PRINTER FRIENDLY VIEW
(inverts site colors)

•	2006 Album

•	2007 Album

•	2006 Album

For those of you who have difficulty accepting this simplistic Pirates of the Caribbean music as appropriate for the genre, there's good reason for your concern. Supporters of the modern sound will call you stubborn or pre-programmed, but you've got history on your side. There's a reason why the original Korngold vision of swashbuckling music has endured so long. It's been employed by maestros since then, often with great effect. Why? Because it simply works. There are intangibles about the soaring effect of orchestral sailing music that stir the imagination like none other. If you look at the definition of something "swashbuckling," it's "flamboyantly adventurous." In a masculine sense, Hans Zimmer's current electronically-aided blockbuster style could be called adventurous. If you're in a technological setting, it matches the adventure well, and in his developing theme for Jack Sparrow in Dead Man's Chest, he tried to capture the flamboyant side of the character's wit. To be flamboyant, though, you have to be elaborate, ornate, and resplendent. Its own definition includes "richly colored," a phrase that dooms Zimmer's score because of the music's inability to resonate with the brilliant beauty and splendor necessary for the high seas (because, of course, the brute masculinity prevents it). If Zimmer wishes to persist with his deep bass droning and limited instrumentation, then a flamboyant presence is simply not possible. Instead of flamboyance, the best he can accomplish is a pounded, melodramatic sense of adventure, which is why you hear a cue at the end of Dead Man's Chest that sounds as though someone's just disarmed a huge bomb, saved the world, or discovered the Holy Grail. Especially for those of us who have heard Zimmer from the start, how can we blindly accept this music for a historical Caribbean pirate genre when it's already seen its glory days in scenes where fighter planes are bombing Alcatraz Island and George Clooney is chasing nukes from a helicopter? Do people really wonder why the score nearly ruins the film for others? This is by no means an attack on modern instrumention. There is no reason why an intelligently incorporated expansion of the traditional swashbuckling palette couldn't include synthetic samples, rock percussion, and even electric guitars. The samples are a tricky slope, but not fatal. John Debney has used guitars very well with orchestral ensembles (a la The Scorpion King), and he likely would have had no problems sprinkling them wisely into something like Cutthroat Island, considered by many collectors to be the best swashbuckling score of the modern age despite the film's terrible struggles.

Hans Zimmer's limited blockbuster palette has proven such a flamboyantly adventurous, elaborate, ornate, and resplendent score to be impossible. And this brings us to the second problem with these Pirates of the Caribbean scores (as previewed above). Let's assume that you accept and enjoy the modernized Bruckheimer and Zimmer sound for the genre, and let's assume you had no problem with the first score in its film. For you, the dynamic "Yo Ho" swing of George Bruns' original composition for the famed Disneyland ride is not necessary and maybe even outdated. If you look at Dead Man's Chest as a stand-alone score, or even just a stand-alone Hans Zimmer album, and compare it to his overarching body of work, it's derivative, boring, and occasionally irritating. Zimmer's made it very clear that he loves the same bass ostinatos, the same chord progressions, and the same instrumentation time and time again. Sometimes, when he throws all caution to the wind, and produces something shamelessly melodramatic, like King Arthur, it actually works as a good listening experience if you accept it as the steroid-popping kind of popcorn muscle that it is. In Dead Man's Chest, he tried some of that technique but didn't provide any spectacular new avenue on that line of thought. The "Hello Beastie" cue rambles on with several stereotypical Zimmer crescendos, all of which are frightfully old in sound. Much of the fault for this stale atmosphere exists in the instrumentation and mix of the music, or, perhaps more accurately, the instrumentation made necessary by Zimmer's desire for a certain mix. He prefers his scores to dwell so low in the bass, often in overwhelming volume meant to convey power, that the use of dynamic high-range instrumentation is either drowned out or not even attempted. Nary a woodwind is to be heard in this score. Nor will you hear higher brass ranges with any decent employment. Even the violins are reduced to supporting roles, often chopping uselessly behind broad choral strokes or the monumentally heavier lower string ranges. Zimmer has used so many horns at once, all in unison, that the effect is a harsh, nearly electronic sound that also contributes to the bass region in such a fashion that you can't really determine each time if they are real or synthesized. The organ in "The Kraken" would be so much more effective if Zimmer would lose the heartbeat effect by percussion, the churning bass strings, and the electric guitar effects, all of which perform in their absolute lowest ranges and dilute the specialty instrument. How can you hope to achieve any heightened sense of style when you continue to use an ensemble so often as a clubbing stick?

The album situation for all of the Pirates of the Caribbean scores has long been a source of frustration that stretches across all boundaries that typically divide the listeners of this music. At odds with the desire of fans to hear all the material from the films on album is Zimmer's tendency to prefer his music rearranged into suites for presentations apart from context. Also problematic is the fact that the music that you hear in the film often contains a different mix of orchestra, synthesizers, and other elements from what is chosen for the albums. Finally, you sometimes hear passages in this franchise of movies in which music from someplace else in the same score (or from one of those that preceded it) is tracked in to a circumstance that is sometimes unrelated to Zimmer's original intent for that music (On Stranger Tides was a disaster in these regards). After the original trilogy of Pirates of the Caribbean films debuted, fans requested expanded versions of the soundtracks on album, preferably in the luxurious, complete format established by the comprehensive sets representing Howard Shore's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In 2007, Disney released what many had hoped would be such treatment of those original Pirates of the Caribbean scores. The "Soundtrack Treasures Collection" of four CDs and a DVD was an immense disappointment, however, providing very few tracks of additional material that hadn't in some form been previously released. The CD dedicated to Dead Man's Chest (#2) is identical to the commercial product, and the remixes on the fourth CD are simply shorter versions of those already heard before (though who actually wants to hear that trash remains a question). The supposedly new score tracks on that fourth CD are mostly rearrangements of themes already released, some of them simply elongated or merged into more palatable tracks. From Dead Man's Chest, you hear a string rendition of the Davy Jones theme in "The Heart of Davy Jones," several unused versions of Beckett's theme in "Lord Cutler Beckett" (some of which better suited for the third film), and a sparse piano solo demo of Jack Sparrow's theme in "Jack's Theme Bare Bones Demo." Together, this collection of "new" music does not merit the high cost of the entire product, though perhaps fans will appreciate the DVD that comes with the set and shows recording studio footage and interviews about the formulation of the music. In the end, though, the "Soundtrack Treasures Collection" is a slap in the face by Disney to all of the film music collectors and concept enthusiasts who deserve, despite the arguably poor quality of these scores, a decent presentation of this famous music.

Overall, whether you can accept this style of music as appropriate for the swashbuckling genre or not, Dead Man's Chest is a mundane, predictable effort. Zimmer does attempt to broaden the dynamic range of the score by providing new character themes with deviations in rhythm and instrumentation from the original. But these deviations are still well within his usual stylistic parameters, nullifying the listener's ability to really appreciate any of these attempts. If you did not enjoy The Curse of the Black Pearl, you stand only a minimal chance of finding merit in Dead Man's Chest. If you specifically appreciated the constant frenzy of activity in the first score, then the sequel score could very well disappoint you in the absence of such flow as well. The battle lines that were drawn during the debate about the original score will persist, with Alan Silvestri fans continuing to bemoan his unnecessary termination from the franchise. Such people should certainly take aim at Bruckheimer rather than Zimmer, for it was Bruckheimer's vision of the Hollywood blockbuster soundtrack that has given birth to Zimmer's now famous style and methodology. That standardized methodology of the Media Ventures (and now Remote Control) production house includes the use of ghostwriters, and as mentioned above in this review, a note about those ghostwriters should be made. It was speculated by the hapless representative of another, now defunct soundtrack review website that the seven co-writers of this Dead Man's Chest score shouldn't be referred to as "ghostwriters" because they are credited in the booklet. Indeed, a "ghostwriter" is one who "gives the credit of authorship to someone else," and these Media Ventures clones are indeed credited. But are they really? Are their names on the covers of the CD booklet? Are their names on the movie poster? Are their names listed next to Zimmer's in the primary credits during the film? Are their names in a larger-than-minimum font size in the album booklet? And, perhaps most importantly, are they recognized for the extent of their contributions? Do we know what, exactly, they wrote? The answer to all of these questions is no, and that's why they're still ghostwriters. One would hope that with all these auxiliary composers, the diversity of the scores would range far better from the usual Hans Zimmer parade of sounds. And, as with before, it's hard to believe that none of these people took a clue from the music in the actual "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride at Disneyland. Unfortunately, Dead Man's Chest regurgitates previous Zimmer stock material more often than it invents, once again leaving Muppet Treasure Island as Zimmer's most interesting effort in the genre.  *   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.84 (in 121 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.96 (in 298,172 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.