This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on The Meg, Aquaman, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119377
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.

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

2018 was a very busy year for Lorne Balfe. His workload for that year included a TV season, a video game, and four films, including the biggest piece of entertainment he’d ever been in charge of the music for. Each work was wildly different, something the composer really enjoyed. “Constantly changing project styles makes you more alert. If I wrote for horror films and all I did was continuously work in that genre, I don’t think that I would be able to give much to the film. It would become a job, and I don’t regard it as a job. I regard it as a very privileged situation to be in.”

I can appreciate all that. But one of those works is one of the most intolerable scores I’ve ever heard.

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

12 Strong (2018) - *
Lorne Balfe; produced by Balfe & Max Aruj; score technical assistants Aruj & Steffen Thum; orchestrated by
Shane Rutherfoord-Jones; conducted by David Hernando Rico; music production coordinator Queenie Li

TBTF discovery #52.

Geostorm was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119058

“I’ve always tried to write themes when it’s appropriate, but it’s not always appropriate in film music.”

The first piece of entertainment released in 2018 to have a Balfe score was this Jerry Bruckheimer-produced adaptation of the true story of the U.S. Special Forces soldiers sent to Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Balfe knew Bruckheimer from his days writing additional music on the Pirates sequels, not to mention more recently serving as lead composer on the salvage attempt for Geostorm which likely secured him this job. It seems the filmmakers wanted the music to mainly function as background window dressing achieving some matter of nondescript tension, basically the halfway point between what Tom Holkenborg might’ve written and Dunkirk. Vast stretches play as little more than pulsing electronics and drums with some regional instruments thrown in every so often. As a reprieve, you occasionally get sparse dramatic string music that’s an extremely ambient variation on the calmer portions of Black Hawk Down, with the adverb extremely deployed because in August of last year I called Ramin Djawadi’s Medal of Honor “Black Hawk Down with moments of hazy ambience” and this is way beyond that.

War film scores had tended to sound like this for a while now (arguably since The Hurt Locker in 2009), and you can’t blame the composer for what was an industry-wide preference for not having music interfere with a sense of realism in this genre. Still, on its lengthy album the score plays like someone temped all the boring interstitial parts of earlier MV / RC action works, then programmed the actual score to be even more anonymous. Say what you will about the music of Dunkirk, but it was at least somewhat of a puzzle box. This score was just a puzzle; how’d Jerry go from wanting derivative power anthems to wanting indistinctive sound design? Behold, Bruckheimer’s version of Captain Philips music.

At this point in his career, it seemed Lorne couldn’t get through a year without someone asking him for a last-minute replacement score, and his next released work would be one of those.


Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) - *½
Lorne Balfe; produced by Balfe & Max Aruj; score technical assistants Aruj & Joseph Cho;
orchestrated by Shane Rutherfoord-Jones; conducted by Johannes Vogel; ‘Go Big or Go Extinct’
remix by Ben Zecker & Patrick Stump; music production coordinator Queenie Li

The first film was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117113

TBTF discovery #53.

“The majority of the movies I work on, basically 80% of the things on screen are missing. You’ve got a robot, but you’ve got somebody there with a stick waving around.”

This Pacific Rim sequel perhaps played more like a spin-off given how much of its focus was on new characters, never mind that director Guillermo del Toro was more hands-off this go-round. Director Steven DeKnight had originally hired John Paesano, the composer on his Daredevil Netflix series, but one gets the sense that DeKnight was sidelined late in the post-production process since about two months before the release date Paesano was out and Lorne was brought in. Ramin Djawadi at first would’ve seemed like a better choice as he’d written one of the best scores of 2013 for the first film, but he probably didn’t have the availability, nor did he have Balfe’s reputation for writing “at superhuman speed” (as Michael Levine once put it) or cranking out adequate replacement music in the eleventh hour.

Perhaps more than any film he’d worked on up to this point, Uprising gave Lorne an opportunity to indulge in his longstanding love of contemporary music. “I love commercial music and classical music, [but] my taste in music [growing up] was more commercial. Depeche Mode [and] Art of Noise had a massive influence on me. The last time I actually bought a soundtrack was Return of the Jedi [or] maybe Wall Street. I don’t listen to EDM to stay relevant. I listen to it because I like it. There’s a lot of electronic music coming back to my work. I kind of started doing it in Ghost in the Shell. That was warranted. I’m not gonna say that I am trying to write music of the future, that’s pretentious, [but] we [wanted] to feel the future.”

As with Kung Fu Panda 3, where Lorne attempted to use the village theme from the prior film’s ending before creating a new idea, the near-abandonment of legacy motifs wasn’t for lack of trying. “We tried variations of [Ramin’s theme] on some scenes, but it became illogical for the sake of putting it there. The majority of the characters are different so there wasn’t the pressure like other sequels I’ve worked on in which you need to connect everything.” Still, what we got instead was largely bereft of any distinctive flavor, a mix of stock Remote Control heroism and sound design laced with bits of EDM, BWAMs, and TRON: Legacy. It provided a “library music” feel akin to the Transformers sequels’ albums, with its sheer predictability an undeniable necessity given the time constraints but still resulting in something surprisingly boring for how loud it was (a lot of obsidian sound and fury, signifying nothing).

Another pre-existing relationship would pay greater dividends.


Genius Season 2: Picasso (2018) - ***½
Lorne Balfe; produced by Balfe & Steffen Thum; add’l music by Thum &
Max Aruj; orchestrated by Shane Rutherfoord-Jones & Oscar Senén; technical
music assistant Miguel Leyva; music production coordinator Queenie Li

TBTF discovery #54.

The Einstein season was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119058

Ron Howard would retain Lorne’s services as his Genius anthology series jumped from Einstein in its inaugural season to Picasso in its second. Some of Balfe’s music would be cut from the same Frost/Nixon cloth as what he’d written for the first season, but the majority of it would be vastly different. The score would certainly indulge in moments of Latin flair (including in Balfe’s redo of Zimmer’s title theme); you’ll hear acoustic guitar, accordion, slaps, and taps, and one track even sounds like it was…uh…heavily inspired by John Powell’s music from Mr. & Mrs. Smith. But it would also feature a surprising color: a solo saxophone. The parts that emphasize that instrument play like someone crossed a Zimmer romcom score with what James Horner wrote on Sneakers, and every score fan owes it to themself to at least hear the album opener Stroke of Genius, one of the most joyous bits of television scoring of the decade.

Lorne’s final film score of the year, and the one he worked on the longest, would be due to a new relationship.


Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) - ****
Lorne Balfe; produced by Balfe & Steffen Thum; score technical assistants Steffen Thum, Shane
Rutherfoord-Jones, Max Aruj & Mike Ladouceur; orchestrated by Rutherfoord-Jones; orchestra
conducted by Matt Dunkley; music production coordinator Queenie Li; thank you to Hans Zimmer

TBTF discovery #55.

A strength of the Mission: Impossible film franchise up until this point had been shifting the team supporting superstar Tom Cruise each time. Even if you didn’t like all of the entries by directors Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, Brad Bird, and Christopher McQuarrie, you can at least admit they helped to keep things from feeling stale. But Cruise would bring back McQuarrie for a second go-round, and the result in Fallout would be the highest-earning film of the franchise and my favorite film of 2018. Different directors usually meant different composers, so the franchise had been treated to Danny Elfman’s nervy strings, Hans Zimmer’s jam band ensemble, the retro antics of Michael Giacchino, and the vibrant orchestral realization of Lalo Schifrin’s famed franchise identities by Joe Kraemer (McQuarrie’s friend and composer on his two earlier directorial efforts) on Rogue Nation.

The latter was beloved by most score fans when it came out in 2015. Even with McQuarrie claiming he wanted to do a very different follow-up story about Ethan Hunt and his team, there was still some shock when the director decided to use a different composer. Kraemer would, to put it lightly, not take this well; he would view it as a betrayal and even go on a Twitter rant about it years later. “One of my closest friends made a deal behind my back that swindled me out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and then dumped me for a Zimling and this was after assuring me that working for him was the same as having a savings bond.” There was no public comment from McQuarrie on the whole hullabaloo; the most he’s said on the matter was “I knew I had to make a distinct change, even one that went against some of my instincts” and that he’d ”never been near a synthesizer in my life.”

In came Lorne, who may not have exactly come up with his own voice wholly independent of his Remote Control origins at this point but was now getting his first major gig that wasn’t a last-minute replacement job (he had 10 months here) or one directly connected to a director / lead producer he’d already met via Hans. He might not have gotten the opportunity if not for helping on a blockbuster the prior summer when Zimmer was on tour. “Jake [Myers] was a producer on [Dunkirk] and was also on Mission. I’ve worked a lot for Paramount and Skydance, and the head of music from Paramount got me that meeting with Chris. I started writing after our first meeting before seeing anything. After our second breakfast I started writing more. I looked at it as I needed to prove to Chris I could do this movie. I’d done music for a number of movies that hadn’t been well-received.”

The assignment was arguably as much of a dream come true for the composer as working with Bruckheimer and Bay. “I [loved the 1996 film] when it came out in college. For the last 22 years, in my head I’ve basically been scoring Mission: Impossible.”

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

“One of the best action sequences I've ever seen was that bathroom fight. And I cannot say I helped, because there is no music in that scene.”

Lorne would say Chris was the rare director who didn’t use a temp track, but the mission (should the composer choose to accept it) still seemed to be pretty clear: with the aesthetics of the franchise shifting a little closer to the style of Christopher Nolan with this movie, the music should follow suit and plunge Schifrin’s themes (the classic ‘da da da’ and its corresponding ‘dun dun, da da, dun dun, da da’ rhythm, plus his secondary idea The Plot) into the brooding darkness and the ostinatos of The Dark Knight trilogy and other similar Remote Control action scores. “You could easily go retro and make it sound nostalgic, which the film isn’t. We weren’t trying to do an Ocean’s Eleven movie, making it feel retro and jazzy and pastiche. It’s a far darker tone. We get to see this side of Ethan we haven’t seen. You have to take Ethan’s theme to a darker place.”

The dang thing would even get composed like a Nolan movie for a while, with Lorne writing “endless amounts of music” that was done apart from the picture and moved around until they could settle on what worked where. “My studio got sent to London. I lived next to the edit room for about 4-5 months. When there was a new scene that had been filmed and they were experimenting with the edit, you were able to come in and say, ‘What if we did this, or what if we tried that?’ You’d have conversations about doing just the rhythm of the theme, and I’d do a 3-4 minute piece and we’d see where it fits.”

This change was seen as something tantamount to heresy by a number of film music fans, especially given the abandonment of what they had liked about Kraemer’s effort, and as such Lorne’s work got loads more shit from people than it deserved, with things like ”anonymous,” “oppressively boring,” and “stopped when it was good enough and never actually good” tossed around. Lorne was acutely aware of all this. “There was a massive backlash when it came out that I was doing it. Some people felt it wasn’t as loyal musically to the prior movie, and that genre. [But] things have gotta move on sometimes in life and evolve. If you alienate all these wonderful [electronic] tools, it’s like saying we shouldn’t be going into [Dolby] Atmos.” There are churning low strings Lorne had often utilized in his career. A sickeningly deep synth pulse appears for the villains; Lorne would later laugh about not even being able to sing that low. There are escalating BWAMs for the skydiving sequence, done only days before the picture was locked according to McQuarrie. And you can hear hints of Zimmer’s Bane chant rhythm from The Dark Knight Rises informing The Exchange.

But the familiarity of that lengthy anticipatory track doesn’t (at least for me) overwhelm one of the biggest pleasures of the work: Schifrin’s main theme gets several variations that are clearly indebted to Inception but still sound outrageously cool and also do a stellar job building up tension before the lengthy chase sequence commences. Lorne would indulge in plenty of booming variants during that actual chase, and as the film went on he would start to toy with new takes on The Plot as well (something Zimmer didn’t do on M:I 2): urgent horns in the motorcycle chase, bombastic takes throughout the climactic helicopter chase, and a militaristic version as Hunt is rescued on a boat, a throwback to the sound of the original TV series that was only stumbled upon after a more rueful composition didn’t give audiences the desired sense of victory and McQuarrie suggested a snare drum as an alternative. Your brain will at first lament the Zimmerization of the sound, and then your brain will tell you “wow, that was fun!”

And focusing on the more typical aspects of the score would unfairly overlook the things Lorne was doing to tinker within the margins of a fairly familiar sound, something that he hadn’t gotten an opportunity to do on the recent Geostorm but which you could trace back to at least 2011’s Assassin’s Creed: Revelations on his lead composing roles and probably earlier if one considers his additional music assignments. There is a startlingly dramatic use of percussion at times, even almost from the get-go when drums hit on Angela Bassett’s footsteps when her character enters the film. But it’s not the kind of big, booming, relentless, Tom Holkenborg-style drums that were a bit in vogue at the time. Lorne would seem to prefer sounds that would cut through the darkness and provide some diversity to the soundscape, just as composers such as Schifrin and Gerald Fried had done on the original series and other 1960s shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (although they had much smaller ensembles and budgets than Balfe had at his disposal).

One group used by Balfe would rival the 18-member accordion ensemble John Powell had used on the fourth Ice Age film for sheer ridiculousness. “Bongos were always in the TV show, and I thought why have one when we can have twelve? It’s hard enough for one bongo player to get a gig these days. For twelve, it's a miracle. It's very like the stunts, trying to push them to a larger form.” McQuarrie would even jokingly refer to Lorne’s experiments as a “weird bongo lab. Guy’s got a budget, he’s gone off the rails, I’m sure he’s going to use it somewhere.” Jokes aside, their applications in the score lend a nice edge to action and suspense tracks like Stairs and Rooftops and help them somewhat transcend their more derivative elements.

There are other intriguing elements. Lorne originally intended a piano idea for Henry Cavill’s character but the skittering theme would end up being used more as a general momentum device. And a series of lightly shifting strings lent an emotional edge to several scenes that wouldn’t have been there otherwise, even with Lorne removing a corresponding melody at the director’s behest. “I wrote a suite called Loves with some piano in it. Chris thought it was a bit busy, so I took it out and called it Loves Reduced!”

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

If you enjoyed Henry Jackman’s earlier tale about sharing his music with Alan Silvestri, rest assured Lorne had an even funnier story. “I sent Lalo [my take on] the theme, because we have the same agent. Nothing. A month goes by. I’m doing a radio interview in [Latin America] and I say he never got back to me. They called me back later, there’s translation going on, and they’re calling Lalo Schifrin and he’s listening to four tracks of it live! He said it’s so lovely for people to still enjoy this music. The last time I beamed this much was when my wife had our child!”

The work brings to mind what Lorne said after Terminator Genisys about how “you don’t need interesting string lines with this.” Sure, what he wrote was a somewhat streamlined, incredibly contemporary take on the franchise that lacked the adornments of Kraemer’s earlier score. But the dang score worked like gangbusters, and no amount of high-minded classical snobbery can tell my brain I didn’t enjoy the ever-living shit out of it. Everyone’s got a guilty pleasure score. This one’s mine.

Not everyone liked the music of Fallout as much as I did. And when viewed in aggregate Lorne’s film scores from this year, each with their own modern flavor, seemed to affirm Tom Holkenborg’s comments from the prior year. Maybe this was really the new reality of what filmmakers wanted. But then there were examples to the contrary from the same year, including one by a man who “can put more energy in a piece of music than a roomful of EDM fuckers.”

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

Next time: That score.

> 12 Strong (2018) - *
> Lorne Balfe; produced by Balfe & Max Aruj; score technical
> assistants Aruj & Steffen Thum; orchestrated by
> Shane Rutherfoord-Jones; conducted by David Hernando Rico; music
> production coordinator Queenie Li

> TBTF discovery #52.

> Geostorm was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119058

> “I’ve always tried to write themes when it’s appropriate, but it’s not
> always appropriate in film music.”

I keep wanting to give the guy a chance (Black Widow was one of my favorite scores of 2021), but then he says crap like this. What a knob.

> Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) - ****
> Lorne Balfe; produced by Balfe & Steffen Thum; score technical
> assistants Steffen Thum, Shane
> Rutherfoord-Jones, Max Aruj & Mike Ladouceur; orchestrated by
> Rutherfoord-Jones; orchestra
> conducted by Matt Dunkley; music production coordinator Queenie Li; thank
> you to Hans Zimmer

> TBTF discovery #55.

> A strength of the Mission: Impossible film franchise up until this
> point had been shifting the team supporting superstar Tom Cruise each
> time. Even if you didn’t like all of the entries by directors Brian De
> Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, Brad Bird, and Christopher McQuarrie, you
> can at least admit they helped to keep things from feeling stale. But
> Cruise would bring back McQuarrie for a second go-round, and the result in
> Fallout would be the highest-earning film of the franchise and my
> favorite film of 2018. Different directors usually meant different
> composers, so the franchise had been treated to Danny Elfman’s nervy
> strings, Hans Zimmer’s jam band ensemble, the retro antics of Michael
> Giacchino, and the vibrant orchestral realization of Lalo Schifrin’s famed
> franchise identities by Joe Kraemer (McQuarrie’s friend and composer on
> his two earlier directorial efforts) on Rogue Nation.

> The latter was beloved by most score fans when it came out in 2015. Even
> with McQuarrie claiming he wanted to do a very different follow-up story
> about Ethan Hunt and his team, there was still some shock when the
> director decided to use a different composer. Kraemer would, to put it
> lightly, not take this well; he would view it as a betrayal and even go on
> a Twitter rant about it years later. “One of my closest friends made a
> deal behind my back that swindled me out of hundreds of thousands of
> dollars and then dumped me for a Zimling and this was after assuring me
> that working for him was the same as having a savings bond.” There was
> no public comment from McQuarrie on the whole hullabaloo; the most he’s
> said on the matter was “I knew I had to make a distinct change, even
> one that went against some of my instincts” and that he’d ”never
> been near a synthesizer in my life.”

It was a betrayal, and after Kraemer labored so mightily on his previous movies, especially The Way of the Gun. Seriously, without Kraemer's music and James Caan, that movie would be 100% unwatchable. Again, what a knob.

>
>
> Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) - ****
> Lorne Balfe; produced by Balfe & Steffen Thum; score technical
> assistants Steffen Thum, Shane
> Rutherfoord-Jones, Max Aruj & Mike Ladouceur; orchestrated by
> Rutherfoord-Jones; orchestra
> conducted by Matt Dunkley; music production coordinator Queenie Li; thank
> you to Hans Zimmer

> TBTF discovery #55.

> A strength of the Mission: Impossible film franchise up until this
> point had been shifting the team supporting superstar Tom Cruise each
> time. Even if you didn’t like all of the entries by directors Brian De
> Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, Brad Bird, and Christopher McQuarrie, you
> can at least admit they helped to keep things from feeling stale. But
> Cruise would bring back McQuarrie for a second go-round, and the result in
> Fallout would be the highest-earning film of the franchise and my
> favorite film of 2018. Different directors usually meant different
> composers, so the franchise had been treated to Danny Elfman’s nervy
> strings, Hans Zimmer’s jam band ensemble, the retro antics of Michael
> Giacchino, and the vibrant orchestral realization of Lalo Schifrin’s famed
> franchise identities by Joe Kraemer (McQuarrie’s friend and composer on
> his two earlier directorial efforts) on Rogue Nation.

> The latter was beloved by most score fans when it came out in 2015. Even
> with McQuarrie claiming he wanted to do a very different follow-up story
> about Ethan Hunt and his team, there was still some shock when the
> director decided to use a different composer. Kraemer would, to put it
> lightly, not take this well; he would view it as a betrayal and even go on
> a Twitter rant about it years later. “One of my closest friends made a
> deal behind my back that swindled me out of hundreds of thousands of
> dollars and then dumped me for a Zimling and this was after assuring me
> that working for him was the same as having a savings bond.” There was
> no public comment from McQuarrie on the whole hullabaloo; the most he’s
> said on the matter was “I knew I had to make a distinct change, even
> one that went against some of my instincts” and that he’d ”never
> been near a synthesizer in my life.”

> In came Lorne, who may not have exactly come up with his own voice wholly
> independent of his Remote Control origins at this point but was now
> getting his first major gig that wasn’t a last-minute replacement job (he
> had 10 months here) or one directly connected to a director / lead
> producer he’d already met via Hans. He might not have gotten the
> opportunity if not for helping on a blockbuster the prior summer when
> Zimmer was on tour. “Jake [Myers] was a producer on [Dunkirk]
> and was also on Mission. I’ve worked a lot for Paramount and
> Skydance, and the head of music from Paramount got me that meeting with
> Chris. I started writing after our first meeting before seeing anything.
> After our second breakfast I started writing more. I looked at it as I
> needed to prove to Chris I could do this movie. I’d done music for a
> number of movies that hadn’t been well-received.”

> The assignment was arguably as much of a dream come true for the composer
> as working with Bruckheimer and Bay. “I [loved the 1996 film] when it
> came out in college. For the last 22 years, in my head I’ve basically been
> scoring Mission: Impossible.”

> -----------------------

> “One of the best action sequences I've ever seen was that bathroom
> fight. And I cannot say I helped, because there is no music in that
> scene.”

> Lorne would say Chris was the rare director who didn’t use a temp track,
> but the mission (should the composer choose to accept it) still seemed to
> be pretty clear: with the aesthetics of the franchise shifting a little
> closer to the style of Christopher Nolan with this movie, the music should
> follow suit and plunge Schifrin’s themes (the classic ‘da da da’ and its
> corresponding ‘dun dun, da da, dun dun, da da’ rhythm, plus his secondary
> idea The Plot) into the brooding darkness and the ostinatos of
> The Dark Knight trilogy and other similar Remote Control action
> scores. “You could easily go retro and make it sound nostalgic, which
> the film isn’t. We weren’t trying to do an Ocean’s Eleven movie,
> making it feel retro and jazzy and pastiche. It’s a far darker tone. We
> get to see this side of Ethan we haven’t seen. You have to take Ethan’s
> theme to a darker place.”

> The dang thing would even get composed like a Nolan movie for a while,
> with Lorne writing “endless amounts of music” that was done apart
> from the picture and moved around until they could settle on what worked
> where. “My studio got sent to London. I lived next to the edit room for
> about 4-5 months. When there was a new scene that had been filmed and they
> were experimenting with the edit, you were able to come in and say, ‘What
> if we did this, or what if we tried that?’ You’d have conversations about
> doing just the rhythm of the theme, and I’d do a 3-4 minute piece and we’d
> see where it fits.”

> This change was seen as something tantamount to heresy by a number of film
> music fans, especially given the abandonment of what they had liked about
> Kraemer’s effort, and as such Lorne’s work got loads more shit from people
> than it deserved, with things like ”anonymous,” “oppressively boring,” and
> “stopped when it was good enough and never actually good” tossed around.
> Lorne was acutely aware of all this. “There was a massive backlash when
> it came out that I was doing it. Some people felt it wasn’t as loyal
> musically to the prior movie, and that genre. [But] things have gotta move
> on sometimes in life and evolve. If you alienate all these wonderful
> [electronic] tools, it’s like saying we shouldn’t be going into [Dolby]
> Atmos.” There are churning low strings Lorne had often utilized in his
> career. A sickeningly deep synth pulse appears for the villains; Lorne
> would later laugh about not even being able to sing that low. There are
> escalating BWAMs for the skydiving sequence, done only days before the
> picture was locked according to McQuarrie. And you can hear hints of
> Zimmer’s Bane chant rhythm from The Dark Knight Rises informing
> The Exchange.

> But the familiarity of that lengthy anticipatory track doesn’t (at least
> for me) overwhelm one of the biggest pleasures of the work: Schifrin’s
> main theme gets several variations that are clearly indebted to
> Inception but still sound outrageously cool and also do a stellar
> job building up tension before the lengthy chase sequence commences. Lorne
> would indulge in plenty of booming variants during that actual chase, and
> as the film went on he would start to toy with new takes on The
> Plot as well (something Zimmer didn’t do on M:I 2): urgent
> horns in the motorcycle chase, bombastic takes throughout the climactic
> helicopter chase, and a militaristic version as Hunt is rescued on a boat,
> a throwback to the sound of the original TV series that was only stumbled
> upon after a more rueful composition didn’t give audiences the desired
> sense of victory and McQuarrie suggested a snare drum as an alternative.
> Your brain will at first lament the Zimmerization of the sound, and then
> your brain will tell you “wow, that was fun!”

> And focusing on the more typical aspects of the score would unfairly
> overlook the things Lorne was doing to tinker within the margins of a
> fairly familiar sound, something that he hadn’t gotten an opportunity to
> do on the recent Geostorm but which you could trace back to at
> least 2011’s Assassin’s Creed: Revelations on his lead composing
> roles and probably earlier if one considers his additional music
> assignments. There is a startlingly dramatic use of percussion at times,
> even almost from the get-go when drums hit on Angela Bassett’s footsteps
> when her character enters the film. But it’s not the kind of big, booming,
> relentless, Tom Holkenborg-style drums that were a bit in vogue at the
> time. Lorne would seem to prefer sounds that would cut through the
> darkness and provide some diversity to the soundscape, just as composers
> such as Schifrin and Gerald Fried had done on the original series and
> other 1960s shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (although they had
> much smaller ensembles and budgets than Balfe had at his disposal).

> One group used by Balfe would rival the 18-member accordion ensemble John
> Powell had used on the fourth Ice Age film for sheer
> ridiculousness. “Bongos were always in the TV show, and I thought why
> have one when we can have twelve? It’s hard enough for one bongo player to
> get a gig these days. For twelve, it's a miracle. It's very like the
> stunts, trying to push them to a larger form.” McQuarrie would even
> jokingly refer to Lorne’s experiments as a “weird bongo lab. Guy’s got
> a budget, he’s gone off the rails, I’m sure he’s going to use it
> somewhere.” Jokes aside, their applications in the score lend a nice
> edge to action and suspense tracks like Stairs and Rooftops and
> help them somewhat transcend their more derivative elements.

> There are other intriguing elements. Lorne originally intended a piano
> idea for Henry Cavill’s character but the skittering theme would end up
> being used more as a general momentum device. And a series of lightly
> shifting strings lent an emotional edge to several scenes that wouldn’t
> have been there otherwise, even with Lorne removing a corresponding melody
> at the director’s behest. “I wrote a suite called Loves with some piano
> in it. Chris thought it was a bit busy, so I took it out and called it
> Loves Reduced!”

> -----------------------

> If you enjoyed Henry Jackman’s earlier tale about sharing his music with
> Alan Silvestri, rest assured Lorne had an even funnier story. “I sent
> Lalo [my take on] the theme, because we have the same agent. Nothing. A
> month goes by. I’m doing a radio interview in [Latin America] and I say he
> never got back to me. They called me back later, there’s translation going
> on, and they’re calling Lalo Schifrin and he’s listening to four tracks of
> it live! He said it’s so lovely for people to still enjoy this music. The
> last time I beamed this much was when my wife had our child!”

> The work brings to mind what Lorne said after Terminator Genisys
> about how “you don’t need interesting string lines with this.”
> Sure, what he wrote was a somewhat streamlined, incredibly contemporary
> take on the franchise that lacked the adornments of Kraemer’s earlier
> score. But the dang score worked like gangbusters, and no amount of
> high-minded classical snobbery can tell my brain I didn’t enjoy the
> ever-living shit out of it. Everyone’s got a guilty pleasure score. This
> one’s mine.

> Not everyone liked the music of Fallout as much as I did. And when
> viewed in aggregate Lorne’s film scores from this year, each with their
> own modern flavor, seemed to affirm Tom Holkenborg’s comments from the
> prior year. Maybe this was really the new reality of what filmmakers
> wanted. But then there were examples to the contrary from the same year,
> including one by a man who “can put more energy in a piece of music
> than a roomful of EDM fuckers.”

> -----------------------

There is probably no score that has come out in the past five that my opinion on has changed as much as this one, I hated it when it first came out and made the first viewing of the film miserable for my family by pointing out how inappropriate Lorne's score was compared to Kraemer's, but with time, like Marvin Hamlisch's score for The Spy Who Loved Me, I have come around to it and its my second favourite score from Lorne after Home. Yeah, what McQuarrie did to Joe was unforgivable, but it doesn't mean Lorne should be blamed for it and the score like Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (which Lorne also worked on!) is one of my biggest guilty pleasure scores, I enjoy it a lot and it fits the film (which weirdly enough I just rewatched last night for the first time) like a glove and I can't imagine a world without "We Are Never Free" in it.

So take this as a lesson, don't write off things too quickly because they're not like what came before in the series, because sometimes you might be missing on a lot of fun.

> There is probably no score that has come out in the past five that my opinion on has changed as much as this one, I hated it when it first came out and made the first viewing of the film miserable for my family by pointing out how inappropriate Lorne's score was compared to Kraemer's

I didn't put anyone else through that, but I think I was of similar mind in 2018. If I hadn't already done a retrospective re-evaluation post about Inception as part of this rundown, I might've done it for this score.

> but with time, like Marvin Hamlisch's score for The Spy Who Loved Me

Funny enough, for a score I have mocked for years for its disco affectations, I have never bothered to listen to it standalone. So much for walking the walk...

> I didn't put anyone else through that, but I think I was of similar mind
> in 2018. If I hadn't already done a retrospective re-evaluation post about
> Inception as part of this rundown, I might've done it for this
> score.

Yes, I'm still quite amazed how I've come around to it, probably no score and I've done such a complete turnaround as much as M:I Fallout.

> Funny enough, for a score I have mocked for years for its disco
> affectations, I have never bothered to listen to it standalone. So much
> for walking the walk...

Yeah, I used to put it down for it sounding like a Charlie's Angels score, but then I started to like it for its fun, upbeat style and that a lot of it does sound like Barry like the tanker music and the ride to Atlantis sequence and the song and its orchestral statements have become more poignant since Roger Moore passed.

> 12 Strong (2018) - *

Eh, I remember this one being rather inoffensive with some kinda-sorta pleasant string harmonies here and there. It didn't exactly leave a *bad* impression, unlike...

> Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) - *½

Yeah, that one just actively got on my nerves. Not only as a standalone listen but also compared to its predecessor. Honestly, the template *provided by a fellow RC-Composer, no less* was. Right. There.

> Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) - ****

I never disliked it as much as some others and it also has hugely grown on me over the years. I come back to the 'Stairs and Rooftops' cue every so often. Something about the Piano-Accents, Bongos and Snare Drums just gets me. At this point, am really looking forward to "Death Reckoning".

> Eh, I remember this one being rather inoffensive with some kinda-sorta pleasant string harmonies here and there. It didn't exactly leave a *bad* impression, unlike...

I had it on while I was folding laundry and it was the worst laundry-folding experience of my life.

> I never disliked it as much as some others and it also has hugely grown on me over the years. I come back to the 'Stairs and Rooftops' cue every so often. Something about the Piano-Accents, Bongos and Snare Drums just gets me. At this point, am really looking forward to 'Death Reckoning'.

Someone in an interview compared the Walker piano motif to something David Shire might've written in the 1970s. Couldn't have put it any better myself.

> Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) - ****

My take on this whole thing was very "middle of the road" nearly 5 (?!!?) years ago. When I saw the film finally a year or two ago my opinion was basically the same though probably would bump my original rating up by a full point. It's definitely one of Balfe's best live-action film scores and despite the jerk move by McQuarrie, is a lot of fun in a "Nu-Zimmer take on M:I" kinda way.

My original review:
https://soundtrack-universe.blogspot.com/2018/07/mission-impossible-fallout-capsule.html?q=fallout

-----

Oh, also can't wait until you hear Hurricane Heist which is arguably FAR worse than 12 Strong. It's also one of a couple of reviews I did that got Balfe pissed off at me on Twitter.

> My take on this whole thing was very 'middle of the road' nearly 5 (?!!?) years ago.

I love how two respondents opined on how long ago 2018 was.

> Oh, also can't wait until you hear Hurricane Heist which is arguably FAR worse than 12 Strong. It's also one of a couple of reviews I did that got Balfe pissed off at me on Twitter.

If I know I'm not going to like something but it has consequences for a storyline, I'll write about it. 12 Strong was a Bruckheimer production, and you can't get to later Lorne blockbusters scores for him without it. Also, yes, I am covering Gemini Man later, why do you ask? LOL.

Hurricane Heist is, uh, decidedly not that. Neither is the FIFA game he and Zimmer scored in that year.

I am intrigued by whatever you said to piss off a composer though. I've had Lorne respond to one of my comments before but he seemed to take it in stride.

> I love how two respondents opined on how long ago 2018 was.

It's making us young'uns feel well... not so young.

> If I know I'm not going to like something but it has consequences for a
> storyline, I'll write about it. 12 Strong was a Bruckheimer
> production, and you can't get to later Lorne blockbusters scores for him
> without it. Also, yes, I am covering Gemini Man later, why do you
> ask? LOL.

> Hurricane Heist is, uh, decidedly not that. Neither is the FIFA
> game he and Zimmer scored in that year.

Haha! Totally understand that logic and you're definitely saving yourself however many minutes that atrociously stupid score is.

> I am intrigued by whatever you said to piss off a composer though. I've
> had Lorne respond to one of my comments before but he seemed to take it in
> stride.

I can't remember the exact wording, but Balfe retweeted two of my reviews (one being Hurricane Heist) and poked fun at the review with something like "This is hilarious. This person clearly hasn't heard many scores" (about Heist, of all things) and then the next one was something along the lines of "well, YOU try making a film score". I would be willing to believe he was having a bad day on one of those, but twice? And like several months apart? It was weird especially since I didn't even tag him or anything (never do if it's a negative review, anyway).

To add to the oddness was that it was a negative review that wasn't that negative, especially compared to some of Clem's writing. Oh yeah, the review for context:

https://soundtrack-universe.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-hurricane-heist-capsule-review.html?q=lorne+balfe

Haven't had anymore interactions with him since (thankfully) and thus far Balfe is the only composer I've interacted with that was rude. *shrugs* I try not to let it affected my perception and evaluation of his work, but I also steer clear of him on social media just the same.

> It's making us young'uns feel well... not so young.

As the other person who expressed this sentiment, yup! XD

> I can't remember the exact wording, but Balfe retweeted two of my reviews
> (one being Hurricane Heist) and poked fun at the review with something
> like 'This is hilarious. This person clearly hasn't heard many scores'
> (about Heist, of all things) and then the next one was something along the
> lines of 'well, YOU try making a film score'. I would be willing to
> believe he was having a bad day on one of those, but twice? And like
> several months apart? It was weird especially since I didn't even tag him
> or anything (never do if it's a negative review, anyway).

I never get the whole "Well then YOU do it better" thing, because one doesn't need to be able to write scores to say when one sounds bad! And Hurricane Heist of all things, I'd stick up for Pacific Rim: Uprising before I defended it (and would defend it before I defended 12 Strong). I may need to rescind my comment about him being less thin-skinned than certain others lol.

2018 should not be five years ago. It still feels like last year, or a couple years ago! Pandemic time, I suppose. And if I remember correctly, it was this year that "Replaced by Lorne Balfe" became an in-joke in the film music fan community.

> -----------------------

> 12 Strong (2018) - *

One of those scores that has "works in the film" as the absolutely only thing going for it. Boring and unambitious, and likely not Balfe's fault. I feel like it was one of the biggest wastes of time I've ever had with an album. (What *was* Balfe's fault was the jaw-shatteringly long album. This score would be a chore at 45 minutes, and at an hour it's torture.)

> Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) - *½

I want to say that you were too harsh on this one, but remembering that Djawadi worked within the RC sound five years prior to deliver a top-20 score for me, I can't help but agree. I get that it was a last-minute rush job, but it's just painfully anonymous and cliched (and again, an overlong album).

> Genius Season 2: Picasso (2018) - ***½

Don't think I heard this, but sounds fun!

> Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) - ****

This may be the hardest I've disagreed with you so far. It's not that I think it's awful, but it has two things that sour it for me, both of which you touched on. The first was Kraemer's ejection, which was just such a blow. His ability's been written about for years, and he just can't find work. His biggest break was Rogue Nation, and he's forced out. Obviously a composer's not entitled to projects or collaborations, but this was a senseless move (unless he and McQuarrie had a falling-out). For the record, though, Balfe shouldn't get shit for the situation, as he (almost certainly) had no hand in Kraemer's ejection. You get the job offer, that's that. And he handled the internet shitshow better than some of his peers have...

The other thing is the music itself. Yes, Balfe wrote more intelligently than you might expect, but it's nothing Kraemer couldn't have done. As Clemmensen said in his review, Rogue Nation's music was already an impressive meeting-in-the-middle of Zimmer muscularity and the classic sound. So why the change-up? For me, McQuarrie's choice was complete nonsense. Balfe wrote the music he was asked to write, and rebelling against a director's vision is a great way to get canned. I guess I'm more lamenting the whole sitch.

Okay, all that said, it's not like I hate the score. In fact, it might be one of the best uses of TDK's sound in recent memory; my gripe is that sound intruding into the M:I universe. He uses Schifrin's themes more than I would have expected, and he has a lot of fun percussion, as you noted. Several passages also shine, like Ethan's run across London. The album situation didn't help though, as the standard one was two hours, and the extended even longer. That's way too long for a score like this, irrespective of its strengths.

And that's a lot of words for me saying I would only drop it one star, or a star and a half

> Everyone’s got a guilty pleasure score. This
> one’s mine.

I'm glad you do! Maybe I'll return to it down the road and go "oh wait, I was a fool." It's happened before!

> Not everyone liked the music of Fallout as much as I did. And when
> viewed in aggregate Lorne’s film scores from this year, each with their
> own modern flavor, seemed to affirm Tom Holkenborg’s comments from the
> prior year. Maybe this was really the new reality of what filmmakers
> wanted. But then there were examples to the contrary from the same year,
> including one by a man who “can put more energy in a piece of music
> than a roomful of EDM fuckers.”

This is the truth. Balfe has it within his wheelhouse to do something akin to what Kraemer did, that he did not indicates that it was the higher-ups' decision. Not everyone was making that call, but enough did that the atmosphere from then felt dire!

> -----------------------

> Next time: That score.

I'm wracking my brains, and I am just drawing a blank on what this could be! Consider me in suspense!

(Love your writing! Truly a treat with every installment)

> Balfe shouldn't get shit for the situation, as he (almost certainly) had no hand in Kraemer's ejection.

If Fallout had come right after, say, Ghost Protocol, we as a community like would have looked more fondly on its music.

McQuarrie later admitted that he somewhat knew Rogue Nation was coasting off the goodwill of Ghost Protocol and that the next film couldn't do the same thing.

Also forgotten is that a decent portion of Kraemer's Rogue Nation score went unused in the final film.

> This is the truth. Balfe has it within his wheelhouse to do something akin to what Kraemer did, that he did not indicates that it was the higher-ups' decision.

True, if for no other reason than Penguins of Madagascar.

> (Love your writing! Truly a treat with every installment)

Thanks!

> If Fallout had come right after, say, Ghost Protocol, we as
> a community like would have looked more fondly on its music.

I can definitely say that would have been the case for me! You have a great way of cutting to the chase

> McQuarrie later admitted that he somewhat knew Rogue Nation was
> coasting off the goodwill of Ghost Protocol and that the next film
> couldn't do the same thing.

I hadn't heard that, and I'm not sure what he means by that, given that each film is thought to be better than the previous one (not that I agree, I think they're all equally excellent Ghost Protocol and after). Maybe it was the atmosphere and approach to the heists?

> Also forgotten is that a decent portion of Kraemer's Rogue Nation
> score went unused in the final film.

I've seen the film and didn't pick up on that. Kinda wonder if the album experience being more full than the film may have fostered its goodwill, then.

> True, if for no other reason than Penguins of Madagascar.

Amusingly, that's precisely what came to mind for me!

> I can definitely say that would have been the case for me! You have a
> great way of cutting to the chase

> I hadn't heard that, and I'm not sure what he means by that, given that
> each film is thought to be better than the previous one (not that I agree,
> I think they're all equally excellent Ghost Protocol and after). Maybe it
> was the atmosphere and approach to the heists?

> I've seen the film and didn't pick up on that. Kinda wonder if the album
> experience being more full than the film may have fostered its goodwill,
> then.

Yes, most of "The Torus" did not make the final cut and I believe there was also music meant for the car chase, the statement of the plot theme just before the main titles in "The A400" is dialed out and the rest of the end title suite in "Finale and Curtain Call" is tracked over with other music, also "Good Evening, Mr. Hunt," "Escape to Danger" and the beginning of "Havana to Vienna" are different versions heard in the film.

> Amusingly, that's precisely what came to mind for me!

> Yes, most of 'The Torus' did not make the final cut and I believe there
> was also music meant for the car chase, the statement of the plot theme
> just before the main titles in 'The A400' is dialed out and the rest of
> the end title suite in 'Finale and Curtain Call' is tracked over with
> other music, also 'Good Evening, Mr. Hunt,' 'Escape to Danger' and the
> beginning of 'Havana to Vienna' are different versions heard in the film.

Thanks for detailing that! If/when I rewatch the film, I'll try to listen for that!

> Thanks for detailing that! If/when I rewatch the film, I'll try to listen
> for that!

You're very welcome, I just rewatched the film last week and I noticed all of that, I do think Joe did not have the easiest time on Rogue Nation.

It’s entry really reminded me of how much Balfe has come. To go from so many stinkers to some of my fave scores of the year is bonkers.

Also, I had a bit of a turn around with Fallout too, recently. I didn’t like it when it came out, actually thought the blatantly DK sound was actively distracting and annoying in context. But when rewatching the film I noticed how many bangers there are,
And how the propulsive motion of the score really does help it feel more exciting. I like it more than Kraemer’s, to be honest…but he was still handled like shit, so fuck McQuarrie.

Excellent stuff as always bud! Love these.

> And how the propulsive motion of the score really does help it feel more
> exciting. I like it more than Kraemer’s, to be honest…but he was still
> handled like shit, so fuck McQuarrie.

Considering you once described Kraemer's score as sounding like "Philip Glass as played by one fat guy with a tuba", this is not such a shocking revelation.

> Considering you once described Kraemer's score as sounding like 'Philip
> Glass as played by one fat guy with a tuba', this is not such a shocking
> revelation.

Hahaha wow, yeah, I don't recall that at all. But I guess I stand by it...? Would probably need to hear it again, though now that I think about it, I would almost like to give that comparison to Ghost Protocol's score as well.

This also now makes me wonder what other stupid shit I've said that one person out there inexplicably remembers.