> Mulan (2020) - ***½
> Harry Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Stephanie Economou; orchestrated
> by Ladd McIntosh, Hal
> Rosenfeld, Jennifer Hammond & Jim Honeyman; conducted by
> Gregson-Williams; specialist woodwinds
> Chris Bleth & Richard Harvey; electric cell Marti Tillman; ‘Loyal
> Brave True’ by Gregson-Williams, Jamie
> Hartman, Rosi Golan & Billy Crabtree; ‘Reflection (2020)’ produced by
> Gregson-Williams

> “There’s no prize for being 100% authentic, otherwise they wouldn’t
> have hired me, they’d have hired Tan Dun.”

> Disney’s new Mulan was intended as a spring blockbuster and had its
> premiere event in early March, but its release date was postponed due to
> the pandemic and the movie was eventually dropped onto Disney’s streaming
> service that fall. Funny enough, it was the third straight live action
> adaptation of a Disney animated film intended for theaters to be scored by
> a veteran of this musical lineage, following Hans’ Lion King re-do
> and Geoff Zanelli’s stellar work on the Maleficent sequel. As with
> Monkey Kingdom, Harry Gregson-Williams thought it would be nice to
> work on a film his daughters could watch, but he didn’t think he’d have a
> shot at it until Niki Caro, the helmer of The Zookeeper’s Wife, was
> hired. For score fans, this seemed awesome: a chance for Harry to return
> to the action/fantasy sound that had defined many of his best works in the
> aughts but hadn’t been on his resume since he returned from his hiatus.
> Caro even made it clear she wanted a big score instead of the understated
> accompaniment she’d asked for on The Zookeeper’s Wife.

> Alas, the end result would be a mixed bag, perhaps in part driven by the
> film’s long pre-pandemic post-production process which featured some
> “recalibrating of the tone of the film” and thus required a number
> of rewrites on the composer’s part. Harry would throw a host of Chinese
> instruments into the mix (taking advantage of his friend and former boss
> Richard Harvey who was about to go record a number of ethnic instruments
> for a sample library) and produce a number of alluring passages. But the
> action material would often feel like a Far Eastern retread of Prince
> of Persia. Several score reviewers noticed likely coincidental
> similarities between Harry’s main melody and Rachel Portman’s from The
> Joy Luck Club, though for my money the more distracting similarity was
> how the music for the midfilm water bucket training sequence seemed to
> take heavy inspiration from Dario Marianelli’s music from V for
> Vendetta. And brief quotes of the famed song melodies from the 1998
> animated film, done at the behest of Caro, didn’t quite gel with the rest
> of the material.
>
>
> Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) - *****
> Hans Zimmer; add’l music by David Fleming & Steve Mazzaro;
> sequencer programming Omer Benyamin & Steve
> Doar; orchestrated by B&W Fowler/Moriarty, Kevin Kaska, Carl Rydlund,
> Jennifer Hammond & David Giuli; conducted
> by Gavin Greenaway & Matt Dunkley; technical score engineer Chuck
> Choi; synth design Kevin Schroeder; electric &
> acoustic cello Tina Guo; bass flute Pedro Eustache; digital instrument
> design Mark Wherry; digital instrument
> preparation Taurees Habib & Raul Vega; RC studio manager Shalini
> Singh; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant

> Wonder Woman was covered here:
> https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=118953

> Director Patty Jenkins wanted Hans for the 2017 Wonder Woman film
> and probably could’ve gotten him if he wasn’t sick of superhero movies at
> the time. Still, it was a bit jolting that Hans took over the franchise
> from former underling Rupert Gregson-Williams in 2018, especially with
> Rupert having done a capable score for that monster hit. But folks got
> over that shock pretty quickly once they heard what Hans and team had come
> up with for the sequel. If the richly romantic music of Pirates of the
> Caribbean: At World’s End had felt like Hans saying to the naysayers,
> “Fine, you want your pirate music, here’s your pirate music,” then
> Wonder Woman 1984 was its superhero equivalent. Were you tired of
> bass strings and grim ostinatos and all the brooding? Didn’t like the EDM
> in Amazing Spider-Man 2? Hated most of Batman v Superman?
> Fine. Here’s your superhero score.

> And it was effing awesome.

> There were two catchy new themes for the title character that unleashed
> rousing, major key heroism at speaker-shaking volumes. There was a female
> chorus injecting a surprising amount of optimism, like Hans putting a
> happy spin on Angels and Demons. There were many impressive lengthy
> action sequences that lacked the overproduced heaviness of Man of
> Steel and BvS and instead showed a surprising level of
> instrumental richness in the soundscape; Wonder Woman 1984 was
> possibly the next major score Zimmer recorded after the “live action”
> The Lion King, and it shares - and arguably surpasses - that
> score’s level of symphonic orchestration (check out that layered brass in
> Fireworks and the second half of 1984). Zimmer and Jenkins
> may have agreed that his war cry theme from BvS wasn’t versatile
> enough to be a big hero theme, but that doesn’t mean he discarded it; its
> 7/8 time signature informed a lot of the action material, and the
> ass-kicking Open Road prominently featured the idea.

> There are a wealth of secondary ideas. The theme for the villain Maxwell
> Lord would start as an amusingly pseudo-baroque variant on Zimmer’s
> mannerisms from his early days before being twisted into darker and sadder
> versions. The love theme would be a throwback Media Ventures gem. And the
> abrasive theme for the villainess Cheetah would be cleverly similar to the
> first four notes of the war cry theme, something Zimmer hadn’t really done
> since his villain theme mirrored his hero theme in Angels and
> Demons. Many thought the score was the finest accomplishment of Hans’
> career since Inception, and possibly even since At World’s
> End, and it would net Hans his first trophy from the IFMCA since
> Interstellar. It’s debatable whether Hans cared about the last
> part, since at his kindest he’s referred to film score critics as
> “academic fanboys.” The film’s mixed reception and direct-to-HBO
> Max release in December 2020 perhaps muted the score’s ability to have a
> bigger impact on the culture at large.

> Zimmer didn’t factor much into the promotion of the film. He filmed a
> cheesy video with Jenkins and Gal Gadot (and with Steve Mazzaro and Dave
> Fleming standing quietly in the background) to introduce his new main
> theme, but to date the only interview I’ve seen evidence of is a Q&A Hans
> did with film music journalist Jon Burlingame that’s currently behind a
> paywall on the website of the Society of Composers and Lyricists. It’s
> possible that temp tracking led to some frustration. Beautiful Lie
> from BvS was used in a late scene as Jenkins would claim Zimmer and
> team tried writing multiple versions to replace it but ultimately gave up
> after they couldn’t get anything she liked as much, and two pre-existing
> tracks by non-RC film composers are in the final cut of the film as well.
> Hans also indicated there were some last-minute recordings done after
> “Patty had some more ideas.”

> Maybe he was annoyed that it went to streaming. Maybe Warner didn’t pay
> him to promote it beyond the video. Or maybe he was just busy! When
> Wonder Woman 1984 came out that winter, Top Gun: Maverick
> was slated for a summer 2021 release and Dune was due to come out
> only a few months after that. Lots to be done.

Here's something you might not hear very often: I quite liked both of these movies. While Mulan missed the emotional beats of the 98 movie, the action scenes (beautifully shot by Elvis' Mandy Walker) were terrific. Don't remember much of the music, but it's interesting to note the similarity to Rachel Portman's The Joy Luck Club; before she found herself with child, Portman (as a female composer or on the strength of JLC or both) was approached the score the 98 film. We ended up with one of Goldsmith's last masterpieces, so it all worked out.

WW84 is certainly a mess, but I found it an entertaining one. Definitely agree on Zimmer's score. So vibrant and exciting. Where was this Hans hiding all this time? Loved the motifs for Maxwell Lord and the stone.

> Next time: “It all went to crap from there.” Pandemic era composing
> and recording begins, and this rundown covers 2021, 2022, and possibly
> 2023. It will end at some point, but perhaps not before its first
> birthday.

Maybe, I missed it, but I don't recall an entry for Wallfisch's The Invisible Man.