This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Henry Jackman’s 2017 & 2018 - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119247
- 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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A Wrinkle in Time (2018) - ***
Ramin Djawadi; add’l music Brandon Campbell; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman & Andrew Kinney conducted by
Djawadi; technical score advisors William Marriott & Omer Benyamin; thank you to Hans Zimmer and everyone at RC
TBTF discovery #45.
Critics would commend the ambition of Disney and director Ava DuVernay to attempt an adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic fantasy novel, but reviews were still mixed and audiences didn’t really show up. Rumors in 2017 about the involvement of composer Johnny Greenwood were intriguing, but DuVernay ultimately went with Ramin Djawadi, who had a bit more time on his hands than usual thanks to Thrones taking an extra year between seasons. Djawadi would pare down his composition in a number of cases to meet DuVernay’s requests, not unleashing anything fully orchestral until the fantasy part of the narrative started and morphing a big symphonic idea for a critical late scene into a violin solo. The work came off like the composer doing a new age spin on a James Horner children’s score, with a certain amount of charm and wonder and with a few intriguing techniques (voices sliding up the scale as characters warp through time and space, for example), though you may get the sense that the music could’ve been pushed much farther.
Westworld Season 2 (2018) - ****
Ramin Djawadi; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman; technical score advisors
Williams Marriott & Omer Benyamin; thank you to Brandon Campbell & Hans Zimmer
Season 1 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117611
TBTF discovery #46.
HBO’s robot show turned murderbot show, and as with the fifth season of Game of Thrones Ramin’s music would occasionally follow down that grim path. There are stretches of musical dread, many of the catchy themes from the first season now play in broken or sad variants, and the electronics are more prevalent. The latter was by design; while Djawadi had largely kept the electronic and the organic separate in season 1, using the former for the control rooms and the latter for the park, with the robots becoming more aware in season 2 he would bleed those elements together. Expect at times to hear a hybrid of Djawadi’s early sound design efforts and his more sophisticated recent works.
The expansion into parts of the park beyond the Western-themed area gave Djawadi an opportunity to toy with different instruments including a South Asian setting for his Sweetwater theme in the Raj-themed area and various Japanese soloists for Shogun World. ”I've never used the shamisen. I actually got one for myself, and just started exploring the instrument. That's something that's exciting as a film composer, when you get to use new instruments and learn about [them]. I love that process.” There are some other intriguing touches to the score. A pulsing synth theme from season 1 is arranged as an emotional piano piece in I Promise. More seasoned listeners might even appreciate the retro Media Ventures feel of My Speech with its valiant solo trumpet amidst strings chopping in unison.
As with season 1’s music, most media attention was paid to the arrangement of various popular songs by Djawadi, including Kurt Cobain’s Heart-Shaped Box for the season’s trailer, Kanye West’s Runaway, and a brief Indian variation on Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes. Two of those adaptations really stood out. As a robbery very similar to the one that occurred in season 1 starts to play out in Shogun World, Djawadi resurrected Paint It, Black but with different instrumentation. “I replaced the Western percussion with various taiko drums. Shamisen instead of some of the piano lines. The koto instead of [the] harp.” And a midseason murderdance would be backed by a Japanese variant of C.R.E.A.M. by the Wu-Tang Clan. “Normally, I write [to] picture, but with this one we picked the song, I did the arrangement, and they used it on set for the choreography of the dance.”
Skyscraper (2018) - **
Steve Jablonsky; add’l music & arrangements by Luke Richards, Christian Wibe & Bryce Jacobs;
orchestrated by Larry Rench & Jeremy Borum; conducted by Alastair King; technical score engineer
Lori Castro; thank you to Hans Zimmer, Harry Gregson-Williams & Bob Badami
TBTF discovery #47.
Director Rawson Marshall Thurber was more known for comedies than straightforward action movies at the time, but he’d recently directed Dwayne Johnson in the action-comedy Central Intelligence and apparently liked Steve Jablonsky’s droning accompaniment for Deepwater Horizon when he was looking for a composer for his Johnson-starring Die Hard-adjacent action thriller. “It was important for Rawson to not overplay [or] treat this like a big hero movie. He wanted to treat the main character like an everyday guy, if you can ignore the fact that he looks like [the Rock].” Granted, Michael Kamen hadn’t resorted to drones and sound design when he scored John McClane’s everyman activities in the original Die Hard in 1986, but perhaps that’s beside the point. As a composer in today’s Hollywood, you gotta give your collaborator what they want.
Even with the composer sneaking a family theme you “maybe wouldn’t expect” into the mix, Jablonsky’s reliance on the kind of distorted fusion of orchestra and electronics he’d been doing for the films of Peter Berg and Michael Bay made many film score fans and critics treat the corresponding album like a biblical plague or, worse, G.I. Joe: Retaliation; Movie-Wave would award it zero stars, while MMUK came close to the level of condescension it showed to Tomb Raider the prior year. Heard today, the work comes off more like a nondescript exercise in going through the motions than anything outright offensive. It’s hard to see what all the fuss was about - and, yes, you’ll note I said pretty much the same thing about G.I. Joe: Retaliation.
Still, despite Jablonsky’s assertion that he was “a firm believer that movies are not there to be a concert for my work,” one couldn’t help but get the sense that the stylistic repetition and the demanding schedule that comes with being a film composer had led to some fatigue. After over a decade of Bayhem and other blockbusters, Jablonsky suggested he was encountering the kind of burnout Harry, John, and Hans had gone through in the 2010s. “My plan all year was to finish Skyscraper and take some time off.” 2019 would be free of major releases for the composer, though he would return to the limelight with a Peter Berg film in 2020 and another film by Thurber the following year.
The Equalizer 2 (2018) - **
Harry Gregson-Williams; add’l arrangements by Stephanie Economou & Justin Burnett; orchestrated by
Ladd McIntosh; conducted by Gregson-Williams & Economou; cello soloists Peter Gregson & Steve Erdody;
guitars George Doering & Peter DiStefano; electric cello Martin Tillman; thank you to Hybrid
The first film was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117113
TBTF discovery #48.
“With Denzel I’m never thinking, ‘Really? Really?’ He just convinces you from the start.”
2018 would find Harry Gregson-Williams re-teaming with director Antoine Fuqua for a sequel to his remake of The Equalizer. The score stayed largely within the somewhat subdued sonic wheelhouse of the first film’s score, with a few new elements including one for the relationship between Denzel Washington’s character and a troubled teen. “Antoine wanted me to find something emotional there without being sentimental. It seemed to me that the cello could have the right tone for what I was after.” One challenge for the composer was that the finale took place in a hurricane. “In the first movie the climax took place in a creepy, quiet superstore. To try and exist within [the] sonic scope [of] a howling gale with crashing waves was a challenge, and I had to pick my levels.” If you liked Harry’s earlier contemporary works, you’ll probably like this one too; if you found them a challenge as standalone listens, the same will be true here.
Early Man (2018) - ***½
Harry Gregson-Williams & Tom Howe; orchestrated by David Butterworth & David Krystal; conducted by
Gregson-Williams & Gavin Greenaway; score technical support Stephanie Economou, Jose Parody & Juan Cortes
TBTF discovery #49.
Chicken Run was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=108077
Flushed Away was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=109444
Despite generally solid reviews, Aardman Animation’s Early Man was a financial flop on par with its 2006 film Flushed Away. At least it resulted in a welcome reunion with Harry who’d scored that earlier movie as well as the more beloved Chicken Run and Arthur Christmas, though the composer had a conflict when the studio reached out to him. ”I was busy finishing The Meg and I was nervous because the timing was quite short. I suggested to them a young composer I've tried to champion [named] Tom Howe. We’d split the work so I'd write the theme tune and make sure Tom stayed on the straight and narrow.” The result played like the intersection between Harry’s animation romps, his action / fantasy sound, and Monkey Kingdom, complete with grunts, oodles of daffy specialty instruments, and even a proper British march. It’s a minor work, but still a rather charming one and a treat for those who appreciate the composer’s love of woodwind solos. Harry later joked they should do a sequel called Early Man: 2: Late Man.
Harry and Tom would later co-compose for the ABC action comedy series Whiskey Cavalier. The network cancelled it after one season, but it still had the benefit of introducing Howe to producer Bill Lawrence, who would hire Howe to write music for his later soccer comedy series Ted Lasso. It became the streaming sensation of 2020, and in a way Howe owed this amazing opportunity not only to being able to prove himself on Early Man but also because Harry was busy helping Jason Staham fight a shark.
The Meg (2018) - ***½
Harry Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Stephanie Economou; orchestrated by Alastair King;
technical score engineers Alvin Wee & Slamm Andrews; Chinese percussion by F3NG Singapore
TBTF discovery #50.
”[Originally] the film was called Meg and I couldn’t help thinking of Meg Ryan. I thought, ‘do I want to be doing a romantic comedy?’ [But I read] the script and said, ‘well, I’ve never done anything like this.’”
Director Jon Turteltaub’s ambition to make “the second-best shark movie ever” might have come true, as his film about a giant prehistoric beast running amok became a moderate hit at the 2018 summer box office. The movie came out a few weeks after The Equalizer 2 but Harry had actually worked on their scores in reverse order, with recording on this one completed in late 2017. The film presented some of the challenges that Harry would later deal with on The Equalizer 2 (“there’s no point in trying to fill up the same sonic area on a noisy movie”) as well as the visual effects challenges his former assistant Steve Jablonsky had dealt with on the Transformers series. “I could tell how the shark moves and its speed, but we spent months without distinct details. I’m like, ‘There’s a wave, what do you want from me?’ and Jon would say, ‘No, the Megalodon just went by!’ Well, thanks for telling me.”
Harry would overachieve for the concept by largely avoiding mindless action and jump scare stingers and instead blending his orchestral and contemporary sides to lean into the fantastical side of the story. “Instead of going dark and dangerous the first time you see the Meg I chose to portray majesty because she is looking at it not with horror but like ‘what the hell is that?’ I stumbled upon the conch. Its call was distinctive and ancient, a voice to the vast terror of a concealed underwater world. I put out a call for a conch player in Los Angeles—not the easiest player to get ahold of.”
The score’s musical themes are sufficient yet may not resonate with most listeners, but the solo instrumental and choral accents that help comprise the sonic tapestry, one as intriguingly layered as Harry’s earlier work on The Martian, should still impress. And it would be a surprisingly symphonic score at times, something that Harry would delight in getting the opportunity to do for the first time in a while. “When I arrived in Vienna to record, I thought, ‘Oh, hello!’ There was a big old poster of my brother on the wall. He’d just been there to do The Crown and he was the one who suggested that we should try the orchestra there.”
Speaking of Rupert…
Aquaman, or as the composer would say ACKwaman (2018) - ***½
Rupert Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Sven Faulconer, Evan Jolly & Tony Clarke; technical
assistance & add’l music by Forest Christenson; orchestrated by Gregson-Williams & Alastair King;
conducted by King & Nick-Glennie Smith; thank you to Hans Zimmer; ‘Trench Engaged’ by Joe Bishara
TBTF discovery #51.
Wonder Woman was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=118953
With Rupert Gregson-Williams doing well on the rampantly successful Wonder Woman in summer 2017, it made sense for the studio and director James Wan to bring him on board for their Aquaman film. “They’re very different characters and different movies. Wonder Woman is fantastical and she’s a superhero, but in a way the movie felt plausible and real when I was writing. Whereas with Aquaman, within the first few frames you know you’re in comic book territory and so you don’t hold back in a way you would with plausible storytelling.”
Rupert would feel his brother’s pain when it came to needing to compose before effects work was completed. “I had plenty of time to get my ducks in a row and get my themes written, but of course with the amount of visual effects in a movie like this, there’s always going to be a time crunch in the last two or three months as effects [come] in and [you] have to adjust things. [For] one of the big heroic moments, I was writing to practical drawings and to the impression that James gave me. But once I got the actual visual effects in, it was 10 times bigger than I even imagined so I had to go back and reimagine a few of those cues.”
In some ways his music didn’t exactly break the mold. A duduk appeared, just as it did in the prior year’s Pirates sequel. A martial secondary theme resurrected the ghosts of Media Ventures past. Electric guitars popped in every so often for coolness (“he’s more of a rock n’ roll hero”). There were a few BWAMs. Never mind that the primary villain theme was three descending notes going “DUN DUN DUN”, which is unintentionally hilarious in the film. But even accounting for those quibbles, Rupert’s Aquaman music is leagues more adventurous than his Wonder Woman score, not just because of its more memorable themes but also because of its wild sonic palette that bolstered its orchestra by going whole hog on 1980s electronics.
Unlike the retro sounds in the Blade Runner sequel, which approximated a familiar sonic ambience without fulfilling any of the other normal roles of film music, Gregson-Williams’ additions were very much not wallpaper; you can hear them doing that a few times, but they’re also part of the driving rhythmic energy in many tracks and backing the character themes in others. ”If you’re going to use an epic synth landscape, don’t just stick one in. Get a room full of them and have some fun. I borrowed some [from] Harry and Hans, then pulled out [ones] I hadn’t used in 20 years. It gave us a different palette of sounds to use once we went under the water compared to the orchestral sound for the surface.” Synth-heavy tracks like Swimming Lessons and Kingdom of Atlantis provided outrageously cool-sounding sequences of throwback wonderment.
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Next time: “The last time I bought a soundtrack was maybe Wall Street”
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