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| Djawadi |
Clash of the Titans: (Ramin Djawadi/Various)
Hollywood's grand age of sword and sorcery in the early 1980's brought
Greek mythology to the big screen in
Clash of the Titans, and in
the industry's age of CGI profiteering, a remake of the concept was
inevitable. So eager were the studio's executives to squeeze many
hundreds of millions of net profits out of the 2010 remake that they
held the film for several months so that 3D technology could enhance the
special effects and seduce audiences in
Avatar fashion.
Unfortunately, nobody stopped to consider the fact that a higher
quotient of CGI usually means a lower level of intelligence, and French
director Louis Leterrier manages to steer the mythology even further
from its roots. The plot is irrelevant, other than it pits Liam Neeson
and Ralph Fiennes (as Zeus and Hades) against each other for control of
the land. After collaborating successfully with Leterrier for
The
Incredible Hulk, composer Craig Armstrong was assigned immediately
to
Clash of the Titans, a major plus given the Scotsman's low
quantity of musical production for the screen (despite his obvious
talent). As could be predicted, he was dismissed from the project during
its post-production extensions and replaced with the reliable drones
from Hans Zimmer's Remote Control. Armstrong reportedly didn't fully
record a score for the film, though he is noted in its ultimate
credits for having contributed to a theme (for Io) that remained in the
final cut. As for the work of Ramin Djawadi and his hoard of assistants,
there's really no point in discussing it as one would an accomplished
piece of film music. Such an analysis of their atrocious material for
Iron Man was a waste of time. We've reached the point where
straight forward reviews of this kind of mindless, mechanical music are
too boring to crank out one after another, so Filmtracks treats
Clash
of the Titans to a special format of analysis: the completely
fictionalized Remote Control spotting session for this film. For those
not familiar with the lingo of the industry, a spotting session is when
the composer and director (or other crew) first sit down for a couple of hours
to look over the rough cut of the film and decide where to put music and what
it should generally sound like. The facetious sarcasm that follows obviously
is
not what happened with
Clash of the Titans, but from what
you hear in the film and on album,
you wouldn't know the
difference.
It's one in the morning and there's a familiar scene of
ambient lighting over sofas, coffee, and laptops. The windowless room at
the Remote Control studio is its usual hue of dark grays and blacks.
Hans Zimmer's framed accolades line a wall outside the door. A slight
scent of cigarette smoke wafts through the air. A group of sixteen
composers in various states of discovery sits lounging comfortably with
a few stray guitars, amplifiers, and abused drum pad parts from twenty
years ago. One man avails himself of the keyboard array on the far wall,
pounding out staccato rhythms of cello samples to keep himself awake.
The 48 speakers in front of him have diminished his hearing capacity by
27%, but at least they augment the coffee as a stimulant. On the custom
82-inch high definition screen on the opposite wall, the mostly finished
Clash of the Titans has entertained the crew for an hour, but
they turn it off and get to business. There's no need to watch the rest
of it because they've all seen the formula before. Time is short, too,
because the filmmakers pulled a Nancy Myers on Craig Armstrong and Hans
thus received another phone call. He turned down the assignment himself,
as expected, and handed over the production to his ghostwriters so they
would actually get some screen credit. God knows, if Hans wrote a theme
or two, he'd be the only one in the opening titles anyway. A felt table in
the corner of the room is used for the dice rolls and, in the third round,
Ramin Djawadi throws a lucky 26 with five cubes to prevail. He'll get primary
credit. He and the fifteen other guys bat around ideas about how to approach
Clash of the Titans. They decide that Warner and cohorts wouldn't have
contacted RC if their suits didn't want the ultimate in expedient and safe
music, so that's what the chefs will prepare. Besides, who wants rainbow
trout with rice pilaf and boiled asparagus when you can have barbequed ribs
with fries and mozzarella sticks? And RC is a rib house anyway. Hans
wrote the recipe book, of course, so the first thing to do is figure out
what ideas from his classics can be aped. Better him than anyone else,
because nobody wants to "do a Tyler Bates" and have a DVD cover framed
on Hans' wall with a "*Derived in Part from Preexisting Compositions Not
Authored by..." on it. Damn lawyers. (And damn that rascal Jay Rifkin,
too!) Nobody's sure if they could understand Elliot Goldenthal music if
they perused his cue sheets anyway, which is another problem. Better to
stick to Hans and maybe some basic John Powell, because it'll be
familiar and everyone will be happy.
The guy on the keyboards plays a rhythmic segment of "Roll
Tide" from
Crimson Tide and everyone nods their heads. An
assistant is dispatched to find the contractor for some voices, because
the budget permits them to "transcend" the samples they made of the same
beefy guys a few years ago. They can also afford 80 orchestral players
in London, though someone pipes up with the idea of only hiring 50
players, using samples to imitate the rest, and pocketing the savings.
Nah, the ensemble is more fun, and the crew compromises by agreeing to
mix the live players' recordings so they'll sound like the partially
synthetic Hans sound they all know and love. Another assistant is
dispatched to call the contractor for the orchestra, with explicit
instructions that at least 65 of the musicians play cello, bass, double
bass, tuba, trombone, or French horns. An ambitious upstart standing in
the corner suggests two or three trumpets be employed, because the film
does deal with some openly heroic content. An awkward moment of silence
transpires, only the whirring sounds of busy hard drives spinning at
15,000 RPM filling the room. Laughter erupts as someone says, "What do
you want next? Sixteenth notes with those? We're not John Williams."
After a knock on Laurence Rosenthal for good measure, the usual rounds
of jokes about woodwinds also ensue, punctuated by the inevitable,
"Piccolos make Jerry Bruckheimer's balls shrivel up and shrink to the
size of a raisin!" Not that Bruckheimer has anything to do with
Clash
of the Titans, other than an indirect shaping of the blockbuster
mould. Everyone agrees to "stick it to the man," however, by inserting a
bassoon or two into this new score. In fact, they get so wild that a few
exotic flutes are discussed. Hans has used them many times, so he would
surely approve. Ramin will play those himself, as well as a guitar viol,
because not only is it the cool thing to do (not to mention that
everyone wants both Brian Tyler's performance talents
and his
super fabulous hair), it looks good in the credit roll and on the press
kit for the album. The specialty plucked stuff will sound like a cross
between a cimbalom and a honky tonk piano. Why? Because Hans added it to
the canon of RC-accepted sounds with
Sherlock Holmes. But wait!
Remember those years when Hans would use solo gospel voices in really
cool, almost operatic ways? Like
Point of No Return and
Pacific Heights? Why not get some gorgeous female opera voice to
represent Medusa? Hot shit! Forget the contractor, there's a stock of
such ladies in the building! Or at least samples of them.
The orgasmic moment of creative mental capacity is
shattered, though, when it's also decided to "even out the playing
field" by inserting the most conservative of supposedly progressive solo
elements, the electric guitar. A fan of Massive Attack texts the group's
Neil Davidge and born is a new collaboration. They'll give him
co-composing credit if he lets rip with his guitars on a major
action cue and works on an adaptation of a theme into a song. The
studio's record branch will
love that. Units, baby! There will,
of course, have to be guitars in other cues. No question about that.
Come to think of it, the dainty plucked and blown stuff should be mixed
in the background so the filmmakers really only hear the guitars,
cellos, and brass. They like brawn. Even if there are two women arguing
on screen about their nail polish, they want brawn. After all, it always
gets back to muscle, especially the one that dangles between the legs.
Someone makes a quip about their new software that only generates sheet
music without a treble clef and another guy says, "What's a treble
clef?" Chuckles all around. The consensus is that
Clash of the
Titans is perfect for an 80% bass to 20% treble balance, as usual.
The choir will have to stay below a predetermined octave. The violins
will be tested at their lowest ranges. The horns will reach down to meet
the tubas. The cello ostinatos will be backed by resounding bass
enhancements. Ah, that's right, the ostinatos! Ramin and the gang
deliberate the merits of taking Hans' ostinatos from
Batman
Begins, always the best starting point nowadays, and giving them the
aggressive tone of John Powell's
The Bourne Supremacy. They will
put them in a ridiculously simple meter so that they can be deliberately
pounded out with huge emphasis on each note. It would be even better if
there were enough timpani to hammer each chord in the progression.
Everyone is reminded by an older clone that there can't be too many
triplets to prohibit the appropriate "emphasis" on each note. In fact,
putting rests in between every note of the themes or the rhythmic
progressions is best for making each harmoniously glorious minor-key
shift as insanely muscular as possible. Let the Ms. Portman's of the
world screw around with the major key (and their Oscars). Ancient
Greece, robot wars, alien invasions... this is the domain of the
melodramatic minor-key chords that meaningfully touch the hearts of the
uneducated Wal-Mart electorate! Never forget: the more uncomplicated
minor-third alternations, the better.
Focus then shifts to the themes. The group takes turns
at the keyboards, reminiscing about their incredibly similar, but fondly
remembered harmonies of past overachievements. Several of Hans' themes
are rambled off, but a particular affinity is agreed upon for Steve
Jablonsky's ideas from the two
Transformers scores. Not only do
Steve's themes rock the floors with Godly authority, they also sound
great when the gains are pushed up to the max across the board.
Clash
of the Titans needs two main themes. The hero theme from
Transformers will do just as nicely for Perseus as it did for
Optimus Prime. The villains' theme from
Transformers will also do
great for the CGI menaces of ancient Greece. How easy was that? Change a
few progressions here and there, throw a triplet into the hero theme
(but make sure it can be elongated to allow for that "emphasis"), and
poof! An argument about whether or not to overlay them in counterpoint
draws a compromise: one use of counterpoint in the whole score. The "key
to success" is stated on a banner across the wall above the keyboards:
"Start and end your themes on key." Just to be safe, the general
rule is to make more than 33% of the total notes in the score on key
regardless of thematic presence. A whip hangs next the door and is used
on RC newbies who don't shift the key of a cue simply to accommodate
more ballsy shoving of awesomeness down audiences' throats when the
previous key becomes burdensome. The looped percussion sounds better
when everyone stays close to key, too. Speaking of percussion, one clone
sends a symbolic bitch-slap in Michael Giacchino's direction by banging
a stick on everyday objects in the room and claiming his own creative
rights. Ramin also pleases the crowd by taking Steve's "Scorponok" and
altering it through John's "Bourne" prism to get a kick-ass motif of
evil. How neat is the fact that it doesn't even have to deviate far from
key? The high point of the early morning brainstorming comes with a
suggestion that the violins be turned into fiddle mode for some
Pirates of the Caribbean faux swash and buckle for scenes of
lighter sparring. The hour is late, though, and the valiant crew decides
to set aside
Clash of the Titans for the time being and strum
away on their guitars into the morning hours. With the groundwork laid
for the score, it can be copied and pasted from old files on the
computers and fleshed out in a couple of days. Any deficiencies after
that can be mopped up with the samples. As for Neil Davidge's part, they
decide not to script such ingenuity. To a round of applause, an RC
veteran does his best Bill O'Reilly voice and exclaims, "
Fuck it!
We'll do it live!"
So there it is, Filmtracks readers, your "Moment of
Zen." Is Djawadi and crew's achievement for
Clash of the Titans
really as offensive as the insanity above suggests? Not really. It's a
functional score despite being idiotic in its simplicity. About this
music, Djawadi said, "It was truly exciting to create the musical
landscape for this epic film."
Create? The first score track
contains the heroic theme as nicely packaged as any generic Media
Ventures/ Remote Control rip-off since Jablonsky's famous cue from
The Island. The subsequent two tracks on album introduce the
predictable secondary themes in succession. There are critical gain
problems on the album; this review is based on a CD master, but it's
safe to say that the MP3 distribution will have volume issues as well.
All of the composers' most unique instrumental elements are drowned out
by the orchestra's mix. The "Medusa" cue is the most blatant example of
an instance where someone absolutely butchers the mix of a score to
render its solo performances moot. How can an organization like Remote
Control have so many recording and engineering gurus and manage to
provide a score so incompetently mixed and/or mastered for album? After
piquing your interest in the first few cues, the score hibernates in its
middle passages, not just because the writing gets even lazier (which it
does) but because its volume seems artificially reduced. The most
amazing aspect of
Clash of the Titans when you step back from it
is not only the mass emulation you hear, but the incredible incapability
of populating the entire sonic spectrum with music. The themes, both in
their simplicity and their extremely low-register rendering, sound like
good baselines for themes that should exist over the top of them. The
lack of counterpoint only drives this absence of true balance home.
There's only so much dwelling in the bass clef before you get the
impression that all of this music is coming from below the waists of the
composers. Whether you think it's coming out of their fronts or rears
will determine your level of appreciation for it. There was a day when
ripping electric guitars were employed by Hans Zimmer for contemporary
topics like race cars, cop chases, mountain climbing, or sky-diving.
Now, his crew has made them not only acceptable for ancient Greece, but
expected. Zimmer has claimed in several interviews through time that
he shakes his head in disbelief when hearing his ideas for
Crimson
Tide and
Batman Begins copied so thoroughly by others. So the
question really is: when is he going to go down the hall and tell these
hacks that they'll never be John Powell or Harry Gregson-Williams unless
they do the inconceivable:
be original? On the other hand,
Clash of the Titans is more tolerable than
Iron Man, so
maybe we shouldn't complain. Baby steps.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
