This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on The Lion King, Dark Phoenix, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119950
- 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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One would think getting into the final run of years in this era (2020, 2021, 2022, and early 2023) would mean having to spend a few paragraphs talking about the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ll get there, but there were a number of works by this musical lineage in 2020 that merit discussion first:
- Five were for films released in the first few months of that year when things still seemed normal
- Another was for a film that had its premiere in March 2020 but ended up reaching audiences via a fall streaming release
- One was for a film that had a festival showing in fall 2019 before ending up on VOD services in late 2020
- Another was for a film that was shown at Sundance in early 2020 before ending up in virtual cinemas in summer 2020
- Four were for 2020 films / shows that had no release pre-pandemic but likely had their scores completed before then
- One was an album of concert suites that were probably recorded before the pandemic
There’s also Mosul which was first shown at the 2019 Venice Film Festival before ending up on Netflix around Thanksgiving 2020, but Henry Jackman’s music (which he characterized as being cut from the same cloth as what he did for Captain Philips) didn’t get an album release. There were also several scores that I’ve confirmed had all or nearly all of their music completed in 2019 or early 2020 but sat on the shelf until March 2021 or later, and I’ll cover those in future posts along with all the other scores that were composed and recorded during/after the pandemic.
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The Rhythm Section (2020) - **½
Steve Mazzaro; produced by Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Lisa Gerrard;
sequencer programming Omer Benyamin; technical score engineer Chuck Choi;
technical assistants Steve Doar & Alejandro Moros; digital instrument design Mark Wherry;
digital instrument preparation Taurees Habib & Raul Vega; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant
TBTF discovery #73.
This action film would be delayed numerous times and eventually limp into theaters to impressively low box office returns. Another composer was likely on it at the start; Adam Taylor had worked with director Reed Morano on her two prior films and episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale, and there’s an unconfirmed rumor that David Arnold was involved at some point. But Steve Mazzaro was announced as its composer two months before its release date, probably doing a last-minute “save the movie” replacement job. It certainly wasn’t the first time that Hans or someone else associated with this musical lineage (or a junior composer overseen by Hans, as was the case here) was brought in under such circumstances. Heck, by my count it was the forty-eighth such instance as of January 2020.*
His score teeters on the edge of incoherence, as all of the Zimmer eras (the early years, MV, RC, and Too Big To Fail) inform different areas. Some chord shifts suggest the keyboard scores of Hans’ earlier years. The tension in Take The Contract recalls Interstellar but with Lisa Gerrard on top of it, while other passages with Gerard’s voice play more like her Media Ventures contributions. The track Marseille starts out feeling like Black Hawk Down and ends up thumping like Dunkirk. Mombasa from Inception lurks over the action piece Hunting. There are also nervous violin solos and even several tracks that allude to the midfilm Scotland sequences, with the album-closing piece Journey a stellar example of that latter element.
Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson were producers on this film, and before it came out they brought in Hans and Steve to salvage the music of another one of their upcoming releases, though after they finished their re-score on that other film it would be shelved for more than a year thanks to COVID.
*Here’s the list
Completely replaced
1. Regarding Henry - Georges Delerue
2. K2 (European release) - Chaz Jankel
3. Point of No Return - Gary Chang
4. White Squall - Maurice Jarre
5. Face/Off - Mark Isham
6. Tarzan - Alan Silvestri
7. Remember the Titans - John Debney
8. Rat Race - Elmer Bernstein
9. Texas Rangers - Marco Beltrami
10. The Bourne Identity - Carter Burwell
11. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl - Alan Silvestri
12. Something’s Gotta Give - Alan Silvestri
13. Phone Booth - Nathan Larson
14. Team America: World Police - Marc Shaiman
15. Hitman (2007) - unknown
16. TMNT - Marco Beltrami
17. Clash of the Titans (2010) - Craig Armstrong & Neil Davidge
18. Game of Thrones Season 1 - Stephen Warbeck
19. Arthur Christmas - Michael Giacchino & Adam Cohen
20. Planes - James Seymour Brett
21. 300: Rise of an Empire - Federico Jusid
22. CHAPPiE - Ryan Amon, Chris Clark & Rich Walters
23. Terminator Genisys - Christophe Beck
24. Pan - Dario Marianelli
25. Money Monster - Michael Andrews
26. The Legend of Tarzan - Mario Grigorov
27. Hacksaw Ridge - John Debney
28. The Crown Season 1 - Paul Englishby
29. Geostorm - Pinar Toprak
30. Blade Runner 2049 - Jóhann Jóhannsson
31. Pacific Rim: Uprising - John Paesano
32. Gemini Man - Marco Beltrami
33. No Time To Die - Dan Romer
Replaced except for source music
34. Ella Enchanted - Shaun Davey
35. The Lone Ranger - Jack White
Mostly replaced
36. Gears of War 2 - Kevin Riepl
Partially replaced
37. White Fang - Basil Poledouris
38. Secret Window - Philip Glass
39. Constantine (2005) - Brian Tyler
40. Ghost in the Shell (2017) - Clint Mansell
41. Christopher Robin - Jon Brion
42. Ad Astra - Max Richter
Partially replaced - Harry/Ridley section
43. Prometheus - Marc Streitenfeld
44. Exodus: Gods and Kings - Alberto Iglesias & Federico Jusid
Not enough known to classify properly
45. Blade: Trinity - The RZA
46. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit - Julian Nott
47. Fast & Furious 6 - Lucas Vidal
Bad Boys for Life (2020) - ***
Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Steffen Thum, Max Aruj, Steven Davis & Sven Faulconer; orchestrated by Shane
Rutherfoord-Jones; conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith; music production services Queenie Li; drums Sheila E.
TBTF discovery #74.
The Bad Boys franchise is a great exhibit for the increasingly divergent musical preferences of its makers. The first inaugurated the Media Ventures action sound under Jerry Bruckheimer, while the sequel released eight years later was the prototypical example of the rap / rock coolness director Michael Bay looked for on many of his future scores. Only Bruckheimer returned for the long-awaited third film, and thus the music swung back to his preferred style and his preferred composer Lorne Balfe, who got a massive return on investment for doing those last-minute replacement scores for Geostorm and Gemini Man. Lorne couldn’t resist another opportunity to reinterpret another composer’s iconic idea, in this case Mancina’s from the first film. “Every one of my friends who’s not musical remembers it. It's definitely coming back.” He would also convincingly reproduce the legacy 90s Bruckheimer sound by evoking not just Bad Boys but The Rock as well. Lorne’s score was a fun dose of nostalgia, though the job would be somewhat bittersweet as the composer had to step away to take care of his sick father back in Scotland. “If it hadn’t been for my team, I wouldn’t have finished.”
Rebuilding Paradise (2020) - ***
Hans Zimmer & Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Boris Salchow, Peter G. Adams, Max
Aruj & Steffen Thum; technical Music Assistants Michael Bitton, Alfie Godfrey & Mike
Ladouceur; technical score engineer Chuck Choi; digital instrument design Mark Wherry;
digital instrument preparation Taurees Habib & Raul Vega; electric cello Peter Gregson;
electric violin Eos Counsell; guitar Michael Bitton; RC studio manager Shalini Singh;
music production coordinator Queenie Li; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant
TBTF discovery #75.
Debuting at Sundance in January 2020, Ron Howard’s acclaimed documentary about California’s 2018 Camp Fire disaster had its release delayed by COVID before eventually emerging via a mix of traditional theaters, drive-ins, and video on demand (VOD) services. It was a rare documentary assignment for both credited composers, and the mix of the format and the tragic topic covered led the team to go for a slightly understated approach, one made up of slow chord shifts, somber but unemotive strings and piano, and solo instrumental accents (both acoustic and electronic). Lorne would characterize the film as needing “less is more. As soon as you go into the usual film scoring, where you’re trying to enhance every emotion, you’re turning it into a Hollywood moment.” The album gives off an appropriate sense of restrained perseverance, save for the exultant One Year Anniversary which plays like a hybrid of Zimmer’s early days and his melodic minimalistic present.
Jungleland (2020) - ****
Lorne Balfe; score technical assistant Max Aruj; orchestrated by Shane Rutherfoord-Jones;
conducted by Johannes Vogel; music production coordinator Queenie Li
TBTF discovery #76.
Lorne’s role on this underground boxing picture was announced in August 2019, a month before the film’s premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, with the film eventually getting a limited theatrical release in November 2020 before moving to VOD services. Director Max Winkler didn’t want the music to reflect the grimness of the characters’ situation because “I don’t think these guys see their circumstances as depressing. I wanted our horns to reflect this optimist despite everyone telling him he should stop.” Balfe’s score was worlds away from anything he’d ever written for films, something much more reliant on wistful flute parts, restrained folk modes, and noble brass chorales that sounded nothing like Remote Control and instead suggested a melancholy-yet-hopeful hybrid of Aaron Copland and Philip Glass, as well as Renaissance composer William Byrd (a favorite of the director) on in its final album track.
The Call of the Wild (2020) - *****
John Powell; add’l music & arrangements by Batu Sener & Paul Mounsey;
orchestrated by John Ashton Thomas, Mark Graham, Andrew Kinney, Randy Kerber,
Rick Giovinazzo, Pete Anthony, Jon Kull & Jeff Atmajian; conducted by John Powell
The umpteenth adaptation of Jack London’s famed dog-centric adventure novel ended up being one of the last films produced by 20th Century Fox before its acquisition by Disney and thus became the first film released under Disney’s 20th Century Studios banner. Audiences seemed indifferent to the film, perhaps because its trailers suggested the movie had trotted into the uncanny valley by relying a lot on CGI animals for its episodic storytelling, and COVID lockdowns setting in a few weeks after its release dampened its long-term box office prospects. But John Powell suggested there were plenty of other challenges with getting it to the finish line anyway. “There were reshoots, and then the animation wasn’t finished. We made a lot of changes near the end. It was going to have a lot less dialogue than it ended up with, but it was the end of Fox, they got a bit frightened and added more and more dialogue.” At least the film was a nice way for Powell to reunite with director Chris Sanders who’d co-helmed the first How To Train Your Dragon, though Powell had a feeling that if Alan Silvestri hadn’t been tied up with work on Avengers: Endgame in 2019 that Sanders might’ve elected to work with him instead as he’d used Silvestri on his prior film The Croods.
The story was an expansive, turn-of-the-century yarn, and Powell responded with something in the fantastical-yet-personal style of his Dragon scores coupled with an attempt at recreating the sound of the frontier without drifting into cowboy territory. “It’s a normal score, but I did introduce some fun instruments. If you get into the question of ‘what is American music,’ it’s influenced by Copland, who was very influenced by Shaker hymns and the orchestration of Debussy and Ravel. But that’s a little bit more Western than what we wanted. We are in the Yukon, not the prairies. I like the idea that everyone who went to that area of the world at that particular time was an immigrant, so I was really open to any kind of music. There are accordions, tin whistles, Irish flutes, a small ensemble of harmoniums, an ensemble of 12 banjos who also played mandolins and guitars. I wouldn’t say I tried to make it sound terribly American - even though there are banjos in it, they weren’t playing bluegrass, they were playing things you would perhaps get out of Ireland.” There was some novelty in 2020 to hearing such large-scale, folk-inflected adventure music since it really hadn’t resurfaced much since Basil Poledouris was writing such scores in the 1980s and 1990s.
Coupled with all that would be the same densely orchestrated, explosively entertaining material that Powell had been consistently delivering over the last decade-plus. Coming on the heels of The Hidden World, Solo, Ferdinand, Pan, and How To Train Your Dragon 2, perhaps this approach was a tad too familiar for some listeners, never mind the absurdly sky-high expectations Powell had created for his work by this point. But many others, including me, found it a profound score with thrills and wonder in abundance, one chock-full of catchy themes, unique instrumentation, and mesmerizing moments of musical storytelling, perhaps none better than the mid-album track Buck Takes The Lead which found Powell operating near the peak of his celebratory music powers and was for my money the best piece of scoring that year. “He's taken over the sled and is now the leader and realizes that he has this and everyone respects him. I do love it when I can be joyful.” On a more personal note, it came out around the time I first skied in Whistler, which made an awesome mountain even more awesome and deepened my appreciation for the music, and it has become a reliable go-to album for solo skiing in the years since.
As of this writing, this is the last film score he’s done in this adventurous style that he’d essentially perfected in the 2010s. Powell isn’t semi-retired as some have speculated, but as he nears 60 he has become more choosy about what he signs on to. The project he was planning to do after this was an opera with his old friend Gavin Greenaway, and his few COVID-era scores have been for decidedly different films with decidedly different musical needs than The Call of the Wild had - a crime film requiring only 12 minutes of score, a thriller, and a documentary. If The Call of the Wild ends up being the last such Powell composition, it was a heck of a way to go out. To quote this film, what an adventure.
Film Suites Vol. 1 (2020) - ****½
John Powell; performed by The Philharmonia Orchestra & Voices; conducted by José Serebrier
The adventure would in fact continue a bit over the 2020 holidays, around which time Powell’s record label would release an album of concert suites of some of his film music performed by the orchestra that had premiered his Prussian Requiem a few years earlier. Powell had been talking about the concept publicly since at least 2014, right around when he was taking his sabbatical for that aforementioned oratorio. He’d even mused about radically reinterpreting some of them, namely Face/Off which he didn’t end up covering here, but the end product would largely play like a faithful orchestral and choral concert performance of his film arrangements. It definitely skimps on the quirkier side of Powell’s writing for films, and one could question if we really needed five whole minutes of Assassin’s Tango from Mr. & Mrs. Smith in the program, but for the most part it was a tremendously entertaining overview of many of Powell’s musical highlights from the last twentyish years, including a delightful performance of the playful The Great Tree from Endurance which was likely how many Powell fans discovered that underheard 1999 score even existed in the first place. Here’s hoping a second volume emerges in the near term.
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Next time: “Flower power sounds.”
