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| Zimmer |
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| Badelt |
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black
Pearl: (Hans Zimmer/Various) When popular and successful action
producer Jerry Bruckheimer was announced to be making a film adaptation
of the legendary Disneyland New Orleans Square theme part attraction
"Pirates of the Caribbean," fans of the swashbuckling genre erupted with
joyful hope and anticipation. A strong cast catering to the masses of
youths, a story worthy of chase and adventure, spectacular effects, and
an intangible likeability all helped
Pirates of the Caribbean: The
Curse of the Black Pearl earn spectacular gross returns in the
summer of 2003 and eventually gave birth to a franchise of continued
success for Disney. That franchise has become the definition of the
summer blockbuster of the 2000's, though while its films remain a guilty
pleasure for even many hardened viewers, few would argue that it's
high-class artistry. A lasting controversy boiled over within the film
score collecting community in regards to
Pirates of the
Caribbean, however, despite the initial score's immense popularity
with mainstream movie-goers. There is no single film music composer
alive today who is such an expert at the sea-faring piracy genre as
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was in the Golden Age, although several modern
composers have followed in his tradition and produced suitably
swashbuckling scores. John Debney, Patrick Doyle, and Bruce Broughton,
among others, have all given the genre their best, and, at the outset,
Alan Silvestri would be called upon to raise the same spirit in
Pirates of the Caribbean. Having proven his larger-than-life
action scoring abilities with a range of films from
Back to the
Future to
The Mummy Returns, Silvestri was well qualified for
the job, especially having worked with Disney in the years just prior.
Being a Bruckheimer production, however, there was always a funny,
sneaking suspicion that the Media Ventures musical empire of Hans Zimmer
would somehow envelope this score's creation, and, alas, it was to be
so. Silvestri was fired after writing some material deemed
unsatisfactory to Bruckheimer's ears, and Disney presented Zimmer with
enough money to hack through some last minute ideas and unleash his
Media Ventures artists on the project at the last minute.
A number of problems faced Zimmer, though. First, he
couldn't contractually take credit for the score because of an agreement
with another studio during that period of time. There are varying
accounts of exactly how much of
The Curse of the Black Pearl he
actually wrote, with some claiming that the quantity is as much as in
any of his other collaborative scores. Zimmer himself has since taken
credit for all the major themes. For legal reasons, however, his
contribution was technically restrained to some synthesizer programming
and consultation. Primary credit was shifted to composer Klaus Badelt, a
relative newcomer in the Zimmer gang who had been moving up the ranks of
the organization since his involvement with
Gladiator and who was
known at the time for his two other summer blockbusters,
The Time
Machine and
K-19: The Widowmaker (both of which highly
derivative of other scores, but ranging from adequate to enjoyable in
the context of their own films). Under Badelt, the list of regular Media
Ventures artists composing snippets for the project included Ramin
Djawadi, James Dooley, Nick Glennie-Smith, Steve Jablonsky, Blake Neely,
James McKee Smith, and Geoff Zanelli. With one music supervisor, eight
composers, nine orchestrators, three conductors, and Zimmer serving as
the "overproducer," you immediately got the impression that this was a
potentially frightening Media Ventures nightmare. The result of this
frantic combined effort? A monumentally disappointing mess of a score
that, more importantly, gave birth to a spirited debate about the larger
implications that the popularity of this imbecilic work had on the
industry. Stop for a moment and consider the days when a single man
would write, orchestrate, conduct, and produce a score. Now imagine
two-dozen people trying to do the same thing all at once on computers,
and the product is a useless, meandering collection of stock action cues
with few cohesive elements of any significance. There is a reason why
scores like these are deemed ineligible to win Academy Awards. Zimmer
and Badelt's coordination efforts serve as a sampler of Media Ventures
cues from the previous seven years, with hardly any original ideas, no
deviation from their norms, and no indication that they took
Pirates
of the Caribbean seriously enough to give it a personality of its
own.
You can hear pieces of music in the contents of this work
that remind of a few of the individual composers credited, but without
detailed cue sheets for the score, then how is anybody to know who is
responsible for the very few bright spots of the composition? Of greater
importance is the debate that
The Curse of the Black Pearl
stirred about the electronic accompaniment and manipulation of
orchestral players. In the mid-2000's, Zimmer was still actually writing
scores to be performed primarily by live players, but their sound was so
heavily mixed in the bass region that the brass and string players ended
up sounding like their sampled counterparts. So when you mix the live
players to sound like electronics and put a layer of synth elements into
that mix to boost the bass (or some other aspect of the recording), then
can you blame anybody for simply dismissing the entire result as
synthetic crap? The Hollywood Studio Orchestra, whose involvement on the
project is advertised, is drowned out (or simply doesn't perform) in
every single cue, leaving the abrasive programming of the Media Ventures
synthesizers to accomplish the scoring task by volume rather than class.
Woodwinds are intentionally devalued (a standard Bruckheimer demand that
endured into the following decade), meaning that the composers had no
incentive to write with any sense of style or delicacy. What few solo
fiddle or other elements there are in this score are mixed so far in the
background that their contribution is useless. Outside of purely
orchestral string performances in "Walk the Plank" and "Moonlight
Serenade," the score is a pounding array of the usual staccato rhythms
and synthesized orchestra hits that we have come to expect from these
people. If you hear synthesized cellos in your nightmares, then be aware
that they are relentless in
Pirates of the Caribbean, chopping
ceaselessly through extremely overused rhythms by the Media Ventures
artists. Brief respites of thirty seconds or so in length break up these
non-descript action explosions, leaving a person scratching his head and
wondering if this music really does make
Gladiator sound like a
masterpiece. The underlying structures are ideas that expired years ago,
a time capsule of
The Rock that has been repackaged with a
variation of its theme and combined with less than a minute of
swashbuckling-oriented music heard only at the start in "Fog
Bound."
The most disgraceful part of the pounding and shouting
score for
The Curse of the Black Pearl is that there is really
nothing swashbuckling about it. If you remove the tepid little
thirty-second jig from the start of the opening cue, then this score
could easily accompany a movie about alien attacks, police force raids,
chases for nuclear weapons, or any other militaristic setting. It
immediately begged the question:
Did none of these two dozen men at
Media Ventures actually walk across town and get on the ride at
Disneyland? Certainly, Zimmer and Badelt had both made America their
residence long enough prior to this assignment to spare a few moments on
the classic ride in Anaheim. Do your research, composers! If they had,
they would have heard the kind of jolly bayou swing that the real tale
of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" combined with its action music,
courtesy of George Bruns' original "Yo Ho" composition. The entire
concept of the jig, and the jolly rhythms that accompany the free
spirited nature of these pirates, was lost on Zimmer and Bruckheimer,
and therefore you get this ridiculously out of place, harshly modernized
interpretation of the genre that has nothing to do with the original
concept. The mark could not have been missed to any greater extent. As
such, the lack of soul, spirit, and spit in
Pirates of the
Caribbean is a matter of a massive failure in conceptualization
rather than instrumentation alone. A decent pirate score can be produced
from this Media Ventures crowd and their electronics, and we know this
because Zimmer himself wrote the more appropriate
Muppet Treasure
Island for Disney in the mid-1990's. While that score was able to
benefit from the silliness of its characters, it still exhibited the "Yo
Ho" spirit that is necessary in the genre. It is possible, perhaps, that
a change in instrumentation would have saved this music, for every score
collector knows that John Debney's
Cutthroat Island stands as a
classic because of the mere scope of orchestral power behind its
swashbuckling rhythms. Concurrently in 2003, Harry Gregson-Williams'
score to the animated film
Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas used
a real orchestra and combined it with snazzy, though stereotypical
pirate rhythms to a very effective end. Some proponents of the first
Pirates of the Caribbean score will argue that time did not allow
Zimmer and his crew the luxury of exploring such avenues, but the
franchise's sequel scores clearly indicate that unwillingness, not
inability due to deadlines, is the villain here.
In the end, however, Zimmer and his associates
completely failed to take inspiration from appropriate places for
The
Curse of the Black Pearl. Instead, they took a cue (or two or three
or twenty) from non-pirate related Media Ventures stock material. The
themes that do appear in this score are not strong enough for the genre,
nor do they exhibit any swing in rhythm themselves. The jaunty Jack
Sparrow idea has some minimal spirit and the primary theme, constantly
repeated and summed up with bravado in "He's a Pirate," has become a
staple of college band performances. Both ideas would figure strongly in
Zimmer's own sequel scores, the latter among the most famous film score
themes of the 2000's. Still, these themes are all reminiscent of prior
Zimmer and Media Ventures identities. The third minute of "One Last
Shot" is particularly shameless, an example of poor engineering because
its volume is so great that it causes high range distortion. Minimal
distortion can also be heard in the atrocious "Swords Crossed" cue, an
insufferable piece of music complete with electric guitars, which may
indicate that the distortion is due to simply a bad combination of
sounds rather than faulty mixing. The album, as a listening experience,
suffers from badly rearranged tracks, though it also fails to include
some of the more derivative cues from the film (indeed, the product
could have quoted even more Zimmer themes from the past had a lengthier
album been pressed). In 2007, Disney released the "Soundtrack Treasures
Collection" containing the first three scores' original albums, a bonus
music CD, and an interview DVD for $60 or more. The only addition to
The Curse of the Black Pearl on this set is an early 4-minute
demo from Zimmer (the endless remixes of "He's a Pirate" were all
previously released on their own pitiful product), a tremendous
disappointment for concept fans. On either the original or 2007 albums,
this score is definitely to be avoided by the vast majority of film
score collectors, for it will frustrate you with its total lack of
respect for the genre. Zimmer would be able to take credit for the
arguably better sequels, though they're all relatively simplistic and
juvenile works. Fortunately, there exist plenty of accomplished
swashbuckling scores that are 20,000 leagues ahead of what Zimmer,
Badelt and his several associates produced for this franchise. The
arguments of these Media Ventures (and later Remote Control) artists, as
well as anyone who might defend this work, mean nothing if they haven't
compared this piece of trash to the music of the "Pirates of the
Caribbean" ride at Disneyland. This music is a socio-political disaster
for the film music community equivalent to what Wal-Mart is to the world
at large.
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| Bias Check: |
For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.86
(in 118 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.01
(in 290,888 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert of the 2003 album includes no extra information about
the score or film, but the names of nearly everyone involved with the
project are given pirate-related nicknames. The 2007 "Soundtrack
Treasures Collection" contains extra notation about the music. Its DVD
contents include "Making of a Score" (19:48), a general production
overview of the scores, "The Man Behind the Pirates Music" (17:38), an
interview with Zimmer alone with recording sessions footage, and "Hans
Zimmer's Live Performance at Disneyland for the World Premiere of
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" (8:37).
