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Review of Tears of the Sun (Hans Zimmer)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you can forgive Hans Zimmer and his army of co-writers for
conjuring a hopelessly disjointed score of forced authenticity that does manage to
yield two memorable performances by Lebo M.
Avoid it... if you're tired of hearing Zimmer try so hard to produce stylish world music that he loses focus on the task of lending a truly effective sense of character and heart to his music.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Tears of the Sun: (Hans Zimmer/Various) A commentary about the
harrowing political state of governmental corruption and failure in Africa, Antoine
Fuqua's Tears of the Sun 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 Tears of the
Sun 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 Tears of the Sun. 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 The Thin Red
Line and Gladiator 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 Pearl Harbor
(which nevertheless translated into an excellent album) and a brutally overbearing
mesh of sound effects and varied music for Black Hawk Down, film critics
relentlessly tore into Zimmer and his team for their efforts in Tears of the
Sun.
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. ***
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 46:36
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert includes lyrics by Lebo M, extensive credits, and a list of
performers.
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