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Not only did this John-emphasized structure push Hans Zimmer's role for The Road to El Dorado down to a minimal level, but it also failed to sustain a film which flopped despite John's music. This heavy emphasis on the songs left Zimmer and his associate for the project, the up and coming animation composer John Powell, with less to accomplish. Their score was scattered throughout the film in mostly 2-minute segments, and this left them with an inability to establish a dominant theme or stylistic personality for the score. Thus, what little score there existed became an uncoordinated sampling of different Media Ventures sounds; veteran film music collectors will easily be able to distinguish Zimmer's style from Powell's, the latter of which would largely inform his subsequent work in the genre. Zimmer wrote the "cool" sequences requiring lazy, Caribbean-style rhythms with soft percussion and acoustic guitar. The most notable piece by Zimmer, "Chelorado," features the easily listenable, somewhat loungey guitar work of Heitor Pereira, and has a swing (and several chord progressions) that sounds like a page taken directly from the song "I'd Be Surprisingly Good for You" in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita. Zimmer also composed the cues that exhibit a slight Latin edge, and when his techniques aren't cliche in their reorganization of ideas from the similarly Latin-flavored score from James Horner for The Mask of Zorro, they tend to be rather mundane. Powell contributed to the more outwardly creative, full ensemble cues, including "To Shibala," which stirs memories of the vocals from the end of John Williams' Star Wars: The Phantom Menace but does offer a beautiful string interlude, "Save El Dorado," the most typical, keyboarded Media Ventures action cue complete with seemingly electronic string mixes, and "The Ball Game," an insufferably overenthusiastic Mexican-rhythmed dance number. Most Zimmer and Powell fans base their complaints about The Road to El Dorado not on the content of the music, but rather the lack of that material featured on the commercial album. But the bigger complaint should be that the mismatched styles in the highly disparate score cues don't create a cohesive whole. There is no theme, no passion, no motif, no element to remember and take away from their contribution to this film.

The John songs are their own entity as well, with only the song "The Panic in Me" featuring some of Zimmer's writing (from "Chelorado"). The rest of John's music has nothing to do with the score, and it has painfully little to do with the Latin flavor of the film. In short, it's a commercialized pop-song disaster. When you combine this bad musical chemistry with the uninspiring visuals in the film, you end up with a total dud. The commercial album is likewise a daunting item to tolerate. Instead of releasing a thousand different albums for The Road to El Dorado (as had been done with The Prince of Egypt), the powerful influence of John caused the soundtrack to be packaged and advertised as "Elton John's The Road to El Dorado," like a solo album with no composition credits given to Zimmer or Powell anywhere on the outer packaging. Several of the John songs on the album aren't even related to the picture. A few are remixes, and one in particular, the duet with Randy Newman, is an embarrassment. The film version of that particular song, "It's Tough to Be a God," is not presented. Twelve or so minutes of material by Zimmer (two cues) and Powell (three cues rolled into a suite) are offered as an afterthought, and they are too brief to satisfy a score collector. The surprising aspect about The Road to El Dorado (for you score fans in an uproar over this) is that there is not that much unreleased score from this film. Zimmer and Powell simply did not write much material for the production. Nevertheless, with Media Ventures music often filtering out in bootleg form (and it's tough to tell if these are originally promos that quickly spiral out of control into bootlegs), a more complete album was inevitable. The first bootleg of 2001 was a 37-minute expansion of material straight from the film and a few extra score cues by both Zimmer and Powell. A second bootleg, a little less polished, then emerged at 60 minutes and offered the previous bootleg in combination with the commercial song album (plus the Japanese release bonus song), making for arguably a more complete presentation of music from the film. The extra Powell and Zimmer score on these bootlegs only amounts to about five extra minutes of music (most notably the cues "Spain 1519/Tulio & Miguel" and "The Gods are Here!!!"). Even extreme Zimmer collectors should be aware that these cues aren't worth the trouble, and score fans would best be served by simply writing off all of The Road to El Dorado as a loss and move on.   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

• Commercial Albums:  **
• Bootleg #1 (14 tracks):  **
• Bootleg #2 (18 tracks):  ***
• Overall:  **

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 298,225 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.