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Review of Thunderbolts* (Son Lux)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... for the sheer irreverence of its strategy, the trio of
composers throwing the franchise's musical conventions aside for a
uniquely divergent blend of haphazard styles.
Avoid it... if you have no tolerance for substandard thematic narratives and extreme post-production manipulation, the latter ruining entire sequences of this wayward score.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Thunderbolts*: (Son Lux) In the never-ending quest
for additional characters to flood into merchandising channels, Walt
Disney and Marvel Studios brought the "New Avengers" to the screen in
2025's Thunderbolts*, introducing new actors into familiar roles
while bringing a few others along for fresh adventures. The approach
this time presents the protagonists as misfits and antiheroes, giving
the movie a counterculture feel. A new CIA director has taken over the
Avengers Tower and now calls it the Watchtower (the Jehovah's Witnesses
rejoice!), and much of the plot involves her secret association with an
extremely tiresomely predictable superhuman development project called
Sentry. She pits heroes against each other but eventually unites the
unlikely gang into the group that will eventually confront her, though
their exploits only really establish the premise for the next films in
the endless franchise. While a number of the Marvel Cinematic Universe
movies of the early 2020's have failed miserably at the box office,
Thunderbolts* managed to impress audiences and critics alike, its
antihero model well suiting the mood of audiences at the moment.
Director Jake Schreier wanted the film to have a personality distinctly
different from the rest of the franchise and arguably pulled it off, and
one of the ways in which the film is different is in its soundtrack. The
director hired Son Lux, an experimental band consisting of Ryan Lott,
Ian Chang, and Rafiq Bhatia, for the assignment after having
collaborated with Lott alone for a score ten years earlier. The trio had
written music together for 2022's acclaimed Everything Everywhere All
at Once but was still untested on the larger stage. With Schreier
requiring that fresh perspective to the Universe, he preferred that no
themes carry over from the franchise, not even Alan Silvestri's main
identity that could have made for some clever cameos here. He also
unleashed the trio far ahead of the editing of the film, causing them to
write solely to the script. It took a while before the composers found
the right tone, starting with the thematic suite.
The resulting score for Thunderbolts* was then rearranged into the picture as needed rather than cues being written to specific synchronization points, and in some cases, the tempo of the film's editing was sometimes matched to the existing music rather than vice versa. The personality of Son Lux's music is irreverent and haphazard by design, tossing aside most superhero conventions in favor of what they called the "kitchen sink" method of throwing all sorts of random ideas at the concept. That strategy functions for the basic feel of the music but yields a highly ineffectual film score that doesn't develop its structures to any satisfying level. It is truly a score defined by its style rather than its substance, and many film music collectors will find it to be a wildly disjointed experience despite espousing some momentary highlights. The ensemble for Thunderbolts* is orchestral at its core, and the instrumental usage is sometimes interesting, but the recording is laced with synthetic and percussive layers that sometimes dominate. Unusual percussive sampling was done by Son Lux, and the composers thought they were being as creative as a Hans Zimmer ghostwriter with the things they banged upon to generate noise, but the result of their efforts sounds the same. There's nothing inherently wrong with their sampling, actually, but it doesn't support anything useful on top of it and often gets lost in the rampant manipulation during post-processing. That extremely abrasive and pervasive distortion of the soundscape compounds dissonance inherent in the orchestral performances, the instrumental nastiness most challenging in "Show Us the Worst." Reverb levels are highly inconsistent throughout, too, "The Climb" oddly wet in sound while surrounding cues are prickly in their dryness. There is very little consistency in the work aside from its rough edges, and the thematic narrative is where Son Lux really fails the film and the franchise. While this movie is considered an origins tale and the trio of composers treated its themes as a developmental set that only partials congeals at the end, if one could even qualify it as congealing, the handling of the identities is among the worst to inhabit a Marvel film. The main Thunderbolts group theme is extremely underwhelming, representing one of the least interesting and inspiring character identities in the franchise. With its simplistic eight notes divided into call and action parts with awkward harmonies, there is absolutely no secondary phrasing to the idea whatsoever, making it extremely repetitive and juvenile. The theme is intentionally left deconstructed in most of the film until the group earns it in the closing cue, which is logical but not particularly necessary or satisfying. Son Lux toys with its progressions right away in the meandering rhythms of "There's Something Wrong With Me," the theme struggling late in "Countdown," forced into a synthetic haze in "Forest Memory," and dismembered in "Maybe We'll All Get Out of Here Alive." It blends into the score's main action motif in "It's Bucky!" for its fullest performance yet but is slowly tempered in "For the Glory" prior to moderately heroic teasing. Fragmented in "Left the Door Unlocked," the payoff is left until "Thunderbolts*," where it is conveyed repetitively at 0:25 on strings and manipulated on brass later. The theme combines the brass and strings for a vaguely heroic incarnation at 2:09, but "Thunderbolts*," despite being the official announcement of the theme, doesn't convey it with any authority or sense of purpose. Making the audience wait until the end of the score for the big reveal of a main theme's full construct is fine as a technique, but that performance has to be really good to justify the wait. This one is not only simplistic and repetitive, but its inflection from the ensemble is disappointingly tepid. The disorganized secondary themes in Thunderbolts* aren't much more successful. Rising, 4-note figures of vague heroism represent the Sentry character and associated super-human concepts, previewed vaguely in "Walker's Memory" and trying to congeal in "First Flight" but failing to really do so. It finally shows its progressions in "Introducing Sentry" and further boosts its identity in "Penthouse Fight" on brass. Some listeners will completely miss this identity. More prevalent is the villain theme for the CIA director, though it sometimes seems totally disconnected from the rest of the score in its awkward attempt to humanize the character around its otherwise muted antagonistic duties. The villain theme stews in troubled string layers in the latter half of "The Light Inside You is Dim," meanders in woodwind layers during "Unimpeachable," and obtains its villain status in the suffering of "It's Not Robert You Need to Be Afraid Of." It gains a little more troubled sympathy in the obtuse "I Don't See Your Mistakes," attempts melodrama in the slurring "No Use Fighting," pushes that tension into "Yelena's Choice," and offends as a distorted piano rendition plunks away in "The Attic" before dissolving badly. Son Lux leaves the idea on a more personable note, offering it some sensitivity on solo cello in "Not Alone" and building to a catharsis from the ensemble in that cue. It also features on piano at 2:39 into the "Thunderbolts*" suite, though its performance suddenly occurs with no transition whatsoever from prior exploration of the main theme. It's a frustratingly poor suite as a result. For the obligatory fighting and chasing, the trio conjure an action motif that is a descending four-note rhythm in staccato movements. Distorted throughout "I Needed That Face" while bouncing annoyingly through the soundscape, this motif becomes a fanciful rhythm on flutes in "Last Assignment" and is elongated in the frantic strings of "Maybe We'll All Get Out of Here Alive." It opens "It's Bucky!" in more traditional action mode, gains momentum in the extremely manipulated "Show Us the Worst," extends to a longer brass variant in "You Can't Even Save Yourself," and teases at the outset and blasts through the mix's distortion at 1:21 into "Thunderbolts*." As a menace motif, Son Lux also applies downward slurring brass as a tired technique, informing pounding descents like those in "It's Bucky!" In the end, the music for Thunderbolts* makes a hell of a lot of noise and is occasionally interesting, but it's simply not a very good film score. It's the work of novices on this playing field, and the even if your ears can survive the absolutely wretched manipulation of the mix, the conveyance of the themes is inadequate throughout. Several cues representing important moments in the story do nothing to advance the thematic narrative, and the action cues provide brute force of sound rather than refined representation of synchronization points on screen. Both are byproducts of how the music was written. It's the type of score that gets noticed because it's so different from the expected mould, but that mould exists for a reason, and Thunderbolts* flounders because it can't find a comfortable balance between convention and creativity.
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 53:51
NOTES & QUOTES:
There exists no official packaging for this album.
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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Thunderbolts* are Copyright © 2025, Hollywood Records/Marvel Music and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 5/9/25 (and not updated significantly since). |
