This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Dunkirk, BR2049, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119141
- 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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Kong: Skull Island (2017) - ****
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Alex Belcher, Halli Cauthery & Stephen Hilton; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman,
Andrew Kinney, Gernot Wolfgang, Jonathan Beard, Henri Wilkinson & Edward Trybek; orchestra conducted by
Gavin Greenaway; choir conducted by Ben Parry; featured guitar Alex Belcher; flute Pedro Eustache; technical score
engineers Maverick Dugger & Felipe Pacheco; John Paul Lefebvre as Jackman’s assistant
TBTF discovery #43.
“If you’re gonna have symphonic music, why on earth wouldn’t you have all these people playing together? I can understand why, on certain contemporary scores, you might want to pick up everything separately because you’re essentially mixing it like a record. With something more symphonic, I think great harm is done to the ensemble, to the tuning and to the way people participate and bounce off each other if they’re not all in the room together. But when we got to it, a lot of the players went, ‘This is fantastic. It rarely happens these days.’ I was like, ‘Well, that’s a shame.’”
Legendary would follow up its successful Godzilla movie from 2014 with this even more successful new take on King Kong, this time keeping him on an island but altering the setting from the 1930s to closer to the Vietnam War. At times, it allowed Henry Jackman to exercise his symphonic chops at a level no film had yet let him do so far. There are rich orchestral sonorities throughout, nasty harmonies fuelled by low winds and muted brass, and plenty of stacked chords of wonder and terror. It’s a work that doesn’t shy away from being written for a monster movie; if anything, it’s practically waving a middle finger at the ”genre doesn’t matter” comments I cited earlier. “The great thing about monster movies is that more exploratory harmony is not de rigueur.” And his Kong theme is a malleable knockout that is alternatingly towering, tragic, and terrifying.
But it wasn’t just a monster movie, and Henry once again showed he was adept at mixing multiple genres into a cohesive whole. The score also pulls in plenty of cool-sounding extensions of Jackman’s First Class style of modern action music for the Monarch organization. Some Copland-like brass for John C. Reilly’s marooned character gives off vibes of the great military scores of Jerry Goldsmith. And there are nods to the 1970s setting and the film’s Vietnam allusions thanks to the demands of director Jordan Vogt-Roberts. “His opening pitch was ‘we just need guitars.’* Like Matthew [Vaughn] he was overshooting a bit. But he was saying please don’t do just a symphonic score. I dragged him into grand symphonic music, but I didn’t mind being dragged into psychedelic guitars.”
* Not to be confused with Zimmer’s botched attempt to only score El Dorado with three violins and a guitar.
Sadly, Legendary would take an MCU-like attitude about the music of its follow-up films, as all of Jackman’s ideas would be ignored by Tom Holkenborg in his Godzilla vs. Kong score four years later. But at least Jackman would get the opportunity later in 2017 to revisit one of his earlier hits, resulting in one of the best works by this musical lineage across the entire Too Big To Fail era.
Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017) - ****˝
Henry Jackman & Matthew Margeson; add’l music arrangements by Alex Belcher, Jason Soudah & Ryan Taubert;
orchestrated by Stephen Coleman & Andrew Kinney; conducted by Gavin Greenaway & Matt Dunkley;
score technical engineers Fabio Marks, Maverick Dugger & Felipe Pacheco
The first Kingsman was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117324
Margeson: “For any sequel there’s comfort. You’ve already created the world. But the challenge is where do we go from here. You do academic things: voice things different, deconstruct the themes. And inevitably you make discoveries.”
The unexpected success of Kingsman in 2014 begat a sequel three years later that got more of a mixed reception but made about as much as its predecessor did at the box office; director Matthew Vaughan thought it would be easier but later characterized making it as “twice as difficult” as the first one. Jackman and his former assistant Matthew Margeson had co-composed a strong score for the first film, one that injected a nice bit of retro caper swank into the action style Jackman had been honing throughout the decade. With the introduction of a U.S.-based cowboy spy organization and the whip-wielding Agent Whiskey, the duo took the opportunity to unleash a rousing new theme (sounding like a musical cousin of the catchy theme for the titular British spy society) and a bunch of wild western material. One could chuckle at Jackman having to write hoedown material given his posh schooling, though Margeson would claim some familiarity with the genre thanks to his parents liking country music and assistant / guitarist Alex Belcher was from Kentucky. Margeson called it “a potpourri of country-western / bluegrass / Americana roots: fiddles, banjos, dobros, washboards, whips. Twang and hay all over the music.”
Landing on the villain theme for The Secret Service had been a trial-and-error process and would be doubly so here. “Poppy’s scenes were some of the first I started and some of the last finished. I recorded her music in March [2017]. A month [later] we thought everything was good except [that theme]. Back to the drawing board. Matthew Vaughn was adamant that there had to be a sly, feminine quality. We landed on using violins in a light staccato manner and woodwinds.” The Poppy ideas get a real workout in the film, going from smaller-scale menace early on to large-scale bombast for the action climax.
The British spy feel of the first film’s score was minimized a bit this go-round, though that was understandable as the second film was riffing on those concepts less frequently. For better or worse, Jackman and Margeson pivoted their themes and style into more of a general setting. That was almost always for better though, as the team delivered some of the most thrilling contemporary action scoring of the decade. Tracks like Eggsy Is Back and Temple Battle were a masterclass in how to juggle multiple character themes in instrumental combat and how to balance a busy orchestra with edgier rock tones. For Vaughn to have moved from wanting somewhat stripped down material for X-Men: First Class to wanting music this ambitious was a minor miracle.
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) - ***
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Halli Cauthery & Paul Mounsey; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman &
Andrew Kinney; conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith & Stephen Coleman; score technical engineers
Maverick Dugger, Felipe Pacheco & Sergio Ruelas Jr.; overdub musicians including George Doering,
Pedro Eustache & Alex Belcher; John Paul Lefebre as Jackman’s assistant
TBTF discovery #44.
After attempting for over 20 years to get another Jumanji movie off the ground, Sony would finally succeed by blending a fantasy adventure where teens get pulled into a video game with a Dwayne Johnson / Kevin Hart buddy comedy, leading to massive box office returns and a later sequel. Composer James Newton Howard was attached at one point but was apparently unavailable once the release date got pushed, so Henry Jackman was brought in. The 1995 film had featured a score by James Horner that’s generally considered adequate but not among his better works. Jackman wouldn’t explicitly refer to it but would take some cues from Horner’s writing. ”That mysterious harmony that [beckons] you to another world. I really like scores [like] Spiderwick Chronicles where the style takes a cue from 20th-century concert music. James was great at [that]. Those things rumble in my head as an influence.”
One might wonder why director Jake Kasdan didn’t bring in composer Alan Silvestri instead, given how the filmmakers seemed to have wanted Jackman to emulate Silvestri’s style, more so than he’d done on Pixels a few years earlier (the reason was probably that Silvestri was tagged to the upcoming juggernaut Avengers: Infinity War and didn’t have any availability). “Jake really likes those old school action-adventure symphonic scores in the tradition of Alan and James Horner and Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Jackman probably didn’t mind getting to play in the musical sandbox of one of his composing heroes (“I did [it] in a style that disappeared in the mid-90s”), but the trade-off is that the score really doesn’t have a lot of his own musical voice in it. Possibly impacting the music’s ability to be more distinctive is that Jackman on comedies and parodies tends to pull back his music a little, not necessarily reducing the volume or level of activity but more how he ends up producing something that’s always a little less memorable than the music of what his films are pointing towards - in this case not just Silvestri’s music but also Indiana Jones which Jackman cited in several interviews.
Plus the fact that the film was a bit of a yukfest (Jack Black and Karen Gillian joined Johnson and Hart for the jokes) imposed additional restrictions on what Jackman could or couldn’t do. “The days of Indy hanging off a truck hitting Nazis…imagine the Chris Nolan version of that. But Jumanji was family action/adventure, and the flip from the Silvestri/Williams tone to comedy is not as hard as going from The Dark Knight or Blade Runner. You have to get out of the way of the jokes. That takes quite a lot of careful structuring so that you don’t alert the audience too much. If you’ve worked on animated films, it’s a useful discipline. Everyone should be writing the best music they can. But the difference between a standalone artist and a composer to picture is understanding why you are writing this music, and its narrative purpose. A director would choose a less talented musician focused on the narrative and certain characters over an incredible musician who was tilting the film and getting in the way of your vision.”
Even with those stylistic constraints, Jackman and team still pulled together an entertaining adventure score. It was not as evocative as his two other scores from 2017, nor was it among the better examples of Jackman fusing multiple genre elements into a cohesive whole, but it was still fun. And Jackman would get a later assignment where adhering to a Silvestri template made more sense…
The Predator (2018) - ****
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Matthew Margeson, Alex Belcher, Evan Goldman & Halli
Cauthery; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman, Andrew Kinney & Henri Wilkenson; orchestra
conducted by Gavin Greenaway, Stephen Coleman & Ed Trybek; choir conducted by Jasper
Randall; score technical engineers Maverick Dugger, Felipe Pacheco, Gage Boozan
& Fabio Marks; John Paul Lefebre as Jackman’s assistant; special thanks to
Alan Silvestri, the Musical Godfather of The Predator and an undisputed genius
“The biggest risk I’ve encountered, living where I do, was going for a hike and bumping into a mountain lion. I think I’d be pretty upset if I bumped into a Predator, that would be a lot more challenging.”
Not content to let Paramount have all the fun with its various so-so Terminator reboots, 20th Century Fox would announce in 2014 yet another attempt at continuing the Predator franchise (coming after creative missteps in 1990, 2004, 2007, and 2010). Yet the film released in 2018 would be even more of a commercial and critical disappointment than Terminator Genisys, and possibly got more attention for writer/director Shane Black’s regrettable decision to cast a convicted sex offender than for anything having to do with its plot. But at least it was a note-perfect composing assignment for Jackman, as a VHS copy of Predator he’d watched in his school days was what had originally stoked his interest in film music, much as Once Upon a Time in the West had inspired a young Hans. “I hardly have any fanboy moments for music because I do music for a living. But the exception is Predator. Given that [the original film] is not exactly Shakespeare or the kind of thing that picks up Oscars, people may not be aware of how high quality the score is. I was on the phone to the producers telling them Alan Silvestri is a hero of mine, I have this musical obsession with the original movie, and I’m going to come up with new cues that have [a] similar sound.”
The score feels perfectly balanced between the harmonic language and instrumental usage in SIlvestri’s classic score and Jackman’s mannerisms, with a theme for the new heroes evolving out of his post-X-Men contemporary action style and the more fantastical sci fi elements doubling down on the brutal harmonies of his recent Kong score. “Because we’re in 2018, there is electronic production and samplers that come in, but they are not so invasive that the orchestra [sounds] like it was sitting behind a drum machine. To reference the original’s flavor, I paid attention to Alan's use of a lot of harp. A lot of people mistakenly believe the harp is always going to be gentle. If you listen to Predator nothing can be further from the truth. There's quite a lot of marimba and harp used in scary ways to create tension to great effect.”
Although Jackman came up with several solid themes, he didn’t quite treat the film like he had The Winter Soldier, as Silvestri’s original thematic ideas are regularly deployed in exciting new arrangements, somewhat like how Geoff Zanelli had reconceptualized legacy Pirates themes in the prior year to avoid sounding stale. Jackman would even get the chance to share his work with his hero. “When I finished it I really felt that I had done something to pay tribute to [Alan], so I called him up and wanted him to listen to my music. We got into this conversation. He said, ‘I didn’t know what I was doing! The only thing I remember is that I was floundering around.’ I said, ‘Hold on, you wrote Back To The Future by then!’ The only concert music I can find that has similar harmony is some passages in Rimsky-Korsakov and the Polish composer Szymanowski. He probably got there with jazz. If that’s what happens when you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing, then that’s some natural talent.”
There would be another Jackman sequel score (done with a different set of additional writers) only a few months later…
Ralph Breaks The Internet (2018) - ***˝
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Jeff Morrow & Anthony Willis; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman, Andrew Kinney,
Gernot Wolfgang, Ed Trybek, Henri Wilkinson & Jonathan Beard; orchestra conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith;
choir conducted by Jasper Randall; score technicians Maverick Dugger, Felipe Pacheco & Gage Boozan;
‘A Place Called Slaughter Race’ by Alan Menken & Phil Johnston & Tom MacDougal
Wreck-It Ralph was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113153
The sequel to the beloved Wreck-It Ralph went through the same struggles that many films that try to comment on the latest tech trends do (they’re already behind the curve by the time they come out), and uncertainty about what film the team was making led to 10 different versions of the film being screened internally. The somewhat scattershot approach to the storytelling probably created a ceiling on how coherent Jackman’s work could be, even with it being the first case of him scoring a sequel for characters he’d created the initial musical concept for. Arguably, he had been the person to break the news about the sequel years earlier, though completely by accident. “It was an abstract conversation where I said I’d never done a sequel where I’d done the first one, and it would be an interesting experience. Three days later there were links saying “film composer Henry Jackman announces Wreck-It Ralph 2.” I didn’t! I had to smooth things over with Disney.”
There’s fealty to his original themes, as well as the same balance between orchestra and retro beeps and boops, but it’s an all-over-the-place score trying to follow an all-over-the-place film, and unfortunately that makes it less enjoyable than the music for the first Ralph. “I remember thinking surely it won’t be hard because you have a Ralph theme! But 2m13 they get propelled to the internet, the 8-bit electronics are out the window, have fun with the princesses! It was sort of like doing a brand new movie.”
Three clever moments are worth highlighting. A song about Sarah Silverman’s character Vanellope’s journey through a Slaughter Race game would be penned in part by Disney Renaissance hitmaker Alan Menken, not one of his more memorable bits but still appropriately goofy. One of the most creative tracks of the year occurs when Ralph falls off a building and is saved by an army of Disney princesses; Jackman would back their actions with each princess’ theme, cycling rapid-fire (yet fluidly) through famous melodies by Menken, Jerry Goldsmith, and others. And a brief midfilm quote of John Williams’ Imperial March as Vanellope is chased by Stormtroopers should put a smile on your face.
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Next time: “When I arrived in Vienna to record, I thought, ‘Oh, hello!’ There was a poster of my brother on the wall.”
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