This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on House of the Dragon, Super-Pets, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=122822
- 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 Survivor (2022) - ***½
Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Heitor Pereira & Steven Doar; technical score engineer
Chuck Choi; technical assistants Emily Joseph, Omer Benyamin & Alex Lamy;
digital instrument design Mark Wherry; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant
TBTF discovery #97.
The first released film score of 2022 for Hans was a reunion with Rain Man director Barry Levinson; they hadn’t worked together since An Everlasting Piece in 2000. “Everything with Barry comes with the burden of thanking him for giving me a career.” Hans actually finished working on it way back in fall 2019 when the film’s title was Harry Haft, the name of the boxing Auschwitz concentration camp survivor whose story the movie dramatizes. The composer had tried to avoid being “sentimental” about several movies in this era (he made a similar comment about Widows), though in this case that attitude had unique relevance. “I come from a family of immigrants that left Germany. It’s an odd thing - if you’re the next generation, you still grow up with the whispers and the fear and ‘don’t tell the neighbors who you are.’ [I have] an incredibly complicated relationship with the country whose passport I’m holding. I’m fighting all the demons within me and going to speak them in my language, which is music.”
Aside from a few moments of Interstellar-like ticking, the mostly dour score mainly serves to resurrect many of Hans’ dramatic modes of the aughts. You’ll hear faint reminders of scores like The Last Samurai and The Da Vinci Code, though here rendered in a more somber fashion. Despite the personal connection Hans had to the concept, he avoided any overt references to the character’s Jewishness, instead supporting the film with a restrained battle between light and dark plus the occasional percussive clutter. “I didn’t treat Harry as a hero. I was going to write about extremes: hope, an amazing love theme, and the worst that humanity can do to each other.” Expect the featured parts for piano, cello, and especially vocals to provide elusive moments of melodic grace on the album, as Hans once again turned to a female voice to provide additional color in his score. “It’s the call of love that keeps him alive. He’s obsessed with this woman, and that is what gets him through it.”
The Son (2022) - *½
Hans Zimmer; produced with add’l music by David Fleming; orchestrated by Oscar Senén;
conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith; technical score engineer Chuck Choi; score technical
assistants Aldo Arechar & Alejandro Moros; digital instrument design Mark Wherry; digital
instrument preparation Taurees Habib & Raul Vega; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant
TBTF discovery #98.
Playwrights who become film directors tend not to want big scores, with many seeming to prefer more intimate accompaniments or even no original music at all; think the works of David Mamet, or more recently those of Kenneth Lonergan and Martin McDonagh. When Florian Zeller adapted his own play The Father in 2020, he had Ludovico Einaudi contribute what MMUK characterized as soothing background noise. So while it was somewhat of a shock that he brought someone of Hans’ stature onto his next film, it wasn’t terribly shocking what the end product turned out to be: extreme minimalism. As with The Survivor it’s clear Hans was trying to avoid sentimentalizing what is (to put it mildly) really rough subject matter. Obnoxiously, a bunch of the music was a clone of Time by way of 12 Years a Slave, though it’s hard to know how much of that to blame on the composer; he had grumbled in the past about requests to recycle his past hits. “I saw a film go from ‘It’s ok’ to being previewed and ‘It’s great’ by having a piece from Inception in it. No! The temp is the enemy of innovation. It killed the composer, because all creativity needed to stop. It’s a rip-off; it’s not going to have the same emotional thing to it.”
Score fans tend to loathe music like this - in part because it doesn’t make for an interesting album experience - but I think Hans gets a bit of a thrill out of gigs like The Son. They’re usually prestige pictures that he hasn’t always gotten a shot at (blockbuster palette cleansers, in a way). They seem a throwback to his days in the 80s and early 90s working hard for very little money on dramas and comedies. And they’re also musical puzzles that align with his mid-to-late career interest in taking “two, three or four notes and [making an] emotional structure”; rather than a test of how to create a memorable melody or sonic texture, it’s a narrow test of which notes to pick, what tempos are appropriate, what’s the maximum volume you can reach before the music is considered intrusive, and whatnot. “I’ve said yes to too many people - [but it’s] because they bring me interesting problems to solve.” He likely didn’t get paid much more for this than he did for 12 Years a Slave, and I can’t imagine any of this music ever showing up on his concert tours, but Hans probably has more money than God at this point. He can afford to take these jobs.
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Another year, another packed schedule for Lorne Balfe - far beyond the re-score of Top Gun: Maverick. He provided a short but sweet accompaniment for the romcom Ticket to Paradise. He wrote vastly more music for the conclusive seasons to HBO’s Pennyworth and His Dark Materials, with the latter containing some of the year’s finest television scoring. His giddy score for Jerry Bruckheimer’s family-friendly direct-to-streaming superhero movie Secret Headquarters showed that Lorne, already having taken over the kinds of gigs Jerry used to give to Hans, had taken the place of Trevor Rabin as well. There was even some silliness for the Rowan Atkinson miniseries Man vs. Bee which came off like a low-budget extension of Lorne’s Skylanders music. Two gigs are worth covering in more detail: one the chance to finally lead his own DC superhero score over a decade after his supporting roles on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight and the other with the master of Bayhem.
Ambulance (2022) - **½
Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Adam Price; add’l arrangements by Kevin Blumenfeld, Jon Aschalew & Steve Davis;
orchestrated by Adam Price, Danny Ryan & Joshua Pacey; conducted by Gavin Greenaway; cello Peter Gregson
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
6 Underground was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119853
As Lorne will tell you, scoring a Michael Bay movie isn’t like any other job. “He really has this unique style. When I saw the final film, [music editor] Alex [Gibson] was taking drum lines from one piece of music, the bass from another. The edit is moving so fast [and] Michael’s cutting very quickly. It’s better to have a piece of music to see if it works rather than writing [to picture].” Bay’s non-Transformers scores over the last two decades had often been rap rock-adjacent, though this time the director would ask for that approach served with a side of techno. “The trick is making an electronic score that doesn’t fall into a song format. You don’t want the audience to start tapping their foot, because then you’ve lost them.” Everything I just described is likely to make traditionalist score fans run for the hills, though the restrained noble brass and folksy string tones in the more subdued moments may redeem the work for some. “I spent more time on that than the action music. Where does it become too heroic? [There were] about 20 rewrites of that one theme. But you needed something the audience could grab on to.” Otherwise, like Harry Gregson-Williams’ score for Unstoppable, this was relentless music for a relentless film.
Black Adam (2022) - ****½
Lorne Balfe; add’l arrangements by Adam Price, Kevin Riepl, Peter G. Adams, Steve Davis
& Stuart Michael Thomas; orchestrated by Adam Price, Harry Brokensha, James Yan,
Jack McKenzie, Aaron King & Samuel Read; conducted by Pete Anthony & James Brett
Me in a Facebook comment: “I liked the theme suite when it came out a few weeks ago, but having it be 4 minutes long felt like overkill. Half that duration would’ve slapped. But The Rock liked it (or at least promoted it), so what do I know?”
Lorne in response: “Just keep listening to it … at least another 27 times and you will change your mind.”
He was right!!
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Lorne’s music for this superhero film about DC Comics’ Black Adam definitely played up the film’s fantastical and action elements, often with large orchestral forces. “We ended up with a humongous brass section: 12 French horns, 12 trombones, four tubas, four trumpets.” But it was also quite contemporary at times, vastly more so than Black Widow was. A recurring relentless bassline could’ve come straight out of a hip-hop song, and there were various other production elements scattered throughout the work. Lorne would say much of this came out of his reaction to the idea of scoring a Dwayne Johnson film and thinking a marching band feel was needed to match the actor’s swagger, and while that characteristic doesn’t show up in obvious ways (you won’t ever think you’re listening to Drumline), you can still hear what Lorne was going for. You’re scoring a movie with The Rock, who isn’t as much acting as being The Rock, and you should thus provide music befitting the audience’s perception of The Rock. In other words, it should sound as cool and badass as possible.
You might think Lorne was in a frame of mind similar to Hans’ on Broken Arrow in the mid-90s, a case where a composer faced with a somewhat absurd movie decided to pile more and more ridiculous stuff into the mix and was amazed and amused that no one really tried to stop him until it was too late. However, Lorne’s fusion of ancient and modern (not just that hip-hop line but also rock music, Latin choir, various beats and electronics, a melting pot of various regional instruments akin to what he’d assembled for The Wheel of Time, and even what sounds like processed children’s voices) was actually a huge hit with the guy who mattered, as Johnson would post a video on social media of him blasting Lorne’s theme suite during a workout. Lorne would later joke he “tried to get through about two sit-ups whilst listening to that, but was not very successful.” Expect to follow Johnson’s lead and bang your head in delight during several tracks, including the ass-kicking guitar-infused Prison Break.
Amid all that production and processing was Lorne’s main theme, which despite being omnipresent throughout the score is actually not terribly repetitive thanks to Lorne making it a multi-part identity (that bassline, a chugging string pattern, a few other motifs, various choral parts). “Originally, it was a much longer theme, and it overcomplicated things. When it becomes too patriotic and too over the top, the audience can be removed from it. So we narrowed it down to a kind of commercial pop structure.” Part of the fun of the score, even with its exhausting album length, was how Lorne bounced each theme part between various sections of the ensemble and sometimes layered two or three of them on top of each other. That Lorne did the the same thing for his suite of ideas for the Justice Society of America characters first trying to stop Black Adam and then later working with him - and had both sets of ideas engage in musical combat with each other as well as with the villain material - made it one of the most remarkably dense thematic juggling acts of the year.
The collision of musical elements in Black Adam wasn’t for everyone. Words like overproduced and compressed were thrown around in some corners of the internet, and I even saw one commenter nonsensically say it belonged in a car commercial (because nothing moves vehicles quite like Latin lyrics, I suppose). But if film music is going to endure and stay relevant as an art form, then it is going to have to continue to find ways to leverage new musical influences in dramatically potent ways - not in every film, but certainly in ones like this. Scoring for visual media is less an innovative medium than a fast follower; this musical genre that started with inspirations from classical music, opera, and show tunes has since pulled in things like folk music, jazz, blues, and rock 'n roll, to the point that no one is surprised when these elements appear these days. Incorporating aspects from hip-hop and other contemporary genres into the traditions of multi-thematic, pseudo-symphonic scoring is the next frontier (this score is a cousin of Ludwig Göransson’s Black Panther in this regard), and also one of the many legacies that - for better or worse, but usually for the better - Hans has left modern film scoring with. I can’t wait to see where Lorne and others go next.
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Next time: Too Big To Fail era coverage will wrap with 2013-2022 rankings, and will be followed by a handful of composer score rankings across all eras (anyone with 30+ scores heard) and a mad attempt at a top 50 across all eras.
I thought about going into 2023 works, but there are only a handful out there from this musical lineage at this point. so it makes sense to pause until there are more of them - and probably at least until Dune: Part Two (DOON TOO?) comes out.
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