This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on HTTYD 3, Catch-22, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119799
- 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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Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019) - ****½
Geoff Zanelli; add’l arrangements by Zak McNeil & Phill Boucher; orchestrated by
Mark Graham, Jon Kull, Tommy Laurence, Geoff Lawson, & John Ashton Thomas;
conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith; technical score engineers Zachariah Rose & Nicolas Salinardi
With the fifth Pirates film, it made tons of sense for Geoff Zanelli to continue using the legacy themes of the franchise. Few walked into the Maleficent sequel thinking the composer would show any fealty to the sensational music from the first film by James Newton Howard, especially since much of the creative team was different this time. The new director this go-round was Joachim Rønning, who’d helmed that aforementioned Pirates sequel and clearly loved working with Zanelli since he brought him along for this film. So it was a welcome surprise for the composer to not only bring back Howard’s themes (avoiding a sense of cut-and-paste, just as he’d done on Dead Men Tell No Tales) but also write in a style that wouldn’t have been out of place with Howard’s material for Maleficent and other fantasy films. “Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Jurassic Park [are] strengthened by having continuity. The first thing we did when I sat down with Joachim was to determine if there’s material from the first movie to apply to this one. Some of the classic Disney fairy tale [feel] holds over, [so I used] some of the themes or just my own approach that honors that.”
Zanelli would add a variety of world music instruments for the other faeries Maleficent meets and pounding metallic tones for the villains (a nice touch, given the protagonist’s weakness to iron). And the climactic sequences featured some of the most satisfying fantasy action music of the 2010s. It was one of the least Remote Control-ey scores a Remote Control graduate had ever written, but then Zanelli had been showing us he could do a variety of other things since 2005’s Into The West. With this score, Dead Man Tell No Tales, and the train sequence in The Lone Ranger coming in a six-year stretch, Zanelli had clearly announced that he could be a significant contributor to blockbuster films, not to mention he’d successfully scored one of the biggest miniseries of the decade with The Pacific near the start of the decade. It’s a dang shame that he hasn’t gotten similar opportunities in the years since, though Rønning’s rumored involvement in an upcoming third TRON film suggests that may change in the near term.
Seven Worlds, One Planet (2019) - ***
Jacob Shea; main theme by Shea & Zimmer; produced by Zimmer & Russell Emanuel; add’l music by Anže Rozman;
orchestrated by Abraham Libbos, Dalton Daniel & Josef Zimmerman; conducted by Geoff Alexander & Peter Rotter
TBTF discovery #65.
Planet Earth II was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117577
Blue Planet II was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119141
In 2018, Jacob Shea gave one of the best quotes ever about the challenges of scoring sequels: “For something [like Blue Planet II] where you’re taking collected footage and creating a narrative, temp score might be more useful. [But] there were moments in each episode where [my Planet Earth II music] poked up. It was the worst. What am I supposed to do that doesn’t sound like me and accomplishes the same thing? It puts you in a creative box.” He had David Fleming score such scenes as often as possible on Blue Planet II. I wonder if he had to deal with the same challenge on this, his third BBC nature series in four years, with six months to write around 300 minutes of music. His score doubled down on the epic feel of Planet Earth II, resulting in several extremely entertaining tracks including the main theme piece with its booming drums. But there were also a lot of tracks of the more blandly atmospheric variety. “[They] wanted to avoid making a caricature of a region by relying on indigenous instruments. I relied a lot on sound design.” The score was decidedly less inspired than Blue Planet II, and one got a sense of creative fatigue on the part of the composer. It wasn’t surprising to see future BBC nature series feature different folks from Bleeding Fingers.
Gemini Man (2019) - **
Lorne Balfe; add’l arrangements by Steffen Thum, Steven Davis, Sven Faulconer & Max Aruj; orchestrated by
Shane Rutherfoord-Jones & Mike Ladouceur; conducted by Matt Dunkley; score technical assistants Joseph Cho &
Alfie Godfrey; cello Tina Guo; woodwinds Pedro Eustache; music production coordinator Queenie Li
TBTF discovery #66.
Ang Lee’s action film about Will Smith’s assassin fighting a younger clone of himself had composer Marco Beltrami on board by February 2019. I suspect producer Jerry Bruckheimer didn’t like what he was hearing after a while because four months later Marco was out and Lorne Balfe (basically Bruckheimer’s composer of choice at this point) was in - although later comments by Balfe would suggest he was involved earlier than that. One couldn’t blame Beltrami if he thought “not this again” after getting bumped off TMNT for Klaus Badelt a dozen years earlier and Texas Rangers for Trevor Rabin back in 2001.
Like pretty much everyone else in this musical lineage at this stage, Balfe would have to adapt to in-progress visual effects, in this case for Smith’s digitally de-aged face. “Every couple of weeks we'd look at scenes and rewrite [because] the performance was more real. We were writing too much [when] it wasn't finished [but] once you saw Junior crying you [didn’t] need to write as hard.” The composer would cleverly address the duality in the story by having the older Smith’s theme on electric cello and the clone’s theme on acoustic cello and even layering both ideas on top of each other. But what ended up being most memorable about the score was how familiar it was; on its album the work largely played like spare parts from other action scores done in the Remote Control style, and not just those by Lorne.
The film would be a commercial disappointment, though the recording of its score provided a nice experience for the director. “Ang has been a resident of New York for 30 years, and he had never recorded in New York. He was so thankful to all the musicians because it was great for him to record in his second home.” And sticking with Jerry is usually a good bet for a composer in the long run. Make him happy and maybe someday he’ll give you a sequel to one of his hits from the 90s. Or maybe even from the 80s. Besides, Lorne also had that collaboration with his other filmmaking hero from his childhood still going on.
6 Underground (2019) - *½
Lorne Balfe; score technical assistants Steffen Thum, Shane Rutherfoord-Jones,
Max Aruj & Mike Ladouceur; orchestrated by Rutherfoord-Jones; cello Peter Gregson;
uncredited drums by Chad Smith; ‘Beautiful Sunday’ by David Balfe & Peter Green
TBTF discovery #67.
13 Hours was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117475
Transformers: The Last Knight was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119058
Michael Bay’s direct-to-Netflix actioner would provide Lorne with his second opportunity to collaborate with the director (or third, depending on your view of his team contributing to the final Transformers film). “I started writing just before he started filming, so he was able to work with it during the early stages of editing. When you have the luxury of time, you're able to experiment. Michael [has] a great understanding of when music should be used and when it shouldn't. If music is continuous, it becomes relentless and the audience no longer appreciates it. [With him I’m] very aware of sound effects and not trying to fight [them] too much.” Bay seemed to want the same from Balfe that he had from Steve Jablonsky since Bad Boys II on non-Transformers entries - indistinctive electronic coolness to blend with both the film’s visual aesthetic and the various pop songs needle-dropped into the movie (over a dozen in this case), piano chords for emotion, and a theme that adhered to standard MV / RC structures. The manipulated sounds of Peter Gregson’s cello added some sonic nuance, and there was a goofy Japanese lounge song right in the middle of the album, but most of the score would play like a style that had been done to death by this point.
Thankfully, someone else gave Lorne the opportunity to write wildly different music that year…
His Dark Materials Series 1 (2019) - ****
Lorne Balfe; add’l arrangements Steffen Thum, Max Aruj, Boris Salchow, Mike Ladouceur & Shane Rutherfoord-Jones;
orchestrated by Rutherfoord-Jones; conducted by Matt Dunkley; music production coordinator Queenie Li;
cello Tina Guo & Peter Gregson; drums Chad Smith; electric guitar Alexandre Fransche; horn Sarah Willis;
recorder Richard Harvey; vocal KT Tunstall; violin Lindsey Stirling; ethnic choir Vanya Moneva Bulgaria
A central lesson of this rundown is this: if you want to write different scores than what you’ve been writing, you need to find filmmaking collaborators who will give you the opportunity to do so. Zimmer did that early in his Hollywood days by pivoting from character-based comedies & dramas to action films. John Powell transitioned out of the Media Ventures sound with a smorgasbord of efforts in the early aughts. Tom Holkenborg was arguably doing that around this time with his gradually expanding orchestral palette thanks to Peter Jackson and Robert Rodriguez. And for Lorne, coming after a stretch of contemporary-sounding action scores, Zimmer-adjacent drama music, and last-minute replacement efforts, perhaps this television adaptation of Philip Pullman’s famed trilogy of fantasy novels was such an opportunity as well.
It helped that Lorne “was a massive fan of the books. I loved the storytelling, the mythology and the way that there was a clash of worlds. I really wanted to be involved. However, so did every other person. [So when] I got a call asking if I’d like to come and meet them in Wales where they were actually filming, I leapt at the chance. It’s one of those rare projects that come along where it’s always been in your life - the same as Mission: Impossible. [But] it's intimidating because people have lived with these characters for a long time, and all of a sudden your music could be saying this is the journey of [Lyra] and everybody has got their own interpretation of that.”
Unlike the assembly line nature that had defined television post-production for decades, His Dark Materials gave Lorne some of the structural advantages that former coworker Ramin Djawadi had on the later seasons of Game of Thrones in terms of being able to see most of the episodes. “I had a head start because as soon as I started writing the character themes, I [could] see the finished beings. [Since] so much was [already] filmed, I was able to look at an episode and then go to the final episode and work in character themes there. For TV, you’ve got a longer story arc, so you’ve got to make sure that those themes don’t wear out.”
If you had been frustrated by his scores over the last few years which didn’t have the most distinctive themes, this score would be exactly what you craved. Lorne was so overflowing with melodic inspiration that 20 different themes got cranked out, ranging from a soaring title melody to a powerfully resolute theme for the Gyptians to a rueful idea surrounding the main character’s destiny, all of them on a marvelous “musical anthology” concept album released right as the first season started airing (a later 2-disc score album would cover much of the episodic music). The composer would also link a number of these ideas together with a descending four-note countermelody, a nice way of creating coherence throughout the score but perhaps also an irritant for my wife when I kept noticing it as we watched the show. There would be so many good ideas that the exquisite Alethiometer track from the anthology album, possibly the one theme that suggested something like what Alexandre Desplat wrote for the failed 2007 film adaptation of the concept, didn’t even end up in the series. The deep roster of musical identities was the polar opposite of his “make sure we’re not being overly thematic” sentiment about Genius two years earlier.
Lorne would take a page from Hans by “casting” musicians for certain parts so that he could get a certain kind of attitude, including a reunion with Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith. “It was just as important as casting Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Coulter. Her theme was the hardest to write. It was the theme that got rejected the most. With her, I always felt a tribal pulse and a sinister, brooding effect from her performance. That’s why I wanted Chad. I had originally planned a far more subdued performance, but as a true rockstar he took it to a different level, a far more ruckus sound, and that then changed the way I wrote the orchestra. After hearing him playing it and then seeing it in the picture, it was like, oh, actually we can go this big. [For] Roger’s character I worked with Richard Harvey. With the Gyptians, I wanted a violin to reflect the Gyptians’ characters but have it with a slightly more Celtic tone, so we have Lindsay Stirling. Peter and Tina both play the cello, but they bring a different performance and they both help tell a different story.”
Some would quibble with the occasional injections of electronics or more contemporary writing, though that would seem to be a misinterpretation of the main storyline as constituting some sort of period piece. “I always treat these books as steampunk. The series deals with different worlds, and the reader is tricked into not knowing the timeline. It was important to make sure there were electronic elements combining with the organic-ness so it reflected what we were seeing.” It was Lorne’s most accomplished score since The Lego Batman Movie, and maybe even since Home, and thankfully the BBC/HBO show got enough viewers for him to get the chance to extend his ideas into future entries (unlike Desplat, whose exemplary score never got the sequel film it deserved).
Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019) - **½
Henry Jackman; produced by Jackman & Maverick Dugger; add’l music by Jeff Morrow,
Evan Goldman & Kazuma Jinnouchi; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman,
Andrew Kinney, Henri Wilkinson, Jonathan Beard & Ed Trybek; conducted by Gavin
Greenaway; score technical engineers Maverick Dugger, Felipe Pacheco & John Paul Lefebvre
TBTF discovery #68.
This adaptation of the Japanese video game franchise reunited Henry Jackman with director Rob Letterman almost a decade after they’d worked together on Gulliver’s Travels, but even with a known collaborator involved the composer sill found scoring the film a challenge because of how the filmmakers had struggled with a temp score. “In my head I thought this’ll be great. But I was getting all these notes; when they were trying to temp it, they tried all electronic, then all symphonic, and nothing [was] working.” Jackman would toy around for months (“about the amount of time you’d spend on a record”) getting the synth sounds right before ultimately setting on “something half Stranger Things, half symphony orchestra.”
Some of the work would be far more sophisticated than necessary (Ryme City is in an atypical 7/4 time signature, for example) but the score was still a surprisingly disparate and anonymous effort from the composer, one that toggled between the horror and wonder of The Predator and the retro beeps and boops of his animated scores without providing the impressive cohesion of Kong: Skull Island or the memorable themes of Big Hero 6. Jackman would let on that this was somewhat a function of his schedule. “Sometimes you go quickly from one film to the next and [it’s] very noticeable. The first few cues of Pikachu [have] a hangover from [The] Predator. I hadn’t quite taken off the clothes and you can hear it.”
Jumanji: The Next Level (2019) - ***½
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Jeff Morrow, Anthony Willis & Kazuma Jinnouchi;
orchestrated by Stephen Coleman, Andrew Kinney, Michael James Lloyd, Ed Trybek,
Jonathan Beard & Henri Wilkinson; conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith; score technical engineers
Maverick Dugger, Felipe Pacheco & John Paul Lefebvre; Sasha Patpatia as Jackman’s assistant
TBTF discovery #69.
Welcome to the Jungle was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119247
The lucrative follow-up to 2017’s lucrative Jumanji reboot would be a more successful venture for Jackman. He’d get the chance to “reharmonize and reorchestrate the themes into different contexts because the geography is different. It’s gotta be full bells and whistles.” There is very little cut-and-paste outside of the first track on the album. He’d unleash a fun “half badass, half barbarian” theme for the villain. And there would be a host of regional instruments thrown into the mix that provided new colors for the franchise’s adventure sound. It was a slight step up from Welcome to the Jungle.
In the grand tradition of Blue Planet II, my favorite Jackman score from this year is the one no one talks about.
21 Bridges (2019) - ***½
Henry Jackman & Alex Belcher; add’l music by Maverick Dugger; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman
& Andrew Kinney; conducted by Gavin Greenaway; score technical engineer John Paul Lefebvre
TBTF discovery #70.
I wouldn’t blame you if you rolled your eyes at Alex Belcher saying he and Henry were told by director Brian Kirk and the Russo brothers that it would “be cool to have a Taxi Driver [or] Cape Fear-type score” for their modern investigative thriller. “Ok buddy, whatever you say, can’t wait to see what contemporary Winter Soldier-type stuff we get.” But that feeling is actually very present throughout the score. “You’ve got to walk that line between paying respect without ripping it off, while at the same time being really clear what we were tipping our hat to.” It’s not a straight-up Bernard Herrmann clone; if anything, it sounds like Jackman & Belcher doing a version of Marco Beltrami doing a Herrmann score. But there are plenty of elements that suggest the vibes of the famed composer of paranoid classics like Psycho and Vertigo: the palpable sense of unease, the succinct repeated melodic devices, the use of strings and winds in the ensemble, the menacing hints of muted brass, and even the occasional use of a marital snare drum, the latter being the most obvious nod to Herrmann’s Taxi Driver.
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Next time: ”Look how the music business has fallen apart. We're never going to get our six-platinum album anymore.”
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