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Review of Superman (2025) (John Murphy/David Fleming)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... to be reminded that John Williams' legacy themes are
classy, emotive, and sophisticated, traits confirmed once again by the
contrasting trailer-appropriate trash forced from the loins in this hideous, "modern"
interpolation.
Avoid it... and revisit John Ottman's 2006 score for Superman Returns to appreciate a truly respectful and superior treatment of the original Williams themes in a new context.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Superman: (John Murphy/David Fleming) What started
as yet another sequel to the Man of Steel lineage on screen,
2025's Superman ultimately became yet another reboot of the
franchise. By the insistence of filmmaker James Gunn, the film sought to
pay homage to the 1978 original on screen, from the story adaptation to
the artwork and even the music. It's yet another fresh telling for
Clark Kent, re-establishing his roots, rural family life, job at
a metropolitan newspaper, and crush on Lois Lane. As usual, master
criminal Lex Luthor is the antagonist with all the wrong ideas about
humanity's future, but this story throws in additional superheroes to
start Kent off with some companions, including his dog, Krypto.
Absolutely none of this was necessary, but the studio's assumption is
that the movie was destined to generate over half a billion of dollars
in revenue, so thus we have yet another redundant entry in the concept.
To its credit, initial critical response was surprisingly positive. One
area that sought to straddle the line between new and old is the music
for Superman. Gunn, who had created the Guardians of the
Galaxy franchise, dialed back the number of song placements in this
film, but a handful still made it into the equation. Trickier was the
original score, to which he once again turned to his prior collaborator,
John Murphy. The director insisted that John Williams' iconic theme from
the 1978 movie factor into the new score, and Murphy set forth very
early in the production process to generate ideas on how to supplement
Williams' famous material with new secondary themes. At some point in
the process, the Hans Zimmer conglomerate, Remote Control, waded deeply
into the project, and some of the famous composer's ghostwriters ended
up providing music for Superman as well. Leading that group is
David Fleming, who has shown promise in his work with and without
Zimmer, notably on Damsel the prior year. While Murphy and
Fleming handled different cues, they interchanged themes and
interpretations of the surviving Williams identities, with the Fleming
portions utilizing most of the additional writers familiar to countless Zimmer
productions.
Ultimately, you can usually distinguish the difference between Murphy and Fleming's styles, the former hip and contemporary in a rock sense and the latter infusing the ultra-masculine Zimmer synthetics, orchestra, and choir. How you interpret the end result of their "modernization" of the music depends on your opinion about its concept's history. The 1978 Williams score is no doubt a classic, but it harkens back to a brighter time in the public's view of the world. Zimmer and his crew of ghostwriters provided a completely different, electronically oppressive and critically lambasted take on the character in 2013's Man of Steel. Several scores have emulated the Man of Steel model through the years since, but only one really nailed the Williams technique, and that was John Ottman's superb Superman Returns in 2006. On the surface, listeners may think that Murphy and Fleming were attempting to walk a fine line between the Williams and Zimmer approaches, which would seem sensible given studio and audience expectations. But the problem with that strategy is that Williams' material is simply incompatible with Zimmer's popular sound on a very basic level. Even though Superman Returns was the model for total success in this adaptation, the 2025 movie ignored that precedent and instead made a totally futile attempt to actually fuse the two sounds together. The harrowing result is on par with the quality of Man of Steel but is awful in different ways. Zimmer's score was simply terrible on its own merit. This time, you hear Williams' music crucified, and that emotional gut punch is arguably worse. What you hear is like Williams' music run through a Zimmer artificial intelligence filter to make it bigger, heavier, and more bad-ass in every cue of any significant volume. Weighty brass, string ostinatos, electric guitars, synthetic enhancements everywhere, and some manipulation all greet the wary listener, with acoustic guitar for lesser character cues. As usual in this model, the strings seem fake as they are written for and recorded, the mix sounding inauthentic at every turn. The outright explosions of rock are about as different from the original concept's intent as possible, signaling the ultimate dumbing-down of this sullied franchise. One cannot blame time as being a major factor in the disaster that is the soundtrack for 2025's Superman, as both composers and their crews reportedly had been involved so early in the project that they wrote themes based on nascent concepts prior to shooting. When not punching you in the face with one of the thematic identities, the score often defaults back to mindless Remote Control action with manipulated synths, as heard in "Hammer of Boravia," "Bases Loaded," and "Upgrade." If that's not enough, you also receive mindless Remote Control fantasy vocals with deep thumping stingers for realizations in "The Message," "Pocket Universe," "Something Like a Sun," "Speeding Bullet," and "Driven by Envy." The Williams interpolations are everywhere but they're typically shallow. (Incidentally, some of the Williams-credited cues don't have any discernable Williams passages in them). Only two of the classic 1978 main theme's parts survive here, and there's a cameo for the Kent family identity as well. From there, Murphy is reported to have led the new themes for the Lois and Clark romance and Lex Luthor while Fleming helmed the ideas for the new Justice Gang, the Daily Planet, and everything related to Krypton, including the dog. None of Williams' other themes were retained, and not even the entirety of the main one is accessed, which makes the remaining pieces sound orphaned and weird in this context. The composers clearly got hung up on the main, eight-note Williams brass fanfare, and while both composers adapted it, Fleming handles it most frequently. Its renderings are atrocious, an insult to the noble heroism of Williams' structures and orchestrations. You hear a Williams theme in trailer-trash mode, all of it pounding and overemphasized as if a whole score was fashioned like the bloated music of a two-minute preview. The composers often just repeat the first two phrases without moving on to the second two for resolution, which is immensely dissatisfying as well. With the underlying rhythmic formations, connective interludes, and the original love theme all absent, the remaining phrases sound annoyingly repetitious. The underlying harmonics are adjusted to give it an increasingly dumber anthemic feel as well, an effort to supply as much melodrama to each turn of the phrase as possible because the melodic line alone is apparently no longer enough to retain interest of the average movie-goer. The interpolations of Williams' eight-note fanfare from 1978 start at the beginning of "Home" on solitary horn and close the cue, later appended to the Williams Kent family theme cameo in "Last Son." From there, the melody is destroyed, forced into masculine bravado twice in "Eyes Up Here" without any class whatsoever, the first phrase obnoxiously repeating over and over without going anywhere. It's reharmonized at the end of "Justice Gang vs. Kaiju" to inject more testosterone into it and explodes with even more testicular power in the middle of "Jailbreak." The fanfare pounds its way through the end of "The Rift" with stupid, percussively slapping attention and persists repeatedly without any variation in its bloated masculine form in "Look Up." It finally carries some lofty trumpet lines above the ruckus late in "Being Human" but recedes in the score from there. The actual main melodic lines of Williams' theme appear separately, initially reduced to solo electric guitar plucking at 0:20 into "Home" and building intensity with the intent of generating excessive coolness. It attempts some chime-banging importance over booming bass and choir late in "The River Pi." An electric guitar takes the theme to Top Gun territory in "Raising the Flag," in which the orchestral and choral accompaniment sounds completely artificial and horrendously shallow. This score fails if only because of this wretched cue alone. The main Williams theme is later very slight in the early, bland fantasy choir of "Remote Control" and recurs on brass with thumping percussion and choir at 1:17 into "Look Up." As mentioned before, Williams' theme for the Kent family is offered one token moment in the middle of "Last Son" that then bleeds into the main theme's performance. From there, the new themes take over, and they are a miserable lot. Fleming's new Krypton theme is a simple repetitive phrase largely built upon three-note phrases that are the modern equivalent of Williams' alternative and seem inspired by it to some degree. (Why not simply adapt the original?) Heard in full glory at 1:28 into "Home," this idea opens "Last Son" with more distant whimsy and choral accompaniment, emulating Williams' "The Planet Krypton" cue in its large crescendo but in this case ejaculating in full form at the end of the cue. Subtle on keyboards in the middle of "Your Choices, Your Actions," this identity erupts on childish electric guitar in the latter half of "Look Up," takes the inspirational fantasy route with choir at the start of "Being Human," and cameos during part of the love theme performance in "Walking on Air." Fleming's new theme for the Daily Planet newspaper is an upbeat rhythmic beat with melodic woodwind lines that don't really grab much attention. Defined throughout "The Daily Planet" in pleasant but substanceless form, this theme returns rather abruptly in similar shades during the first half of "The Rift." His Justice Gang theme, meanwhile, is an anonymously rising figure of moderate heroism opens "Justice Gang vs. Kaiju" and is passed around later in the idiotic, pounding action cue. Returning without any joy or excitement in "Jailbreak" and "The River Pi," this idea is sharpened in the overblown minor mode late in "Bases Loaded," brightens again during the action of "Speeding Bullet," and tries to emerge in the melodrama at the end of "Driven by Envy." On Murphy's part, the new love theme is about as big a letdown from Williams' identity as one could imagine, with no warmth or romance. It's a truly awful replacement that has no importance to it whatsoever. A subtle acoustic guitar melody of meandering pointlessness in "Lois & Clark," this theme meanders without purpose again in "The Real Punk Rock," the strings too processed here for any heart. It still struggles to ineffectual ends on the guitar in "Take the T-Craft" but finally discovers some actual romantic footing in "Metropolis" with the orchestra prior to pushing back to its guitar origins in "Walking on Air." Murphy's identity for Luthor uses grungy minor third alternations of rhythmic simplicity over harmonic shifts and a somewhat melodramatic melody that stews over the top. It isn't memorable, though, despite trying to correct one true flaw of seriousness from Williams' original score. The underlying rhythm dominates "LuthorCorp" with the theme emerging at 0:52 and 1:19, the cartoonish idea with choir offering no sophistication at all. The Luthor theme blasts on synths and drum kit with oppressive malice in "Intruders," reduces to solo cello tones of sinister mystery in "Secret Harem," vaguely informs the suspense of "Pocket Universe," and conveys no actual menace in the massively formulaic rendition in the second half of "The Rift." The idea lets loose in full rock bravado in "Upgrade" but broods on strings and choir in "Luthor the Traitor" without any of the elegance of the adversary. These new themes for Superman are ineffective and dumb in their expression, and only the director and studio can be blamed for this travesty. What does Williams think of what the industry has become? Does the style of his music suck too much for modern ears? This score takes Williams' history and forces it through Zimmer's F1 methodology, and the result sounds childish and cheap. Unlike anything here, Williams' themes have class. *
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 76:58
NOTES & QUOTES:
There exists no official packaging for this album.
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