This is part of a series.
- Here’s the prior post on various 2024 scores - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=139124
- If you want the full set of links, click on my profile.
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I called 2023 “another year for Lorne Balfe, another big batch of projects” - and the same was true of 2024. In addition to once again serving as music director of The Game Awards and debuting Top Gun: Maverick in concert, seventeen different scores had him involved in some capacity. One was for Gran Turismo director Neil Blomkamp’s game Off the Grid which went into early access in fall 2024; Lorne’s 15-minute EP of electronic action likely hinted at more music to come in 2025. Five were pure producer credits supporting assistant Taran Mitchell’s bombast on a budget for Alexander: The Making of a God (stirring memories of Lorne’s similarly derivative but entertaining sound for 2011’s Assassin’s Creed: Revelations), assistant Steffen Thum’s abrasive noise for Stockholm Bloodbath, Thum’s moody space travel paranoia amplification for Slingshot, the soothing mystery atmospheres and mundane sound design assistants Adam Price and Jeremy Earnest did for the Rosemary’s Baby prequel Apartment 7A (Lorne’s first horror score), and Amelia Warner’s buoyant, triumphant music for Jerry Bruckheimer’s distance swimming drama Young Woman and the Sea, with Warner’s assignment coming after Lorne recommended her on the basis of her stylish contribution to the 2018 biopic Mary Shelley.
Music for the Chinese WWII codebreaking drama Decoded - balancing pleasant if anonymous material with ear-splitting noise - was co-composed with assistant Kevin Riepl, the score coming a year after Lorne and his team dabbled with a Chinese ping pong film. Seven additional composers helped the music for the fourth Bad Boys film blend a dutiful extension of 1990s Media Ventures with the electronica of Ambulance, with the most surprising aspect of that action score being the emotional takes on Mark Mancina’s franchise theme in something like the style of Japanese film composer Naoki Sato (an aspect more present in the movie than it is on the score album). The functional nature of the suspense music for Netflix’s airport blackmail thriller Carry-On was understandable given how most thrillers are scored like that these days but perhaps still a minor disappointment considering the thematic swagger and rhythmic creativity on display in Black Adam, Lorne’s prior project for director Jaume Collet-Serra. Scores for a James Carville documentary, a second season of the British crime drama Sherwood, Michael Bay’s Discovery true crime series, and the all-access boxing series Stable were almost assuredly shepherded by Lorne’s assistants as well.
No credits were more puzzling than those for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Onetime Hans assistant Trevor Morris had scored the last entry in the video game franchise in 2014, but for this entry Lorne and nine of his assistants were mentioned along with Hans Zimmer and his assistants Steve Mazzaro and Steven Doar. The game had a troubled development process, beginning in 2015, rebooting in 2018, and spanning multiple waves of resignations and layoffs at BioWare, thus the most likely scenario is that Hans’ crew was on at the start and Lorne’s crew was brought in after the game had been extensively reworked years later. There’s no evidence of this being a Top Gun: Maverick-style replacement score scenario, though it can’t be wholly ruled out considering the music on album sounds like leftovers from Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, His Dark Materials, and The Wheel of Time and bears little trace of Hans (not to mention that the score was recorded in Nashville, London, and Vienna). Compounding the confusion is that the German neo-Medieval band Corvus Corax was also hired in 2020 to “completely reinterpret the orchestral soundtrack with their own instruments,” though no tracks on the album are specifically credited to them.
Why director Matthew Vaughn moved away from Henry Jackman and his team after over a decade of collaborations was never made clear, but regardless Lorne was contacted by him all the way back in the second half of 2020, originally for another project he couldn’t do but eventually turning into a job scoring the director’s spy novelist action-comedy Argylle as well as other Vaughn-produced films (2021’s Silent Night and 2023’s Tetris and Ghosted). Lorne had to navigate around a bunch of disco tunes dropped throughout the film, and a Beatles song that producer Giles Martin (Beatles producer George Martin’s son and a friend of Vaughn’s) had been tinkering with became part of the film as a kind of memory-triggering device for the protagonist, the choice to use it coming a year and a half before the song was even released to the public in November 2023. Lorne still crafted some fun passages and a rather compelling action theme, the latter co-written with Vaughn who, unlike some other directors Lorne had worked with, “loves themes.” An orchestral arrangement of the new Beatles tune was entertaining as well. But, as with the movie's feline visual effects, something felt a bit askew about the end product.
The film seemed to have been an enormous challenge to nail the tone of, not only because it hops genres and twists its plot frequently but also because the filmmakers cycled through umpteen songs and requested a number of score rewrites (bolstered by “a lot of voices” opining), which may very well explain why ten different assistants were credited with additional music or arrangements on a score that ended up at only a bit over an hour (at least on its album). That’s assuming a tone was picked at all, as the sound mix veered from emphasizing the large orchestra they had at their disposal to something more like the gleefully chintzy music for Rumble or the synthetic sheen that used to permeate Trevor Rabin’s blockbuster scores. And the villainous Division theme sounded suspiciously close to one of the many tunes Lorne created for the prior year’s Netflix miniseries Life on Our Planet, though only deep cut score nerds likely picked up on that. Lorne said at the time of the film’s release that he had more music on the way for several unrevealed Vaughn products, though with the very expensive Argylle turning into one of the biggest box office bombs of all time who knows how many of those will come to fruition.
Lorne fared better with his continued collaboration with Jerry Bruckheimer. Two years earlier he’d salvaged the score for Jerry’s Top Gun: Maverick, and now he got another go at repurposing a famed Harold Faltermeyer tune with the decades-in-development Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. There’s no indication Harold was invited back for this sequel, but given his experiences with Top Gun: Maverick it would have been surprising if that offer had been extended - and with Harold skipping that 2022 movie’s premiere and grumbling through a German language interview about the experience, it would have been truly shocking if he’d said yes. Some of the light-on-its-feet nature of the original 1984 film’s score was lost in translation as Lorne and his big team occasionally indulged in modern action tropes and injected aspects of hip-hop and trap music. But the fealty to the core themes, including new variations on the classic Axel F ideas and Harold’s hard-hitting villain material from Beverly Hills Cop II, was rather impressive (“the DNA comes from Harold - he wrote one of the most iconic themes ever”), as was the legacy “synth orchestra” brought out of retirement. And Lorne’s new themes fit the concept like a glove, nowhere better than the rowdy 80s throwback album arrangement Axel’s Back with a prominent part for muscled saxophonist Tim Cappello. “There’s no one else that I’ve worked with that can play the instrument like Capello does. It’s animalistic. Tim represents everything I remember from [the 80s].”
If Axel F was an effort to inject something modern into a legacy idea, Lorne’s music for the new Wallace & Gromit film represented a resistance to that. “There’s lots of genres in it, nods to old Hitchcock films, and it doesn't work if you're trying to be perfect and contemporary.” A giddy orchestral romp that was easily the most quintessentially English-sounding thing Lorne had ever had a hand in, the music of Vengeance Most Fowl was a toe-tapping delight. Once again Lorne had another iconic tune to play around with, this time the one written by composer Julian Nott for the original three animated short films. Astute listeners will rightly point out that almost 20 years earlier, not too long after he’d shown up at Media Ventures and become Rupert Gregson-Williams’ assistant, Lorne was part of the team called in late in the game to inject the Dreamworks house style of music into what’d already been written by Nott for The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Now Lorne was not only the lead composer but was co-scoring with Nott rather than replacing him, with Nott saying he handled more of the thematic development while Lorne and team handled detailed execution. The quality of the score also likely meant that Lorne’s young Indian-American team member Jeremy Earnest, a new arrival to the crew in the past year who got one of those additional music/produced by credits that suggested he had an outsized assistant role on Vengeance Most Fowl, will be someone to keep an eye on in the near future.
Young Woman and the Sea - ****½ - Amelia Warner; add’l music & arranging by Sam Thompson; co-produced
by Lorne Balfe; orchestrated by Anthony Weeden; add’l orchestrators Sam Jones, Jon Sims & Anna Stokes;
conducted by Robert Ziegler; electric cello Peter Gregson; feat. cello Ashok Klouda; feat. viola Clifton Harrison
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl - **** - Lorne Balfe & Julian Nott; co-produced
with additional music by Jeremy Earnest; add’l arrangements by Brandon Campbell, Yaron
Eigenstein & Stuart Michael Thomas; add’l arrangements & technical assistance by Ethan
Gillespie; orchestrated by Adam Price, Nicolò Braghiroli & Jack McKenzie; orchestra conducted by
James Brett & Péter Illényi; choir conducted by Ben Parry; Gnome Working Song lyrics by Mark Burton
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F - **** - Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Brandon Campbell, add’l arrangements by
Max Aruj & Stuart Michael Thomas; orchestrated by Jeremy Earnest & Yaron Eigenstein; other orchestration and
arranging by Daniel Alm & Steven Davis; conducted by Lorne Balfe; synth programming by Lorne Balfe & Edward
Gamper; add’l arrangements & technical assistance by Ethan Gillespie; technical assistant W.F. Smith Leithart;
song adaptations produced by Stuart Price; tenor saxophone by Tim Cappello
Argylle - ***½ - Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Peter G. Adams, Steve Davis, Jeremy Earnest, Dieter Hartmann,
Luigi Jassen, Joshua Pacey, Adam Price, Kevin Riepl & Stuart Michael Thomas; orchestrated by Harry Brokensha,
Ben Morales-Frost, Aaron King, Samuel Read, Nicolo Braghiroli & Gabriel Chernick; conducted by James Brett, Gavin
Greenaway, Ben Foster & Allan Wilson; add’l arrangements and technical assistance by Ethan Gillespie;
Electric Energy by Gary Barlow, Stuart Price, Matthew Vaughn & Lorne Balfe and performed by Ariana DeBose,
Boy George & Nile Rodgers; Get Up and Start Again by Gary Barlow, Matthew Vaughn, Lorne Balfe, Giles Martin
and performed by Ariana DeBose; The Beatles’ Now and Then covered by Lorne Balfe & Adam Price;
score produced by Lorne Balfe & Jack Dolman; original songs produced by Giles Martin & Stuart Price
Alexander: The Making of a God - *** - Taran Mitchell; add'l music by Joseph Stevenson, add’l
arrangements by Bernard Duc, Michael Frankenberger & Ole Wiedekamm; produced by Lorne Balfe
Bad Boys: Ride or Die - **½ - Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Max Aruj, Brandon Campbell,
Jeremy Earnest, Ethan Gillespie, Kevin Riepl, Stuart Michael Thomas & Karl Zine;
orchestrated by Jeremy Earnest & Yaron Eichenstein; conducted by Peter Rotter
Apartment 7A - **½ - Adam Price & Jeremy Earnest; produced by
Lorne Balfe; orchestrated by Nicolò Braghiroli; featured vocalist Laura Jackman;
technical assistant Ethan Gillespie; composer’s assistant Nir Perlman
Sherwood Season 2 - **½ - Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Taran Mitchell;
add’l arrangements by Michael Frankenberger & Ole Wiedekamm
Dragon Age: The Veilguard - **½ - Hans Zimmer with add'l music by Steve Mazzaro & add’l
arrangements by Steven Doar; Lorne Balfe with add'l music by Steffen Thum & Jon Ong and add’l
arrangements by Ace Vaptsarov, Alfie Godfrey, Filip Olejka, Kiley Norton, Max Aruj, Michael Bitton &
Ole Wiedekamm; add'l arrangements by Corvus Corax; produced by Lorne Balfe & Steve Schnur;
orchestrated by Òscar Senén & Rob Adams; add’l orchestration by Tyler Williams; Nashville orchestrator /
conductor David Shipps; London conductor Matt Dunkley; Vienna conductor Gottried Rabl; cello Tina Guo
Decoded - **½ - Lorne Balfe & Kevin Riepl; Code song also by
Tang Tian (Chinese version) and Charles Zhou & Faouzia Ouihya (English version)
Slingshot - **½ - Steffen Thum; orchestrated by Bence Farkas;
conducted by Péter Illényi; produced by Lorne Balfe
Off the Grid - ** - Lorne Balfe; other contributors not identified
Carry-On - ** - Lorne Balfe; add’l arrangements by Brandon Campbell, Jeremy Earnest &
Peter G. Adams; orchestrated by Adam Price; conducted by Youki Yamamoto; add’l arrangements &
technical assistance Ethan Gillespie; synth programming Lorne Balfe, Karl Zine & Robert Dudzic
Stockholm Bloodbath - ** - Steffen Thum; produced by Lorne Balfe
Born Evil: The Serial Killer and the Savior - no album release - produced by Lorne Balfe;
other contributors not identified
Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid - no album release - produced by Lorne Balfe;
add’l music by Jeremy Earnest, Yaron Eigenstein, Ethan Gillespie & Taran Mitchell
Stable - no album release - theme by Lorne Balfe; produced by Michael Frankenberger;
add’l arrangements by Bernard Duc, Joseph Stevenson & Nikhil Koparkar
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Next time:
- “That level of acting, you don’t have to push hard and help convince anyone that they're watching great performances.”
- “It was kind of a mess.”
- “Make sure that everybody knew that we were in this world.”
(Message edited on Friday, February 7, 2025, at 5:40 a.m.)
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