Filmtracks: Clash of the Titans (Ramin Djawadi/Various)

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Written 4/5/10

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Buy it... if you like barbequed ribs with fries and mozzarella sticks to go with your knock-off blockbuster music from the Hans Zimmer clone factory of formulaic emulation.

Avoid it... if you prefer rainbow trout with rice pilaf and boiled asparagus while appreciating music with original themes, original instrumentation, original performances, and an abundance of nuance and style.

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.

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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 Download

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