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| Zimmer |
The Ring/
The Ring Two: (Hans Zimmer/Various)
The hysteria revolving around the mid-2000's franchise of
The
Ring all began with Koji Suzuki's popular novel in Japan, featuring
a metaphorical horror story that warns of a cursed video tape that, upon
being viewed, begins a seven-day countdown to that viewer's death. It's
one of those classic, ridiculous urban legend concepts that has
cinematic legs, and one that builds upon a foundation of supernatural
menace rather than the usual slasher-related horror tales. In Japan, the
story was translated to the big screen in the 1998 hit film
Ringu, and its popularity led to a subsequent series of novels,
three subsequent movies, and a TV series. An interpretation of the
legend in American cinema was inevitable, and
Fear Dot Com
somewhat borrowed from the same concept while
The Ring finally
adapted the original idea in 2002. Followers of the Japanese originals
criticized director Gore Verbinski's American version immediately,
stating that its plot had been made incoherent because of the
filmmakers' attempts to condense the best ideas from the growing legend
into one film. For susceptible American viewers, however, the fresh
urban legend and a well-performed and executed product launched it to
box office success. Three years later, and with a new director at the
helm, the inevitable sequel moves the surviving primary characters from
the original setting of Seattle to Astoria, Oregon, where a fresh new
curse predictably begins another round of killings all over again. With
his career never establishing the horror genre to any great extent
during its earlier half, composer Hans Zimmer saw
The Ring as an
opportunity to branch out into the realm of musical horror master
Christopher Young. It was a project that would share a basic genre with
Hannibal, for which Zimmer co-wrote a very popular,
classically-inclined score, but these two genre entries for the composer
could not be further from each other in style. Whereas
Hannibal
is a horror score based on beauty, intelligence, and elegance,
The
Ring clearly required nothing so thoughtful.
Both
The Ring and
The Ring Two prey upon
primordial emotions, like any good urban legend flick, and thus the
scores required a very simple, atmospheric approach in their tone and
structures. With additional material written by Jim Dooley, Henning
Lohner, and Martin Tillman, a small orchestral ensemble and a few
soloists comprise the performers in both works. The bulk of music in
The Ring is constructed from a base ensemble of a piano, a
violin, and two cellos. The piano and violin offer the plain,
(purposely) underdeveloped sensibilities of the story's primary
character, her care for her family, and her investigative instincts.
There are significant cues, including the lengthy "Floating Minds,"
consisting of contemplative underscore that borders on the realm of
troubled dissonance, with the two highlighted instruments performing
subtle, meandering motifs alongside a harp. Zimmer very slowly
introduces and develops his thematic material in
The Ring, and
between elusive statements on mainly the piano and violin, it takes
nearly the entire length of the score to realize where that rather
unceremonious theme is leading. A small, accompanying ensemble of
strings, perhaps a synthetic library or two, and various percussion
accents present an adequately tense, though occasionally uninteresting
base environment for the score. The synthesizers employ a fair amount of
unsettling distortion in their samples, and the string section often
reacts much the same way, raising tension by simply using themselves as
one combined sound effect (whether by screeching, whining, or striking).
Most listeners will recognize the two cellos, performed by Martin
Tillmann and Anthony Pleeth, to be the heart and soul of the score,
their typically disjointed performances representing the true horror
element in
The Ring. Almost never stating the same motif or theme
in unison, the two cellos play well off of each other in order to create
a unique method of confusing and frightening the audience. Consider it a
twisted form of instrumental taunting with subtle jabs at the listener
that never coalesce into a full expression of dread, guilt, or outright
fright in the ways you'd expect for an entry in this genre.
In sum, the score for
The Ring doesn't really
sustain its appeal very well outside of the context of the film,
providing some intriguing ideas for enthusiasts of Zimmer and his crew
to consider, but not expressing its ideas in such a form as to define
itself as a solid listening experience, as many Christopher Young horror
scores do. The end credits do finally condense all of the best ideas
from the score into one surprisingly engaging and impressive suite, and
the long-awaited development of these ideas in that eight-minute track
saves the score from total mediocrity. Zimmer even throws a dying, young
girl's vocal at the end of this suite, playing to the expected psyche of
the cult. For the purposes of
The Ring Two, Lohner and Tillman
primarily tackled the sequel (using Zimmer material) in two strikingly
different and arguably very ineffective ways. The first idea in the
score seems to involve a simple expansion of the sound in the previous
entry. With a fuller sound to the string orchestra (the sense of
heightened violence of their performances is easier to appreciate in
this recording), the reprised appearances of themes from the first film
have more beef in instrumental substance, although the rather stale
structures will be highly familiar and perhaps disappointing to fans of
the original score. If you heard nothing distinctly original or
compelling in
The Ring, then the rehash of ideas in the
derivative half of
The Ring Two will likely not interest you,
either. The other, more curious part of
The Ring Two is the
mass-electrification of four cues for the film. Sharing little in
continuity with the other music existing between the two pictures, the
electric guitar, percussion, and other basic pop band elements cheapen
the score by turning it into a rock-laced attempt at "coolness" in an
otherwise atmospheric domain. With compositional credit pointing to
Tillman, the two final cues from
The Ring Two, as well as the two
remixes that appear at the end of the commercial compilation album
containing both scores, are extreme disappointments. In some cases, they
take the orchestral performances heard elsewhere in the films and
overlay blasting guitars and modern percussive rhythms that all but ruin
the listening experience established by the previous material.
Despite the success of the film, as well as the
marketability of Zimmer's name in the years just after
Gladiator,
no record label picked up the rights to
The Ring and pressed an
album release. A variety of wild reasons for this circumstance flew
about over subsequent years, including an unconfirmed report that Zimmer
himself was unhappy with the outcome of the project and blocked a
possible album. As expected, the lack of availability for
The
Ring created an uproar with Zimmer and associated Media
Ventures/Remote Control collectors who had become accustomed to hearing
all of his scores on album. Desperate fans, however, were treated to a
"promotional" release of
The Ring not long after the film's debut
that included about 25 minutes of the score. The only reason this "TIL
Music Group" album even has the term "promotional" associated with it is
because much of the music in its contents was voluntarily streamed on
the website of one of the associated composers (Dooley), thus blurring
the lines in whether the intent of the music leak was for promotional
purposes, or, in the worst of cases, out of spite for the fact that no
commercial album existed. At any rate, this music was quickly taken off
the website by fans and pressed onto the original "promotional bootleg."
It was then filtered out by others almost immediately after the
realization that no commercial album would exist for the score, and, as
to be expected, a few bootlegged versions were created for those who
wanted to scrounge around and add even more music from the film. Music
produced by Zimmer and his production house often has a way of finding
itself leaked onto the secondary market, with the group perhaps existing
as the most easily bootlegged ensemble of artists in the film music
industry today, so the fact that several different versions of
The
Ring were wandering about the secondary market quite quickly (and
eventually including the complete sessions) should come as no surprise
to Zimmer, his army of assistant, the studio, or anyone else. So often
are digital versions of their recording sessions leaving the front doors
of their studios that you have to wonder if such mass bootlegging of
their music concerns them to any extent at all.
For
The Ring, the original "TIL Music Group"
album had eight cues based on the first leak of the music, and before
too long, a fan-created suite had been added to the end (essentially
just an edit of the ideas heard in the original end credits, without the
girl's vocals) and, with new artwork, the common nine-track, 33-minute
bootleg was born. Still, more material from the film was missing from
the album, and a ten-track, 38-minute bootleg then appeared in late
2003. This second bootleg maintained similar packaging but included
several short cues from the film's DVD edited (without sound effects or
dialogue, but often with abrupt cuts) into a five-minute suite. For
nearly all collectors, the original eight-track "promo" of
The
Ring would have sufficed, because the end credits cue that appears
on all of them includes the best material from the film. When
The
Ring Two entered the scene in 2005, Zimmer and Universal decided to
finally release both the original and sequel score together on one CD.
With so much material shared between the two scores, that decision was a
no-brainer. The 2005 Decca album was the first commercial release of
music from either film, and for collectors of the bootlegs of the first
score, this commercial product features a strong arrangement of music in
significantly clearer sound. In fact, the improved sound quality alone
is worth the purchase price for most Zimmer die-hards. The problem is,
however, that the 2005 album does not differentiate between music from
The Ring and original performances for
The Ring Two,
leading you to believe that there may have been a significant "cut and
paste" operation in progress when the score for the sequel was being
prepared. Regardless of the tracking of existing music into
The Ring
Two, the final four highly synthetic and pop-culture remix cues on
this album are definitely new, and, as discussed above, they all but
ruin the listening experience. Overall, the mass hysteria over this
music never made much sense, because
The Ring, as functional and
occasionally interesting as it may be, is not much more than very
typical ambient suspense. If you can forget for a moment that
The
Ring is a Zimmer work and realize that the film's cult status has
instead caused all the interest, then you may discover that the score is
average at best and unsettling at its worst, while
The Ring Two
is a combination of rehash and remix that further muddies the waters.
@Amazon.com: CD or
Download
- Music as Written for Both Films: **
- Music as Heard on All Albums: **
- Overall: **
| Bias Check: |
For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.94
(in 96 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 2.97
(in 275,216 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
None of the albums (promotional, bootleg, or commercial) includes
any extra information about the score or film.
