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FILMTRACKS.COM
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VIEW 
Review of Dunkirk (Hans Zimmer/Various)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you can approach this music with academic interest in
studying one of the most obnoxiously inappropriate and brutally juvenile
"fear zeal" film scores of a generation.
Avoid it... unless you have a really fabulous sense of humor about laughably terrible film music that fails miserably in its quest for innovation.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Dunkirk: (Hans Zimmer/Various) Though mostly
faithful in its historical accuracy, Christopher Nolan's acclaimed 2017
war film Dunkirk took some artistic liberty with the famed
evacuation of Allied forces from France during World War II. The
director sought to avoid to two aspects of the genre covered endlessly
by other films: politics and character stories. With limited dialogue in
his script, Nolan's goal was to immerse the audience in the sights and
sounds of the harrowing evacuation, taking a mechanical approach to a
dramatically emotional event. There is indeed emotional depth in
Dunkirk, but it is largely applied through the blunt force of the
film's overall tone of brutality. A handful of characters is followed
throughout the story, but their depictions are two-dimensional and
dwarfed by the various wholesale aspects of war shown in intervals at
land, air, and sea. The movie's stark depiction was largely heralded as
a success, earning significant grosses for a grim war topic and
predictably eliciting numerous awards nominations. Among the highly
praised production elements of Dunkirk is its score by Hans
Zimmer and his expansive crew. For long sequences, the film utilizes the
score in conjunction with only sound effects, blending the two together
as needed to supply a morbid sense of foreboding to the proceedings.
Nolan specifically requested music of a propulsive but ambient nature to
accentuate the feeling of panic felt by all involved in the evacuation.
He then dials in and out the interchangeable pieces of the score where
needed in the film, with no significant synchronization points attempted
and the music alternating between blaringly obvious and barely heard. At
several points in the film, the score creeps into the background of the
mix in such a way that you cannot tell if it is music or the droning of
an approaching German plane. At other times, the forceful music is so
loud that you cannot hear what the characters are saying or even the
sound effects immediately around them. In both cases, however, that
music exists to unsettle. Even in its heavy reliance on "Nimrod" from
Sir Edward Elgar's "Enigma Variations" for the redemptive element in
latter cues, Zimmer and his team thrash the demeanor of that piece to
give it a distinctly battered personality.
Not surprisingly, the music for Dunkirk by Zimmer's conglomerate is polarizing to the extreme. It received immense mainstream praise and awards consideration, further evidence that composers of this era are awarded for trying to differ from convention rather than be proficient at the fundamental purpose of film music. Some detractors will argue that Dunkirk isn't actually music at all, similar to criticism leveled at Jóhann Jóhannsson's equally lauded Arrival the previous year. That's not true, as there is definite musical structure throughout Dunkirk. Zimmer adheres to his now obnoxious, predictable methodology of writing long cues containing one, drawn-out crescendo that adds layers of activity to an underlying rhythmic device. Aside from the Elgar interpolations, there are a few actual recurring motifs of significance in the score, the two most obvious heard easily on top of each other in "The Oil." The first of these is a slurred, octave-alternating alarm of sorts for synthetics, heard most obviously in "Supermarine" and utilizing a different interval in "The Mole." Under that highly grating motif in "The Oil" comes a vaguely brass-like crawl that rises slowly through an octave on agonizing, deliberate notes, an idea more clearly enunciated in the first half of "Regimental Brothers." While there are cues like "We Need Our Army Back" that contain ambient sound design by default, most of the score is driven by some throbbing rhythmic device. In the aerial sequences ("Supermarine"), for instance, you hear the much-hyped pocket watch sounds of Nolan manipulated by Zimmer's crew as a pace keeper. Though dissonant in almost all corners not involving Elgar, the score is indeed certifiable music. It's just not effective music at accomplishing its task unless you accept the idea that sluggish, brooding musical figures of extremely oppressive personality can function to accentuate a full range of emotion on screen. Unfortunately, Zimmer fails at this task, as the only way Nolan can crank up and down the emotional grip of a scene is by adjusting the volume on the score. It's no surprise that some of the most powerful scenes in Dunkirk, such as the escape by the film's lead character in the opening moments, are absent Zimmer's otherwise intrusively unwelcome music. In fact, it wouldn't be difficult to postulate that the movie would have been better off with no score at all. An effective film score in a case like Dunkirk is one that can manipulate audience emotions without making itself overtly noticeable to the movie-goer. If you only have three simple sides to your score (atmospheric droning, rhythmic droning, and Elgar droning), then the only way to address the difference between unease, worry, fright, panic, and outright terror is by adjusting the volume of the music, and that's a terribly constricting way to operate. Even if Zimmer was instructed, by necessity of Nolan's diminishment of characters, not to address specific emotional connections in the plot, there has to be a greater distinction between fear and relief. For a scene in which German bombers attack the lines of soldiers on the beach, the conclusion of that moment of horror is only the absence of the score, and that technique shouldn't be necessary. There are still strong emotions in the aftermath of that attack, even if the soldiers remain stunned by the experience. A maestro composer knows how to apply appropriate music for both halves of that scene, even if only adjusting a few orchestrations and chord intervals from here to there. The Dunkirk score's recording is interchangeable throughout, of course, allowing Nolan the means to throw generic notions of musical fear at any volume he wants when needed. Some will argue as to the effectiveness of this technique, but even if you accept such cases of directorial convenience, one must interject that the material recorded by Zimmer's crew isn't appropriate for the era of this particular action anyway. There seems to be a determination by the composer that any situation requiring dread or despair requires synthetic accentuation. And, yes, Dunkirk is an extremely "processed" score. It's also a cheap and novice approach to a WWII movie that could have been serviced better by the exact same constructs if they had been conveyed by musical instruments and performance capabilities that actually existed at the time. One can only imagine what the Elliot Goldenthal writing techniques of the 1990's could have provided for this context using organic means. Awards bodies and dedicated Zimmer apologists can make endless circular arguments about how creative the composer can be with his sampled sound effects run through loops, but such choices are not really that innovative. Finding a way to score the "Supermarine" aerial sequences with only minimally manipulated woodwinds would have been innovative. And it would have been possible, too, even with the same sense of fear and gravity. There are times when the score for Dunkirk traverses into the realm of black comedy, begging for ridicule as Zimmer and his associates attempt to surpass prior creativity. The concept of the long Zimmer crescendo has become as humorous as his thunderously booming base notes on brass made famous in Inception, and there is no better a place to generate some chuckles as in the cue "The Oil" in Dunkirk. Over six minutes, Zimmer propels all his thumping rhythms on key, slurring octave effects, rising note progressions, solo piano strikes in the base, and dissonant string effects on the top towards one massively orgasmic expression of silliness at the end of the cue. At the 5:00 mark in that cue, a vaguely Inception-like broadside from the bass region shifts the tempo in its most awkwardly hilarious gear of "fear zeal," Zimmer's seemingly only answer to the need for providing greater emotion: faster, louder versions of the same pointless crap. And then there's poor Elgar, whose music here is given Blade Runner treatment by Remote Control regular Benjamin Wallfisch for reasons unknown. The tempo of "Nimrod" is slowed dramatically, conveyed with a tone that barely sounds organic, and it is joined by bass pulses in "Variation 15" and "End Titles" that perk up weary ears in expectation of imminent Enya vocals. Who exactly looked at the technology depicted in this film and made the determination that a combination of electronica Elgar and a significantly digitally manipulated-sounding score elsewhere was appropriate? The Elgar applications are shameful, and it's unfortunate to contemplate that these misguided attempts at emotional payoff in the resolution of the score are what earned this score its award nominations. So whose fault is all of this? Many will point to Nolan, who continues to display no competence whatsoever in how to apply music to his films. But Zimmer also shoulders blame for hyping his techniques so that the mainstream believes this type of music is revolutionary when it's actually mindless, simplistic, and inept. There's also the usual business with ghostwriters in the score for Dunkirk; six, at least, and maybe seven or more, of the Remote Control crew had a hand in generating music for this project. The end result is insultingly juvenile and ruins several scenes in an otherwise fine film. There was no place for a cue like "Elegy for Dunkirk" from Dario Marianelli's Atonement in this context, but some realization of genuine emotional range in between those techniques must have been possible. On screen, the Zimmer horde's music is best when it's absent, and on album, it's best when it has concluded. *
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 74:27
* contains music composed by Sir Edward Elgar
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert includes extensive credits and lengthy notes about the scoring process
from both the composer and director.
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