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| Bates |
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| Goldenthal |
300: (Tyler Bates) If you accept all the more
highly publicized faults of the 2007 film
300, including but
certainly not limited to glorified gore, questionable history, poor
character development, desaturation of colors, insufferable pacing, and
stolen music, then you finally get to the real issue of the production:
false abdominal muscles. That's right, fake abs! The best debates about
300 involve whether the ridiculously chiseled muscles you see in
the place of the normal spare tires on the finely exhibited bodies in
the cast were (a.) painted on with a bronzing agent, (b.) enhanced with
CGI in post-production, (c.) faked completely with plastic front pieces,
or (d.) some combination of all of the above to suit the needs of the
individual actors and whether they're closer to the blue screen than the
camera. The answer is mostly (a.), though credit the production with
finding a Scotsman in great shape to play, naturally, King Leonidas of
the Spartans. Sean Connery could have starred in
300 at his age,
too, and the production would have assigned him the appropriate look of
rock hard abs. In all reality, the appeal of
300 exists in its
entire visual package, though the sculpted, minimally clothed bodies
caused the film to be embraced by a wide range of sexual preferences and
fetishes that included crowds of mesmerized homosexual men. Rest assured
that
300 is an equal opportunity production, though, balancing
female nudity along with bare male asses in prominent placements. The
sexuality of the film in general is as striking as any of its other
elements, all of which owing some measure of success to a surprisingly
faithful adaptation of the graphic novel by Frank Miller. Director Zack
Snyder so thoroughly captures the essence of Miller's illustrated
imagination that
300 did indeed achieve the desired effect of
translating that specific imagery to screen. The blue-screen shooting of
300 allowed for every scene to be layered with backgrounds of
various distances that very specifically imitate each illustration of
the comic. Realism wasn't the intention here, and the viewer is never in
doubt that he or she is watching a moving comic rather than a
traditional film. To this end, Snyder succeeds even better than the
adaptation of Miller's
Sin City, catapulting the latter film to
its surprising $200+ million earnings at the box office.
The plot of
300 is really not that important. The
Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. is the focus, but the confrontation
between King Leonidas' 300 Spartans and King Xerxes' significantly
larger Persian force (as well as the introduction of Xerxes' downfall at
the Battle of Plataea the following year) only serves the basic purpose
of providing a minimal level of compelling action for the rendering of
the characters. Those characters are only as three-dimensional as Snyder
allows them to be, glazing over their humanity with the same
copper-toned shades (with the production's distinctive flashes of red,
of course) as the water and skies in each scene. The pacing of the film
is incredibly slow, intentionally pausing on specific shots as to
suggest another frame in the novel. During the time the actual ultimatum
is delivered to Leonidas at the end, an average viewing couple could
have wildly satisfying sexual intercourse in three rooms of the house
and fix a couple of sandwiches in the time it takes for the
Scotsman's character to toss aside his armor, drop to his knees, and
contemplate the glorious nature of his impending death. Seeing fake
blood dripping from actors' mouths has never been so tedious. The same
could be said about David Wenham's obnoxiously interfering narration.
The role of Tyler Bates' music in this entire equation was not of
particular interest either, at least at the time of the film's debut.
The score was just another culmination of ideas already tested in
similar epics and fantasy films of a decade past. When Bates was nailed
first by the public and then by the lawyers for plagiarism in the work,
though, his music for
300 then entered the realm of infamy. In
retrospect, all anybody familiar with film music recalls about
300 is precisely the shameful copying and pasting that was
revealed in Bates' writing, but it's also important to remember that
this score served the dumb masses just as well as Steve Jablonsy's music
for the
Transformers films. There is an audience for predictably
recycled and repackaged crossover music such as this, as evidenced by
the fact that the
300 album exploded to 40,000 unit sales with no
trouble at all and Warner Brothers over-saturated the market with no
less than three versions of CD soundtracks for the film. The fact that
the studio's music arm saw fit to treat
300 with "special" and
"collector" editions on album indicates how highly they sought to
maximize their profits from this crowd pleaser.
There are two ways to look at Bates' efforts for
300: with the plagiarism angle and without. It's not much
different from looking at Jablonsky's
Transformers music from the
disparate intellectual and mainstream angles. For mainstream readers and
listeners not concerned with the recycling issues,
300 will sound
as stylishly enticing as the film's visuals. Bates treats the slow
motion photography with a sense of melodramatic self-importance that
meets or exceeds their expectations with satisfyingly familiar shades of
orchestral, electronic, and vocal elements. The harmonious parts are
often simple and unclouded by potentially compromising counterpoint. An
ensemble of London orchestral performers is joined by vocalist Azam Ali,
with whom Bates had collaborated on the artist's solo works. Several
specialty instruments are employed, though most exist in the lowest
registers of the percussion section, not a surprising move given the
typical intent on accompanying masculine movies with overpowering bass
in their music. The use of Taiko drums is especially prominent, though
while a few other ethnically diverse elements are incorporated, Bates
largely foregoes the Mychael Danna route (an unfair comparison, granted)
and instead opts for a fair amount of electronic manipulation of more
frequently heard symphonic instruments. Also making a substantial impact
are the rock sounds, embodied by driving electric guitar and an
intimidating, alienating industrial metal tone that largely defines the
score. The "coolness" factor contributed by the guitars closes the film
in "To Victory," the accompaniment for the comic-like end credits
sequence, while the industrial effect is inseparable from most of the
action and suspense sequences in the film. Why Bates chose to employ
this harsh metal edge into
300 rather than use more creative
traditional instruments in dissonant patterns to create a more
appropriate sound for the film is obvious, though given his tendency to
employ the same techniques in
The Day the Earth Stood Still and
Watchmen, perhaps this sound represents the limits of his
abilities. When he uses these textures to define a mythical element as
in "The Wolf," the result is tiring, reminding of the kind of mundane
material that Paul Haslinger pumps out for films of
Underworld
quality. At times, Bates almost employs guitars like a wild duduk, and
as a supplemental performance aspect, this would have been fine. Leading
a cue like "No Mercy," however, it's simply noise.
Bates does work two recurring themes of importance into
the score. The first is a choral chant with clanging and banging
percussion meant to represent the power and bravery of Leonidas and his
group, heard clearly in "Returns a King" and with greater depth in "Come
and Get Them." The timpani-pounding, deliberate exclamations by male
chorus in these cues are certainly rousing, though their tone is so over
the top that even Conan the King couldn't live up to this amount of
pomp. The second theme conveyed by Bates is one for the overwrought love
story in
300, accompanying Lena Headey's performance of the Queen
and the
Gladiator-like scenes of dreamy and ethereal wheat fields
involving her. This theme offers a combination of Ali's exotic
vocalizations, solo cello, and various flutes, all expressing fantastic
beauty in "Goodbye My Love" and "Message for the Queen." Utilizing
wailing female vocals of an extremely melancholy tone is a tried and
tested cliche in Hollywood, but it seems to, once again, please the
crowds. The freaky-looking Xerxes in
300 is given a musical voice
by electric guitar, oddly enough, presented in a combination of slapping
metal percussion loops, wildly tearing guitars at random pitch, and
vaguely Middle-Eastern progressions on strings; his representations in
"The Hot Gates" and "Xerxes' Tent" are damn near intolerable. There's a
big difference between the sound of a foreign menace and the sound of
unrelenting metal trash that uses volume to frighten rather than
structure. The entirety of the
300 score suffers from the same
terrible affliction. George Carlin once termed it "frothing at the
crotch," but in film music terms, it's "frothing at the manipulator." In
other words, Bates handles every scene on a basic emotional level rather
than an intellectual one, a choice (or necessity caused by lack of
talent, his detractors would say) that forces his score for
300
to be held together by its overbearing simplicity rather than any deep
sense of thought. The themes aren't developed well enough to carry the
narrative and most of the instrumentation is too manipulated in tone or
pitch to serve this purpose either. Thus, listeners are left with a few
individual highlights and a general sense of metal mayhem when departing
this listening experience. The score is, like so many of those that come
from the clones of Hans Zimmer's operation, so engrossed in the
masculine editing of its parts that all sense of nuance is lost. Don't
seek interesting textures outside of the dissonant metal-grinding and
guitar-wailing that dominates the treble region.
In sum, without any consideration of Bates' more serious
transgressions in the assembly of
300, the resulting music is a
two-star effort. It panders to the lowest common denominator of
blockbuster action music for topics set in times long past. Bates has
claimed that the lack of overarching structural coherence in a thematic
sense was intentional, stating, "To be honest with you that's not really
the direction I like to go with scoring so much. When somebody comes on
the screen and you hear their theme all the time, it's just not my
sensibility." He even admits that "What I wanted to do was create
certain motifs that supported a mindset, or an emotion, or a
circumstance that we're experiencing dramatically for the film." To that
end, he succeeded to a basic degree. The problem for the young composer
arose when it came to balance his own research with the temp track that
was obviously used in various places throughout the picture. The
composer maintains (correctly, given the nature of the graphic
translation of the topic) that a direct application of traditional
sounds would not have functioned in
300, though he did supposedly
look backwards for some inspiration. "I definitely researched a lot of
choral work and it's very difficult to find any reference to anything
before the 5th Century," Bates continues. "I knew that I wanted voice to
be a part of it, but it's just my nature to probably always do something
that is a hybrid of sorts." Somewhere along the line, however, he got
thoroughly tripped up by the temp track placed into the film, thus
transitioning this review into its second (and necessary) half. Temp
tracks have been around since the earliest days of cinema. Before there
were early film scores to play to the photography of new productions,
directors would play classical music on phonographs in synch to the
projected rough edits, giving the studio composer some insight into what
the director wanted. This process has evolved to a level that is so
grotesque that it has restricted many composers from the liberty of
producing what could be fine film scores if not for filmmakers'
insistence on mimicry. There's something actually quite satisfying when
a director simply goes ahead and spares the composer the headache of
imitating a temp track by simply licensing the music from a previous
film for use in the new one. Accomplished composers like Jerry Goldsmith
would roll their eyes at the temp track and simply take the assignment
into the direction of their choice, usually resulting in superior
results. Others simply do their job, earn their pay, and move on.
When a composer replaces his or her own creativity with
the editing skills of a temp track arranger, a piece of their soul, as
the saying goes, is indeed lost to the studio. A man like John Debney
has made a career out of such endeavors. Music editors heeding the whims
of filmmakers have become an all too common and unfortunate occurrence
in today's society, as pointless and irritating an occupation as animal
talkers who double as pet psychologists and professional organizers who
live out of suitcases and charge $90 per hour. Cleansing the soul in such
manners has its price, however, and for Bates, his debacle over
300 has brought him financial fortunes but also significant
ridicule that will likely kill any chance of widespread respect for his
music in the future. Plagiarism happens in film music, and in the last
thirty years, no composer has stirred discussions about this fact more
than James Horner. The difference between Horner and Bates, however, is
that Horner has proven his ability to write masterful music without the
need for inspiration from the past. Bates' music for mainstream films in
the 2000's outside of
300 has amounted to a steamy pile of sonic
feces, artistically underachieving at every turn despite satisfying a
select few in the industry. A tremendous amount of disdain has rained
down upon him for his transgressions involving
300, and as much
as you pity any composer who is trying to earn a paycheck by writing the
right music for the wrong expectations, there is no excuse for his
plagiarism in this instance. In the few years prior to
300, most
of the plagiarism-related talk in the film music industry revolved
around the challenges against Zimmer's
Gladiator, for which the
composer had been sued in court. Bates' problems in
300 make
Gladiator look inconsequential, leading to the unprecedented move
by Warner Brothers to acknowledge very publicly that Bates' music is not
entirely original. After the wrangling of lawyers, the studio added an
asterisk to Bates' name in the movie poster (and DVD) credit section,
followed by "*Derived in Part from Preexisting Compositions Not Authored
by Tyler Bates." Furthermore, the studio issued a statement in August of
2007 that stated, "A number of the music cues for the score of
300 were, without our knowledge or participation, derived from
music composed by Academy Award winning composer Elliot Goldenthal for
the motion picture
Titus. Warner Bros. Pictures has great respect
for Elliot, our longtime collaborator, and is pleased to have amicably
resolved this matter."
Collectors of Elliot Goldenthal's music had already
picked up on the clear plagiarism long before. The Leonidas/Spartan
theme (in "Returns a King" and "Come and Get Them") is clearly identical
to "Victorius Titus" in
Titus, not only in the progression of the
vocalized theme, but even in the style of the slapped and pounded
percussion in that cue. This is truly film score plagiarism at is most
inexcusable. Why couldn't Bates have done what most of his peers have
accomplished and made enough subtle changes to stay legal? Less obvious
but still definitely connected are Bates' "Remember Us" and Goldenthal's
"Finale," and similar fragmented hints exist elsewhere in the score.
These similarities are well documented because of Goldenthal collectors'
great affinity and respect for
Titus, but the problems don't end
there. Bates also managed to anger another entire segment of the
population: Macedonians! As early as April of 2007, it had been revealed
by Macedonian reporters that the lovely theme for the Queen in
300 was actually derived in full from the regional folk song
"Zajdi, Zajdi Jasno Sonce" (Set, Set Bright Sun), a piece that
traditionally defines Macedonia apart from the larger Yugoslavia. While
the song was credited in arthouse productions like
Powder Keg and
Savior, no such acknowledgement was made in
300, and Bates
was even forced to address these reports specifically with the
rebutment, "I can't say there is a specific source of inspiration for
the cue." Additionally, the application of Ali's vocals in these cues
and elsewhere, including the wavering of pitch one note above or below
key, is highly reminiscent of Gabriel Yared's rejected score for
Troy. Film music collectors have pointed out several other
connections to previous scores, all of which damning the sum of Bates'
work for
300. These include Horner's replacement work for
Troy, Vangelis'
Alexander, a few Zimmer scores outside of
Gladiator (led by
Black Hawk Down), and, as previously
mentioned, a handful of Haslinger scores in the industrial segments. It
is perhaps fitting that Christopher Lennertz conjured an extremely
effective parody score of
300 for
Meet the Spartans that
quite literally made explicit fun out of all of these references. It
shouldn't be surprising that Lennertz's take on the same ideas is
infinitely superior in terms of its structural coherence and
instrumental intellect, too.
Meet the Spartans, in playing the
topic seriously (as any good parody score should), is therefore a much
more entertaining listening experience out of context.
The most inexcusable aspect of Bates' handling of
300 is that it was completely unavoidable. There were many ways
to give the film a unique aural texture to match its striking visuals.
Much was said about the different pacing of various elements in the
blue-screen and special effects layers of the film's final visual mix.
To coincide with characters in the foreground moving in slow motion and
surrounding action whizzing by at faster than normal speeds, Bates could
have written two layers of music at equally striking differences in pace
and layered them like Goldsmith did in
The 13th Warrior and Ennio
Morricone accomplished in
The Mission. Such intelligent
juxtaposition of tempo could have offered
300 the kind of
intellectually satisfying sense of originality without sacrificing the
hard-nosed industrial and masculine tone of the music. Ironically, the
mix of the music in the film isn't always that spectacular anyway, with
much of the final battle sequence, from "Xerxes' Final Offer" to
"Glory," buried in the sound effects edits. The score experienced deluxe
treatment from Warner Brothers before the Goldenthal issue thankfully
put an end to the parade of
300 CD products pushed at fans with
too much expendable income. A regular CD and a "special edition" were
released together in March of 2007, the latter featuring the same music
but providing lifeless fans with a 16-page booklet and three trading
cards. Just days before Warner's admission of the plagiarism, its music
branch dropped a "collector's edition" into stores, a product with a
42-page case-bound book complete with the "Blood Spatter" art debossed
and foil-stamped on the cover. Unfortunately, in between the Corniche
Silk end sheets (seriously, do people really care about this nonsense?),
there are only two pages devoted to notes about the score, leaving the
rest for photography from the film that will probably be used by some
men for masturbatory purposes. Three additional original score tracks
and a nasty remix of "To Victory" await your $40+ for a new copy of this
product, and none of these cues adds anything significant to the other
25 tracks of previously available music (though "First Battle Push" is a
somewhat decent summary of the score's other action material). In the
end, Bates'
300 isn't worth any of these albums, proving that
intelligence from composers now comes at a premium. He said at the time,
"I have as much respect for a garbage can lid as I do for the orchestra.
Both of them can be entirely useful and important in the scope of a
movie, if you look at them the right way." That's a wise statement, but
it's completely irrelevant unless you can actually use that garbage can
lid in a manner that doesn't break the law.
@Amazon.com: CD or
Download
- The Score Without Consideration of Plagiarism: **
- The Score With Consideration of Plagiarism: FRISBEE
- Overall: *
| Bias Check: |
For Tyler Bates reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.11
(in 9 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 2.48
(in 4,699 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
The majority of inserts contain notes from the director and composer, though
none of the products contains any disclaimers about the plagiarism. The "special edition"
includes a 16-page booklet and three trading cards. The "collector's edition" includes a
42-page case-bound book complete with the "Blood Spatter" art debossed and foil-stamped
on the cover, as well as Corniche Silk end sheets and extensive photography from the film.
