in other words.
The music for Planet Earth II was adequate. This series’ score was a notable step up from that, even if its influences were obvious and disparate. You get everything from legacy Zimmer tropes to goofball Thomas Newman-like stuff suggesting more than just Shea’s Planet Earth II music was in the temp track (perhaps a certain animated film’s music about a lost clownfish?) to wondrous tones almost more in the realm of James Newton Howard’s fantasy material. The mix of orchestra and watery synth sounds calls to mind the music of famed film composer Basil Poledouris at times, only the second case in over 20 years where anyone from this musical lineage had come close to that sound (the other instance being former Poledouris ghostwriter and Zimmer assistant Jeff Rona’s last-minute replacement work for Ridley Scott’s 1996 survival film White Squall). Regardless, the work congeals all these influences into a largely cohesive whole, one that effectively conveys the magic and mystery of the deep.
Much was made in interviews (Zimmer to promote the series, plus Shea later on) of the idea of pointillism. “We need[ed] an orchestral articulation that mimicked the undulation and instability of the water. We took woodwind sections and had them all play the same note in their register, but not [at] the same time as their neighbor, so we got this bubbling sound.” Zimmer would later say that when Jacob and David brought him the suggestion “I said, ‘Good luck.’ But I loved that you guys were coming from a different discipline, looking at paintings” just as Zimmer had used other disciplines for inspiration on The Da Vinci Code. One would think this was another case of marketing gobbledygook or experimentalism that didn’t result in a different sound (orchestra through a guitar amp, crowd-sourced chants, Man of Steel drums, etc.), but here the effect is noticeable, and often a delight; the music honestly seems to shimmer at times.
The pointillism would also extend to an arrangement of the song Bloom by Radiohead, a piece which had originally been inspired by band member Thom Yorke’s obsession with the 2001 Blue Planet series; its inclusion here was suggested by the BBC. It is intriguing to wonder what would’ve resulted if fellow Radiohead member and film composer Johnny Greenwood (of There Will Be Blood and other unconventional scores) was asked to do the music instead of just appearing in promotional interviews, especially since Zimmer later copped to being a huge fan of his film music. The lion’s share of media attention for the music would go to the adaptation of that song instead of the episodic score, understandable at the time but an oddity in hindsight as the (Ocean) Bloom track still hasn’t been commercially released. Thankfully film music journalist Kaya Savas would give Shea and Fleming the lengthy video interview their work deserved in 2018.
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Next time: “We just need guitars.”
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