This is part of a series.
- Here’s the prior post on Lorne’s 2023 scores - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=131393
- If you want the full set of links, click on my profile.
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As Lorne can’t score everything (yet), there were many opportunities for others in 2023. Jacob Shea, absent from major assignments since 2019’s Seven Worlds One Planet, scored Planet Earth III with Sara Barone, previously of Tom Holkenborg’s team, with Hans working with the British pop band Bastille on reworking their song Pompeii for the series (akin to how Radiohead’s Bloom was utilized for Blue Planet II). Their score was as functional as the music for Planet Earth II but less inspired than more recent Bleeding Fingers entries like Frozen Planet II, not to mention Shea’s own striking 20-minute concert piece The Arctic Suite, part of an album of works featuring violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing. Comparable in quality to that was the music for the second season of Prehistoric Planet, with Anže Rozman and Kara Talve adding new sounds (a subcontrabass sax, an instrument made from a triceratops skull, etc.) and rousing ensemble outbursts to their established orchestral/world music fusion style.
Dave Fleming wrote atmospheric material to complement Gustavo Santaolalla’s sparse string & guitar music for HBO’s television adaptation of the video game The Last of Us; neither composer’s contributions were designed to be as conducive to album listening as, say, Ramin Djawadi’s Game of Thrones music was, but with the series attaining significant critical acclaim and earning a second season I would still expect Fleming’s career to benefit from the high-profile opportunity. Not all such projects were as noteworthy, with the barely-seen baseball drama The Hill getting understated folksy music by Geoff Zanelli. Also not making much of a dent in pop culture was the Netflix miniseries Kaleidoscope even with it being one of the streamer’s most-watched titles in the first half of 2023, though that eight-episode heist show (designed to be watched in any order) did give Dominic Lewis the chance to craft a worthy follow-up to the wild genre mixture that was 2022’s Bullet Train, with the composer blending crime caper jazz, R&B, funk, and other elements for one of the most underrated scores of 2023.
Kaleidoscope - **** - Dominic Lewis; add’l music by Daniel Futcher
Prehistoric Planet Season 2 - **** - Anže Rozman and Kara Talve; title theme by Hans Zimmer & Andrew Christie; orchestrated by Gregory Jamrok, Abraham Libbos, Jaimee Jimin Park, Norvin Tu-Wang & Joe Zimmerman; conducted by Ben Foster; technical score assistant Enzo Hwang
The Arctic Suite - **** - Jacob Shea; performed by Eldbjørg Hemsing with the Arctic Philharmonic
Planet Earth III - *** - Jacob Shea & Sara Barone; title theme also by Hans Zimmer; add’l music by Laurentia Editha; technical score assistants William Bourassa-Bennett, Ruth Christina, Samuel Lam & Richard Wang
The Hill - *** - Geoff Zanelli; add’l music by Zak McNeil & Nicolas Salinardi; orchestrated by Oscar Senén; orchestrator assistant Nacho Cantalejo; conducted by Oleg Kondratenko; featured fiddle soloist Michael A. Levine
The Last of Us Season 1 - ** - Gustavo Santaolalla with add’l music by Jake Staley & Juan Luqui; Dave Fleming with add’l arrangements by Aldo Arechar & Forest Christenson
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For the Gregson-Williams brothers, 2023 was largely a year of continuing what they’d started - with one exception being Retribution, which got a mostly electronic score that was consistent with director Nimród Antal’s aesthetic (all the way back to his terrific debut film Kontroll twenty years earlier) but still came off like a largely mundane cousin of Harry’s earlier work for Tony Scott. Harry and Rupert reunited for another lively and spirited season of music for HBO’s series The Gilded Age. Rupert and his team worked on the sequel Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, delivering a score largely overlooked on the basis of its aquatic film’s failure at the box office despite it equaling the synths-n’-symphony delights of the composer’s first take on the superhero. Meanwhile, Harry and his team worked on the sequel Meg 2: The Trench, delivering a score largely overlooked on the basis of its aquatic film’s failure at the box office despite it equaling the functional action and occasionally fantastical sounds of the composer’s first take on Jason Statham fighting a shark.
The most notable gig either sibling worked on was Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, the long-awaited sequel to Aardman’s 2000 claymation which debuted on Netflix. Harry had continued to score many of the British studio’s films since, including their 2018 movie Early Man, and relished returning to what had been one of the high points of the early years of his career, though his notion of reteaming with John Powell was quickly ruled out as the other composer was busy with his own bird movie. The sequel was a different animal, with the first entry having a flavor of The Great Escape with chickens trying to break out of a farm and the new release having the chickens trying to break into a nugget factory to save one of their youngsters, and it was decided Harry should provide a “certain Mission: Impossible vibe.” Harry found it tricky at first, what with his original main theme being in 6/8 time and Lalo Schifrin’s famed spy tune being in 5/4 time, but he eventually cracked the code and added some “wacko guitars” and bongos for good measure. Despite Harry’s music never explicitly referencing the well-known theme, someone at Aardman or Netflix was cautious enough to have the end credits read “Mission: Impossible Theme written by Lalo Schifrin, composed and rearranged by Harry Gregson-Williams.”
There’s more than spy pastiche: new takes on nearly every legacy tune, boisterous climactic action, and a charming melody for the new youngster - “charting the growth of Molly, but orchestrated (picolos, ukulele) so it was in the same Chicken Run world.” And the score had a marvelous sense of humor, including a playful English classical sound accompanying a midfilm propaganda video and a later torture sequence where the balalaika theme for the baddie Mrs. Tweedy is morphed to sound like John Barry’s villainous space music from You Only Live Twice. Some score fans were disappointed, feeling the work lacked anything as inspired as Building the Crate from the first film, the toe-tapping track supposedly a pure Powell creation. But that didn’t offset the sequel score’s positives for others, never mind that Harry did improve on some of his earlier work’s few weaknesses; there’s more sophistication to the orchestration and recording compared to the MIDI sound that occasionally popped up in Chicken Run (and more so in Antz), and gone too are the 2000 film’s few moments of sad low voices which now play like a derivative holdover of the 90s Media Ventures style.
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget - **** - HGW; add’l music by Jonathan Keith & Halli Cauthery; orchestrated by Alastair King; conducted by HGW
The Gilded Age Season 2 - **** - HGW & RGW; add’l music by Ho-Ling Tang, Ryder McNair & Joshua Pacey; orchestrated by Alastair King
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom - ***½ - RGW; add’l music by Steffen Thum & Joshua Pacey; orchestrated by Alastair King, Paul Campbell, Thomas Bryla, Evan Rodgers & Alec Roberts; conducted by Alastair King & Jasper Randall
Meg 2: The Trench - ***½ - HGW; add’l music by Ho-Ling Tang & Ryder McNair; orchestrated by Alastair King, Paul Campbell, Evan Rodgers, Thomas Bryla & Alec Roberts
Retribution - *½ - HGW; add’l music by Ho-Ling Tang & Ryder McNair; add’l programming by Andy Page & Justin Burnett; strings conducted by George Strezov
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Dawn of the Nugget got good reviews and was one of the most-viewed titles on Netflix in its first week of release, but Harry found its success a bit bittersweet. Years earlier, the weekend a Dreamworks film came out in theaters meant a call from studio boss Jeffrey Katzenberg to tell you how much money the movie was on track to make and to congratulate you on a job well done. In 2023, no one from Netflix called.
But there were other vicarious joys to perhaps help compensate for that, since the saga of mentorship in this musical lineage was still going strong. Harry’s former assistant Stephanie Economou won the inaugural Grammy Award for best video game score in February 2023 for her work on the 2022 Assassin's Creed Valhalla expansion Dawn of Ragnarok, and she also scored the 2023 Dreamworks film Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken. Stephen Barton, another former assistant of his, got widespread praise for working on Star Trek: Picard and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Harry’s former coworker John Powell probably had a similar sense of pride; his assistant Batu Sener wrote music for a miniseries in his home country of Turkey about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, while Anthony Willis (who started supporting Powell on Rio 2) got attention for his capable scores for the horror film M3GAN and the aristocratic Saltburn, the latter making the 15-film shortlist for Best Score for the following year’s Oscars ceremony.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor - ****½ - Stephen Barton & Gordy Haab; orchestration and add’l music / programming by Marco Antonini, ET Chen, Max Lombardo, Samuel Joseph Smythe, Max McGuire, Emil and Nick Laviers, Blake Robinson & Andrew Karboski; conducted by Gavin Greenaway & Geoff Alexander
Star Trek: Picard Season 3 - ****½ - Stephen Barton & Frederik Wiedmann; add’l music by Henri Vartio; orchestration and add’l music by Max McGuire; orchestration by Geoff Stradling, Chad and Susie Seiter & Hyesu Wiedmann; conducted by Stephen Barton & Hyesu Wiedmann
M3GAN - ***½ - Anthony Willis; add’l music, arranging & programming by Brett Bailey; orchestrations by Jack McKenzie, Tommy Laurence, Samuel Read, Thomas Bryła, James McWilliam & Phil Knights (just do it!); conducted by Péter Illényi, Zoltan Padi & Bálint Sapszon
Saltburn - ***½ - Anthony Willis; orchestrated by Hugh Brunt, Brett Bailey & Giles Thornton; conducted by Hugh Brunt
Atatürk 1881-1919 Part 1 - ***½ - Batu Sener; add’l music by Markus Siegel; orchestrated by Shaun Dale Crawford; conducted by Péter Illényi; vocals Holly Sedillos
Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken - *** - Stephanie Economou; add’l music by Bryan Winslow; add’l arrangements by Christa Duggan; orchestrated by Jennifer Dirkes & Hal Rosenfeld
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Having already composed for chickens, vultures, penguins, macaws, and probably several other feathered friends, it was perhaps only a matter of time before John Powell was asked to compose for ducks too. “If it flies, get John Powell!” The mallard-centric family-friendly animated film Migration was the the first time he’d worked with the studio Illumination since 2012’s The Lorax, although it was amusingly came close to being scuttled after the director watched Don’t Worry Darling on a plane and got concerned he’d have that kind of music in his movie. “He had a point!” But Powell’s score was a return to the intersection of zany creativity (complete with a hilarious duck quack at one point) and heartfelt character themes that he’d become known for in the aughts, with some virtuoso string parts perhaps hinting at his childhood affection for Mendelssohn’s violin concerto. “After having controlled myself on [an earlier project], I didn’t for this one. I just let it rip.” Easy to overlook at first as it wasn’t in the same league as his inimitable trilogy of Dragon scores, the technically accomplished and undeniably catchy Migration still showed that Powell is a master of animation scoring - even 25 years after he co-wrote Antz.
That earlier project where Powell exercised restraint turned out to be the more notable of the two he delivered in 2023, owing largely to it earning the composer a surprise Emmy nomination as the film ended up on the Apple TV+ streaming service. Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, chronicling the famous actor’s career and struggles with Parkinson’s, represented a new frontier for the composer: documentaries. The admitted overwriter had never even thought of trying to write for the genre owing to most such films not demanding much more than an understated accompaniment, but he was pulled in after director Davis Guggenheim’s daughter told him in a car ride that if he wanted “joyful” music he should seek out the guy who scored How to Train Your Dragon. Also helping secure the assignment was that Powell got the call when he was working on Don’t Worry Darling with music supervisor Randy Poster, also attached to Still, who encouraged Powell to take the gig. “[Davis] was kind of nervous about a score that was dour. No sentimentality. We must never allow ourselves to be soppy about this. [Michael] isn’t. I was cast well. I do like rhythm and fun and dance. And this was a documentary about a man who never stopped moving.”
But finding the right tone for the film still took a lot of time - “five months to do 39 minutes, which is not tenable in my industry. Davis would say, ‘It seems like the film is not accepting this,’ like rejecting an organ. I was out of my depth for the first time in a long time. I’m used to being that overt composer. I had to be there without being over the top and bombastic and grand.” Once he figured out that having a string quartet as a foundational element of the score would open up a number of rhythmic possibilities, the music started to come together, the result calling to mind some of the material Powell was writing when he got started in Hollywood (think the scale of I Am Sam). A healthy sampling of quirky electronic and percussive noises also clearly cement this as a Powell work. Yet even within the stylistic constraints of documentary scoring, the composer’s gift for melody and momentum still cut through, especially when the piano comes to the forefront, making this score that can’t quite seem to sit Still a charming showcase for how the composer can write affecting material regardless of scale.
Migration - ****½ - John Powell; add’l music & arrangements by Batu Sener; add’l music by Peter Davison; orchestrated by Mark Graham, Rick Giovinazzo, Jon Kull & Tracie Turnbull; conducted by Gavin Greenaway
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie - **** - John Powell; add’l music & arrangements by Batu Sener; orchestrations by Tracie Turnbull
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Next time:
- “There’s that saying in Hollywood: never change your wedding team.”
- “Bond is always hovering over you.”
- “Pretty damn good.”
(Message edited on Wednesday, February 21, 2024, at 4:53 a.m.)
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