Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,149
Written 12/26/13
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Buy it... if you seek to punish yourself for your sins or are
merely curious about what a frustrating disaster of an ensemble film
scoring project sounds like when finished.
Avoid it... if you have no interest in supporting any music that
results from an insatiable director who demands that cues be re-written
dozens of times and then the output is miserable, droning muck.
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| Jackman |
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| Zimmer |
Captain Phillips: (Henry Jackman/Hans
Zimmer/Various) Even Barack Obama has made wise-cracks about the last
thing he expected to deal with while being the President of the United
States: pirates on the high seas. The impoverished nation of Somalia has
brought piracy on those seas back to life in the 21st Century, their
youth boarding large merchant vessels and demanding insurance money
ransoms for them and their crews, sometimes successfully. Thanks to a
rescue operation involving the U.S. Navy and written accounts of the
event after the fact, the American container ship Maersk Alabama has
become the most famous of these. When the vessel was hijacked in 2009,
Obama gave authorization for an American destroyer and a team of Navy
SEALs to execute the pirates when the Maersk Alabama's crew came under
extreme danger, Captain Richard Phillips in the most precarious position
as a bartering chip aboard a lifeboat. Remarkably, the crew survived and
Maersk Alabama was attacked by Somali pirates again in 2010 and 2011.
Merchant vessels have been blasting Britney Spears music at approaching
pirate skiffs to ward them off more recently. Equally effective,
perhaps, would be some of the music from the 2013 movie adaptation of
Phillips' novel about the event, Captain Phillips, directed by
action and suspense veteran Paul Greengrass. Receiving tremendous
critical acclaim, the film did come under some fire for historical
inaccuracies, especially in light of conflicting accounts about the SEAL
kill shots that ended the crisis. Tom Hanks was widely praised in the
titular role, however, and a massive box office preceded expected awards
recognition. One aspect of the film that was a total disaster, however,
was its soundtrack. A handful of source songs were employed in the film
without issue, but rumors started flying when the original score became
a significant headache for those in Hans Zimmer's Remote Control
operations. Greengrass had collaborated successfully with John Powell on
a number of occasions in the past, though with difficulties between them
on Green Zone and Powell taking a break from film scoring in
2013, Greengrass turned back to Zimmer's clone factory and ended up with
Henry Jackman, who, throughout his career, has proven to be something of
a Powell clone himself. What followed was a mess created by Greengrass,
with demands for re-writes that were so plentiful that Zimmer himself
had to very reluctantly enter the frustrating endeavor and write a
handful of cues to satisfy the difficult director.
Who actually deserves credit for the
Captain
Phillips score remains murky. Jackman's material was eventually
altered and supplanted by a host of others, only two of which officially
credited. That doesn't include Zimmer and Lorne Balfe, the latter
reportedly involved in a lesser role. Over the better part of a year,
cues were endlessly rewritten, some dozens of times, until the nightmare
forced Zimmer to dedicate a couple of days of work to finishing the
score. The composers may not have even known how to accurately attribute
the cue sheets after all was done. The irony of this situation? The
music is hideously awful in final form, barely functional for this
context and painful to tolerate on album. It's a synthetic score from
start to finish, with a few string soloists heavily processed to give
the ambience a foreign sound. Percussionists and synthesizers round out
the ensemble, none of these contributors shining in an atmosphere of
droning, banging muck. The ethnic tilt is insultingly generic, the
rhythms are so basic that a first-year composing student could program
them, and the droning sound design portions are insufferable. In no way
does this collection of boring, emotionless bouts of noise compete with
the complexity and nuances of
Green Zone. Beginning with "Seals
Inbound," however, and culminating in "High-Speed Maneuvers," you start
to hear what sounds like Zimmer's writing break into more conventional
synthetic mode, at least harmonically. And with "Safe Now," you hear a
light version of "Time" from
Inception, the "Journey to the Line"
influence from
The Thin Red Line still obvious. That pseudo-theme
is the only motif to come out of this score, and there is little
recurring material of value in the remainder, making it a truly
divergent ensemble composing effort. In its entirety, this is cheap,
ridiculously awful musical treatment for a film of this quality, and
Zimmer and his crew are known to be incredibly frustrated by it. Who
knows where Jackman fit into the equation at the end, if at all.
Greengrass did finally go ahead and license "The End" from Powell's
United 93 for use in
Captain Phillips, and perhaps he
would have been better off simply making his Powell temp track the whole
soundtrack for this movie. A more interesting point of discussion is the
potential future of the Powell/Greengrass collaboration. In a humorous
way, this experience serves as payback to Zimmer for his controversial
production house methodology, because this is precisely the worst kind
of nightmare to result from that process. That said, Greengrass, by all
accounts, is responsible for this particular mess, and given how putrid
the final result ultimately was, he deserves a public flogging for his
handling of this score.
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Bias Check:
For Henry Jackman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.8
(in 25 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.79
(in 7,757 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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