: (Hans Zimmer/Various) A commentary about the
harrowing political state of governmental corruption and failure in Africa, Antoine
Fuqua's
packages a Bruce Willis action story into a
sometimes overbearing, but still compelling message about genocide. Leading a group
of American troops in Nigeria to rescue a U.S. aide worker targeted for death,
Willis' soldier instead finds himself leading a mission of Christians on a trek to
the Cambodian border, where they'll hopefully find relief from a new Muslim
government of Nigeria that has set its sights on the elimination of Christians in
the country. Despite a plethora of often ridiculous dialogue and an occasionally
overwrought political message, the technical production values of
compensate to maintain an entertaining mass chase sequence late in the
film. One of the aspects about the film that was most blasted by respected film
critics, however, was its score by Hans Zimmer and a variety of Media Ventures
contributors. The solo career of Zimmer had been slowly fading away in the early
2000's, with the highly popular composer rarely composing a single score by himself
in the five years leading up to
. Zimmer's involvement as
the head of his Media Ventures organization, a music studio that gave young
composers an opportunity to contribute to major scores before branching out on
their own, had caused him to rely heavily upon these available talents to co-write
nearly all of his scores of the decade. Most interested, seemingly, in war pictures
(and especially those with an ethnic tilt), Zimmer produced a string of popular,
though not always successful mainstream scores for the genre. While
gained the composer Academy Award nominations and
mass album sales, his three following war-related scores came under heavy negative
criticism from not just soundtrack critics, but from major, international film
critics as well. After a suspiciously out of place score for
(which nevertheless translated into an excellent album) and a brutally overbearing
mesh of sound effects and varied music for
The topic of the film presented an opportunity for Zimmer to
revisit the African ethnicity that he enjoyed success with in
The Power of
One and
The Lion King, though perhaps the appeal was waning. Undaunted,
his long-standing collaboration with Lebo M was an obvious choice for the
foundation of this score, and Zimmer drew upon several of his usual colleagues,
including Lisa Gerrard of
Gladiator fame, to produce a hybrid war and ethnic
song soundtrack. The majority of the dozen or so national critics who blasted
Zimmer's contribution to
Tears of the Sun usually did so because it was
either "distracting" or "irritating." The most colorful such description came in
the New York Times, which described it as "wretched fake-world-music." For those
who have heard
Black Hawk Down and
The Power of One and are trying to
imagine a rough combination of the two, it would be easy to hear how such a pairing
would be tricky to handle. Zimmer pulls it off, but he does so in a way that
produces music that functions only as a basic tool to meet the expectations of
Western ears while at the same time, ironically, abandoning a clean sense of
accessibility. In short, it aims to be stylistically impressive rather than
appropriately practical in much of its length. If one was to determine why Zimmer's
scores had been becoming more elaborate works of art at the time (rather than the
simple, straightforward film scores he built his career on), a conclusion could
easily be reached that Zimmer was simply trying too hard to be stylish. It proves
that you can't force style into a film score; it is something that will flow
naturally out of a strong composition with the right instrumentation. And yet, for
Tears of the Sun, Zimmer pulls out all the stops to feature top
international voices, several of his best Media Ventures colleagues, huge
instrumental ensembles, rock band elements, and obscure ethnic instrumentation in
arrays that no human has heard before. The culmination of this immense effort is a
disjointed score that overwhelms in its size and occasionally its passion, but
lacks a central heart or spirit. The frustration for some Zimmer collectors in a
case like
Tears of the Sun is hearing the composer go to such extraordinary
lengths as a musical director of all these efforts just to hear an aimless finished
product in the end. A lack of focus is key.
When all is said and done, Zimmer's coordination of magnificently
edited sound for
Tears of the Sun couldn't save the film from being a
theatrical disappointment and opened his work to scathing criticism in the context
of that film. From the perspective of the album, Zimmer's music is far more
cohesive than
Black Hawk Down. You still get the feeling that a different
person is writing each track (which, in this case, is nearly true), and thus a
truly consistent mood is absent. The score has some horrific cues that are barely
tolerable and several that exist at a level of conservative minimalism below
anything heard in
The Thin Red Line. These juxtaposed styles, with
instrumentation switching violently between the cues, gives the score a fatally
split personality. The saving element, ironically, is Lebo M, whose pair of
co-written cues with Zimmer at the end ("Cameroon Border Post" and "Kopano Part
III") provide some excellent, intense action music and a pleasant (though endlessly
repeating) song that was immediately a strong candidate for concert arrangement.
These final two cues are more hearty and powerful compositions by Zimmer, not
stretched simply by the need for an extra element of creativity, and they are among
the most satisfying of Zimmer's work in the decade. That said, there's an
artificiality to these two cues that causes them to seem forced; Zimmer may have
been better served by dialing back these overwhelming performances, though they do
provide ten minutes of very memorable material that are a necessary inclusion in
any survey of his career. The score finally shows its true character in these final
cues, and while this material saves the album from mediocrity, it can't pull the
first three-quarters of the album up to its level. The manipulation of orchestral
elements (in usual melodramatic Zimmer fashion) to sound as synthetic as their
actual electronic counterparts is a tactic in full swing here, and the ethnic
percussion is employed without much subtlety. The score proved that the "stylish"
Zimmer was slowly replacing the raw talent heard in the ten years previous to
Tears of the Sun, and it made some listeners wish that he would simply
relax, drop the endless cameo appearances by other artists, and write a solid,
singular score of cohesive distinction for a major, successful motion picture. On
its own,
Tears of the Sun provides an example of an underachieving score
that trips over the many feet of its own massive ensemble of artists.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.86
(in 119 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 2.97
(in 294,665 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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