| CLOSE WINDOW |
|
FILMTRACKS.COM
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VIEW 
Review of Blitz (Hans Zimmer/Nicholas Britell)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... for Nicholas Britell's lively original source music that
resurrects the jazz of the era with remarkable personality.
Avoid it... for Hans Zimmer's score unless you are predisposed to appreciating the composer's gloomy, dramatic string mode for situations of despair.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Blitz: (Hans Zimmer/Nicholas Britell) With writer,
director, and producer Steve McQueen firmly at the helm, 2024's Apple
original film Blitz attempts to tackle a wide variety of
socio-political topics without any filters. It's a brutal look at the
bombing of London in World War II on the surface, but how one family is
affected by its perseverance is complicated by issues of class, gender,
and especially race. A woman with a biracial son in London during the
Blitz sends the boy to the countryside for his safety, but he encounters
a world there that is arguably more hostile than even the one being
destroyed from above, and he sets off back to the city alone to find his
mother at great peril. Meanwhile, that young mom is shown in a mostly
parallel story as she fulfills her factory duties and strives to sing
and be part of the underground music scene in her spare time, both
activities an effort to cope. The movie is understandably bleak but
speaks to endurance of the spirit in ways that McQueen is known for
depicting on screen. The critically acclaimed film was clearly meant as
awards bait, and the hype machine was activated in full force for its
soundtrack. The music in Blitz serves two distinct purposes;
first, there's the original score for both the suffering and the
character depth during the narrative's journey. Then, however, is the
completely disparate half that deals with the 1930's and 1940's swing
and big band jazz music that occupies the diagetic portion of the
soundtrack. McQueen opted to hire two separate composers to tackle those
two halves, Hans Zimmer for the score and Nicholas Britell for the
songs. Both composers had contributed music to the director's 12
Years a Slave, so the dual assignment is no major surprise.
Interestingly, however, the two halves of the soundtrack proceed on
completely different and separate tracks in the film, the work of Zimmer
and Britell sharing absolutely nothing in common and this dichotomy
perhaps serving some lingering critical concerns about the film's
inability to bring all of its story elements together into a satisfying
whole. Britell, for his part, succeeds quite well in the
assignment.
Although his contribution to Blitz is short, Britell worked with the lead actress to craft a song she could perform and managed to resurrect the vibrant genre of music remarkably well. Some of Britell's source jazz is purely instrumental, and its quality is only hindered by its brevity. While the "Winter Coat" song is the obvious target of awards consideration, the personal "Brighter Days," in both its vocal and instrumental version, is arguably the more attractive contribution. These songs do nothing to advance the story of the film in a broader sense, though, and that's where Zimmer's score was supposed to create that connectivity. Sadly, he fails to realize that need, instead focusing on his specific angle of the plot. The composer, as per typical, fed his promotion machine vigorously for Blitz, happily revealing that McQueen had instructed him to produce "the most unlistenable, most horrific and terrorizing score possible." This instruction was meant to accentuate the horrors of the war from a child's perspective, and this particular topic was close to Zimmer's own past. But the composer couldn't help but ramble on a bit more about his supposedly unlistenable music: "It is an absolute horrible score. It's so dissonant; it's so committed to this atonality that it was very difficult to put pieces together where you weren't going to go and run screaming out this room." Once again, however, what Zimmer says about his own music doesn't match what he actually wrote and recorded. Of course, he employed no less than five ghostwriters for the score (What did they write? Where is the cue attribution? Why aren't their names on the album track-by-track credits in a prominent fashion?), so perhaps the end product landed in a different place than Zimmer originally had in his head. But Blitz is not an unlistenable score by any means, and if anyone has absorbed a decent dose of Leonard Rosenman's film music, they'll know that Zimmer is nowhere near a comparable level of atonality or dissonance here. In fact, this music is far more accessible than even Dunkirk in that only a small portion devolves into atmospheric sound design. Such cues as "September 1940" and "Munitionettes" are indeed wretched in that regard, the former employing terrible electronic manipulation techniques as if this time and setting merited them. But these passages occupy only a small part of the score, largely frontloaded in the first third of the narrative. The majority of Zimmer's work for Blitz utilizes strings and synthetics in his trademark gloomy haze, punctuated by occasional string soloists. Their performances are largely tonal in the latter two-thirds of the work, typically carrying a pair of themes that meander through the narrative but are intentionally left wanting in memorability. Zimmer's main theme is the depressing one, likely representing the separation and associated struggles. It's a fairly simple, cyclical, descending, and never-ending phrase, much like the falling bombs terrorizing the population. Somber cellos take the idea in "Somewhere to Shelter," and it opens "No. 6 Platform" on whining high strings, building intensity throughout in Zimmer's usual crescendo format. This theme is more prominently carried by overlapping, emphasized high string lines in "Lost Property Not Lost Children" and occupies most of "Never Let You Go Again" in agony from the full ensemble. Zimmer counters this idea with a hopeful alternative, a somewhat enduring motif using the opposite formation of the main theme. Developing out of the ascending loftiness of "An Adventure for Children" on strings, this secondary theme offers lightly keyboarded optimism against somewhat accessible strings in "Loitering is Not Permitted," with very slight connectivity in this incarnation. It more effectively simmers throughout "Doing Rounds," where it achieves an increasingly contemporary and tonal stance with synthetic keyboarding and strings. Neither of these themes will reach out and grab the listener, though "An Adventure for Children" is a surprisingly engaging cue conveying the promise of better times in an upbeat spirit by weighty Zimmer drama standards of this era. Even in this moment of light, however, the score and Britell's source material never even remotely reference each other. There was an intellectually fantastic potential for Blitz if the original source jazz was boiled down and adapted into the score's far darker structure, reinforcing the familial bond and common spirit of survival. Instead, we receive disparate efforts to secure awards nominations for completely unrelated music and Zimmer saying things that aren't really true about his own part. The overall result is nowhere as bad as his words would suggest, and Britell's contributions are a remarkable hidden gem. On the short album, Zimmer's music amounts to only 18 minutes and Britell's runs about 13 minutes. A pair of other source cues rounds out the product. The soundtrack altogether is the kind of souvenir-oriented experience that requires an admiration of the film to appreciate.
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 35:38
* composed by Nicholas Britell
NOTES & QUOTES:
There exists no official packaging for this album.
Copyright ©
2024, Filmtracks Publications. All rights reserved.
The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Blitz are Copyright © 2024, Milan Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 11/24/24 (and not updated significantly since). |
