This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Top Gun: Maverick - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=122685
- 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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The Gilded Age Season 1 (2022) - ****
Harry Gregson-Williams & Rupert Gregson-Williams; add’l music by
Ho-Ling Tang, Ryder McNair, Forest Christenson & Steffen Thum

Catch-22 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119799

HBO’s series about old and new wealth in 1880s New York provided Harry and Rupert with their second opportunity to co-compose; the two would pitch themselves as a package when Harry realized that they were two-thirds of the three-person shortlist of potential series composers. The duo would be billed as the classy-sounding The Gregson-Williams Brothers in the credits instead of by their first names as they were on Catch-22, which Rupert joked “looked like Mr. and Mrs. Gregson-Williams [and] felt wrong.” Rupert felt this second team-up went “much smoother. He’s been much more willing to let me go my way - and me with his.” Though logistical challenges still remained - Harry working in L.A., Rupert in the U.K., the filmmakers in New York.

Harry would be amazed at how much had to be done over five months. “The Last Duel had an hour of music, and House of Gucci had less, but both took three or four months each. [Rupert’s] done more TV, so he was probably more prepared.” The two delivered a delightfully bustling main title track that was among the scoring highlights of the year, and their episodic music (largely orchestral, but complemented with more “unconventional” instruments) often provided an essential dose of energy. “This show’s about families that are on the up. This was a time in the country in the United States that’s exciting and there’s money being thrown everywhere. This needed confidence, something vibrant.” The album featured almost 80 minutes of music, though it did exclude one of the best pieces from the season finale: a piece that begins as source music at a ball, grows into actual scoring to wrap up the sequence, and ends with a flourish the next morning as a carriage door slams shut.


Polar Bear (2022) - ****
Harry Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Ho-Ling Tang & Ryder
McNair; orchestrated by Ladd McIntosh & Simeon Edward

Monkey Kingdom was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117475
Penguins was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119799

For this reunion with Alastair Fothergill and Disneynature, Harry would deliver a grander musical cousin of what he’d written for Penguins a few years earlier. “It’s not a big budget thing, but being Disney they’ll ship me over to Abbey Road [to record a] 70-piece orchestra, plus some odd instruments. They don’t skimp on that.” The album was required listening for anyone who loved the twinkly magic of his earlier Narnia scores.


The Sea Beast (2022) - ***½
Mark Mancina; additional music by Marlon Espino; orchestrated by
Larry Rench; add’l arrangements & conducting by Don Harper

This Netflix animated seafaring tale reunited Mark Mancina with Moana co-director Chris Williams. The composer would complement his monster adventure music with a healthy dose of Celtic idioms. If your tolerance for shanties is high then you’ll likely have a toe-tapping good time with those parts, though keep in mind the score ends up being fairly diverse. “It’s all over the place. At times it can be very melodic, very orchestral. At times it can be wacked out - guitar, a steam train pulse.” Expect an entertaining if somewhat minor work that doesn’t hit the consistent heights of other music Mark had made for the ocean - not just the aforementioned Moana but also the unsung gem Speed 2.


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2022 would be the ultimate exhibition of the two sides of Henry Jackman’s output. “If [I’ve just] spent all my time doing heavy production stuff, I’d probably start pining for using lush symphonic textures and whatnot.” One gig had the composer “shoving sounds through late ’70s analog equipment, overdriving and distorting them,” while his very next gig featured the most resplendent orchestral music he’d written in years.


The Gray Man (2022) - ***
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Alex Belcher, Evan Goldman, Alex Kovacs & Jack Dolman;
orchestrated by Stephen Coleman, Andrew Kinney & Michael James Lloyd; add’l orchestration by
Edward Trybek, Henri Wilkinson, Jonathan Beard & Nicholas Cazares; score technical assistants
Maverick Dugger & Joe Cho; conducted by Gavin Greenaway; Mart Bronowicka as Jackman’s assistant

The Winter Solider was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117220
Extraction was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=120127

Atypically for a soundtrack album, the score release for the music for this Russo brothers-directed Netflix action film would kick off with a lengthy suite, all thanks to Henry Jackman’s newfound status as a father. “Victoria and I had a child in March of 2021, and I didn’t have to start writing for The Gray Man until November or December. So I thought I’ll take time off and change diapers and be more present. But at the same time I have the studio in the house and [thought] I’ll fiddle away on some ideas to get ahead. I figured out this piano piece. Then I got this cool drum sound. Before I knew [it], I was spending forever on it. I kept saying, ‘When I get to seven minutes, I’ll wrap it up,’ and then a new idea would spring up. If I was remotely sane, I would have stopped a lot earlier and played a bit of it to Joe and Anthony. But I knew they would much rather you go for aggressive and unusual [than] something safe.”

That 17-minute suite would be a big hit with the filmmakers, possibly too big a hit as Henry got some pushback when he deviated too far from the suite when composing to picture. “If you’ve spent forever on something like that, by the time you’ve finished you’re basically over it. Therefore, there’s a danger that when you start getting into the cues you start adding new material, because you want to escape the music you’ve been hearing for so long. ‘What’s this? Why are you adding that?’” Many found the long album program (over an hour following the suite) to be a tad on the repetitive side as a result of this. Still, the work intrigues in places. It was obviously very much in Henry’s contemporary wheelhouse, but it was also laced with hints of the paranoid thriller and spy music of yesteryear - “Chemical Brothers meets one of those jazzy 70s scores.” It’s hard to dismiss the score as Winter Soldier-like noise when it has complex alternating meters, rapid-fire string runs, distorted sax solos, octatonic chords, and a bunch of other goodies. The movie got enough viewership for the streamer to justify a sequel and a spin-off, and hopefully those entries will give Henry an opportunity to expand on the more interesting ideas on display here.


Strange World (2022) - ****½
Henry Jackman; add'l by Halli Cauthery, Antonio Di Iorio, Sven Faulconer, Evan Goldman &
Alex Kovacs; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman, Geoff Lawson & Michael J. Lloyd; add’l orchestrations
by Jonathan Beard, Edward Trybek, Henri Wilkinson, Sean Barrett, Benjamin Hoff, Jacob Schrum &
Jamie Thierman; conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith & Anthony Parnther; choir conducted by Jasper Randall

Winnie the Pooh was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113009
Wreck-It Ralph was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113153
Big Hero 6 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117324

Henry’s music for this fantastical Disney animated movie - a reunion with director Don Hall - was (strange) worlds away from The Gray Man, both with its full-on embrace of the weird harmonies of classical composers like Alexander Scriabin that the composer has often expressed admiration for and with its resurrection of his Jumanji style of throwback adventure scoring. In addition to just being a genuinely exciting musical accompaniment, Jackman’s Strange World was also one of the finest recent examples of how to deftly evolve melodies over the life of a story. There’s a rousing march for the Clade family that doubles for the main character’s relationship with his long-lost adventurer father and also an initially playful idea for their Avalonia homeworld that doubles for his relationship with his own son, and the way Henry utilizes these ideas throughout the film helps to deepen the viewer’s connection to the movie’s characters and its themes about the challenges of fatherhood. “It's this huge epic unexplored world, but it's also a family story. You get moments of intimacy and emotion, and you also get epic reveals. So it has a bit of everything, and that got reflected in the music.” One has to wonder if the project had special resonance for Henry given his newfound status as a dad.

There are also plenty of delightful fantasy touches, including an alluring theme for the titular strange world (“unusual chords, extended colors”) and a gargantuan organ hit as the adventurers save the day - the score’s one obvious tip of the hat to the Bernard Herrmann music that graced the 1959 Journey to the Center of the Earth film. And Jackman would delight in having the opportunity to write a big swashbuckling summary of his ideas for the end credits. “If you think of Indiana Jones or Jurassic Park, they are unashamed of their narrative invasiveness. You're not supposed to be hiding in the corner. You would be arrogant and misguided to ignore the heritage from adventure films handed to us [by] such titan composers like John Williams and the late James Horner.” The composer’s sense of adventure would be confirmed by him wearing an Indiana Jones-style fedora at the movie’s premiere.


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For former Henry Jackman lieutenant Dominic Lewis, 2022 would be a busy follow-up to his magnificent work for the prior year’s The King’s Man. He’d write music for two very different holiday-themed films, one the supporting score for Apple’s musical film Spirited and the other a gleefully entertaining mash-up of the styles of Home Alone and Die Hard for the darkly comic Violent Night. He’d also deliver scores for the Disney+ Big Hero 6 follow-up Baymax! and the Netflix heist miniseries Kaleidoscope, with the latter getting released on New Year’s Day 2023. My favorite work of his from 2022 was something different though - and it was also the most bizarre major score of the year.


Bullet Train (2022) - ****½
Dominic Lewis; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman, Tommy Laurence, Andrew Kinney & Michael Lloyd;
conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith; score technical engineer Eduardo Diezl; additional Score Vocals Eri Sasaki;
‘Stayin’ Alive’ produced by Lewis & Dan Pinder; ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ produced by Lewis;
‘La Despedida’ written by Lewis & Luiz Augusto Buff; ‘Kill Me Pretty’ written & produced by Lewis

One might have thought before this point that Dominic was a well-established action composer because of all the films he’d gotten additional music credits on, but that couldn’t have been further from his actual experience. “When I did a lot of additional music for Hans and John Powell and Henry Jackman, they wouldn’t get me to do action scenes. I was always doing the emotional underscore. When I did The King’s Man with Matt Margeson, it was literally the opposite because Matt was always the action guy. Let’s swap it up and do something different. I’ll do a lot of the action stuff and Matt can do the emotional stuff. That was the film where I was like, ‘I actually can do this.’” But then it’s an open question if any prior score assignment would have been adequate preparation for the absolute madness that was required for the Brad Pitt-starring action film Bullet Train. “It's set in Japan, but it's this coming together of lots of different genres and cultural inspirations. I wanted the score to have this feeling of rummaging through your mate’s vinyl collection and you find this really cool record from the 1970s no one has ever heard before.”

That comment still doesn’t quite do justice to the insane combination of influences at play here which include - but are definitely not limited to - the anthem for the soccer club West Ham United (as one character is a fan), trip hop, 90s grunge, psychedelic rock, The Beatles, “70s based retro-style recording,” Ennio Morricone Spaghetti Western scoring, “60s superhero TV themes,” bird sounds, and a fusion of blues and traditional Japanese singing called enka. At times Lewis seems to go in the direction of some of the more hip, bonkers music Japanese film composer Naoki Sato sometimes writes. There’s even a large orchestra injected into the action climax. “It was just whatever came out of my head at that point. [Director David Leitch] said, ‘Swing for the fences, and I'll rein you in if it gets too much.’ It's not that thing that we normally do as film composers, which is that we're just felt and not really heard a lot of the time. Right from the beginning, the directive was ‘We want to hear music. Be bold. Be courageous. Go big, or go home.’”

The film also used several songs, though a nice benefit for Lewis was that he got to participate in writing several of them and rearranging others, including a Japanese take on Stayin’ Alive and multiple takes on the West Ham anthem I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles. “We did a really awesome 60s Vegas version [with legendary British pop singer] Engelbert Humperdinck, which was crazy. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if he was still alive when I suggested him.” Helping create coherence was how Lewis integrated little bits and pieces of the songs into parts of his score - a verse snippet here, a chorus melody there, a bass riff elsewhere. “Normally, the needle drop and score are separated but with this movie they are very much one idea. I can do those awesome twenty seconds and then I can go to a stripped-down version or the bridge. It’s still following the arc of the characters and the movie, yet it feels like a song.” Even an absurd piece of source music Lewis wrote for an in-film cartoon character was rearranged for a fight scene.

Scores like this often tilt on the edge of insanity, as if one more instrument or stylistic pivot would cause the whole thing to collapse under its own weight, and Lewis would in fact go too far at one point as Leitch rejected a “massive Puccini-esque version” of the Thomas the Tank Engine theme at the demo stage in part due to licensing concerns. And yet, despite the score’s myriad influences, even on its album it never quite feels too scattershot or all-over-the-place (something that tends to happen with those aforementioned Naoki Sato works). The fusion between the songs and score helped, as did Lewis’ use of musical elements that don’t tend to show up in Western films; there’s a freshness to a lot of the sonic combinations heard here. The unique rock energy pulsing through the score had something to do with its charms as well. “It's me playing most of those instruments. I felt like a one-man band. I think that's why it's got that raw vibe to it, that very specific attitude. I didn't want it to be perfect.”

And another reason it not only avoided being unlistenable but also turned out to be one of the best scores of 2022 was that it was too much damn fun. Nothing else in 2022 had an action scene where an assassin called The Hornet seems to be supported in part by a deranged adaptation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee. Or anything as beguilingly haunting as Lewis’ fate theme. Or any track as thrilling as the climactic Make or Brake which seems to throw every element into the mix including the composer’s own wailing vocals. With perhaps only the exception of the works of Ludwig Göransson, Lewis’ score was drenched in more outrageous style than any two or three other scores from 2022 put together. It was guaranteed to drive some people nuts, but for others it was the film music equivalent of the greatest acid trip you’ve ever been on, and taken together with The King’s Man it suggested Lewis (not even 40 yet!) will be a major compositional force in Hollywood for years to come.

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Next time: “Whatever panic I was feeling multiplied by a thousand at that point.”