: (Hans Zimmer) Director Ridley
Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer combined efforts to create a
frighteningly realistic account of the American soldiers' fight for
survival during the botched 1993 kidnapping mission in Somalia that led
to the deaths of several of those soldiers. The critical acclaim
surrounding the film is based on the severely true to life account of
the gruesome accident and rescue that ensued during the event. That
success takes a page from the harrowing realism captured in films such
as
, placing the viewer in
the midst of a battle environment that's intended to extend the
soldiers' adrenaline rush to the audience. The film came under harsh
fire from other critics who identified Scott's inaccuracies in the
depiction of the people of Somalia (who were not actually used in the
creation of the film), and that same disdainful response extended to
Hans Zimmer's music for the production. Spreading his wings to take
flight into another unexplored method of scoring, Zimmer's score for
is like nothing film music fans had heard before.
Instead of attempting to portray the ethereal aspect of wartime conflict
with a classical approach or allowing the sound effects to replace a
score in many parts, Zimmer's work is mixed as a central piece of the
film. Still riding the success of
continued his strong popularity
with mainstream film score fans in 2001. In nearly ever way possible,
though,
. Rather than reprising the underplaying of a
historical event with soft, thematic writing, Zimmer unleashes a
wretched dose of hell in his music for
. To
understand the disparate tones in this work, all you have to do is
realize that the film itself is not meant to be a pleasant experience.
Zimmer intentionally approached the assignment with brutality on the
mind, seeking to accompany the overpowering and detailed human account
of the event with music that is also at war with itself. The resulting
mix is competent and intermittently effective, but it's extremely
incongruous on album.
Zimmer indeed tackled this score with a admirable sense of
experimentation. There is nothing pleasant about the vast majority of
this material; it is a necessarily painful experience that can test your
endurance in parts. Those who dismiss this score as merely incoherent
noise are missing the point. The precise culture clash between African
and American elements produces an interesting environment even if it's
largely unlistenable in some cues. Heavy electric guitars and African
voices are not what you'd expect to hear together in a piece of music,
but when they're intentionally fighting each other in the sonic
spectrum, it is successful if only because of its uniqueness. Zimmer
joyfully explained at the time that
Black Hawk Down was a project
for which he wanted to create a score that had never been done before.
He and a seemingly infinite team of Media Ventures artists tinkered and
experimented with all sorts of different electronic samplings in their
effort to create a foreign setting. All you have to do to grasp the
scope of the project is attempt to understand the liner credits on the
album, and you'll realize that literally dozens of people contributed
small compositional input into this score (not including the orchestral
players, which are minimally realized in the work). Because of this
eclectic base, and when considering that the orchestra was contracted
for only a handful of minutes to perform underscore for the
synthesizers, the
Black Hawk Down music is understandably a very
inconsistent listening experience. Zimmer adequately balances the
American (and slightly Scottish?) elements of the score with the African
ones, though he was criticized by nationals from Somalia who were
offended by the employment of Senegalese and Moroccan vocalists and
instruments. This lack of precision in the ethnic balance is indeed a
curious aspect of
Black Hawk Down, though the vast majority of
American listeners won't know enough about world music to notice the
difference. It doesn't, however, give detractors of Zimmer's methodology
a legitimate avenue of attack when claiming that his music is strikingly
inappropriate for a multitude of settings, a problem that plagued
Pearl Harbor far more than this effort. Ultimately, the basic
culture clashes in the score, regardless of precise representation,
sufficed for the picture.
The setting of Mogadishu, with its famine and unknown
quantity of militants, is represented by African voices set often to a
modern, percussive rhythm. When the American cowboy attitudes and
superior technology are displayed, the synthesized sounds of machine gun
fire, jet afterburners, and the slow, deliberate swooshing of helicopter
blades accompany guitars of varying electronic harshness. While no theme
really prevails in
Black Hawk Down, the final significant score
track on album, "Leave No Man Behind," presents the only development of
the score's broad patriotic theme that represents the sacrifice of the
soldiers (a short, more ballsy variant on this idea was not included on
that album). Its deliberate pace and melancholy nature could remind you
of the heavy theme from
Beyond Rangoon. For most listeners, this
cue will likely represent the only easily accessible, non-vocal musical
souvenir from the film. Otherwise, the vocals are truly the most
engaging part of
Black Hawk Down. The performances by Baaba Maal
in "Hunger" and "Still" are very compelling, and the latter track is
another reason to return to the album. Zimmer's long-standing love of
African vocals, from
The Lion King to
Tears of the Sun and
several others, is on full display here. The "Gortoz A Ran" vocal piece
is a solemn and mournful, but even more beautiful duet between Denez
Prigent and Zimmer's regular collaborator, Lisa Gerrard. Combined with
"Leave No Man Behind," these vocal tracks provide at least fifteen
minutes of redeeming music of only a moderate volume. The devastating
action sequences, by contrast, will knock you down with their relentless
and harsh pounding. In particular, "Chant" is an unforgiving, obnoxious
piece with layers of crashing that could easily give you a headache. The
scenes of the civilian suffering in Somalia will frighten you with their
stark echoing of subsistence. The underscore will challenge your
tolerance for cross cultural musical integration that was never meant to
sound harmonious. Of the pulsating, straight-laced militaristic
material, most Zimmer collectors find themselves enjoying "Synchrotone,"
a cue that was cut to pieces in the final version of the film but still
manages to convey the mechanized madness of the Americans'
capabilities.
Just as the score for
Black Hawk Down functions
in its film in ways exactly opposite to
Pearl Harbor, the same
could be said about the album experience. It is an extremely difficult
and disjointed one in this case, but it is hard to dismiss Zimmer's
intentions. For many viewers and listeners, those decisions by Zimmer
were masked by Scott's heavily rearranging editing of the music in the
actual film. While Zimmer intended for the Americans to be represented
by the heaviest music, the scene in which the convoy of helicopters
approaches the coast is switched so that the shots of rioting civilians
are given the bombast while the choppers are treated to silence. Whether
moves like this were Zimmer's or Scott's, they ultimately defeat the
purpose of the composer's definitions. Also at issue is the fact that
Zimmer and his many associates (termed the "BHD band" for this occasion)
recorded five hours of music for
Black Hawk Down and less than a
quarter of it appeared on the Decca retail album. Hefty 3-CD bootlegs
have circulated around the secondary market for years, but its hard to
recommend a score that is, at any length, difficult to enjoy on album
due to its radical shifts in tone. Still, even if you absolutely cannot
stand this music on album, you have to chalk up another few points to
Zimmer for assembling the talent necessary to make the
Black Hawk
Down experiment into a moderate success. A vibrant sound quality
assists the loneliness of the vocals in every track, a definite
improvement over the many blockbuster scores by Zimmer in which the best
solo elements get lost in the emphasis of the bass region (
Pearl
Harbor,
Pirates of the Caribbean, etc). The cross cultural
vocals in "Barra Barra," "Still," and "Gortoz A Ran" are enticing
combinations of modern rock and new age electronic accompaniment for
African and Middle Eastern voices, and these are the selling points of
the commercial album. If you are a Zimmer fan hoping for another score
along the same lines as
The Peacemaker or
Gladiator, then
outside of "Leave No Man Behind" you may be surprised by how much it
isn't like either of those scores. The score accomplishes
everything it set out to do, and despite its intolerable sequences, you
have to appreciate the conceptualization.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.86
(in 119 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 2.97
(in 294,663 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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