Seriously, I can always tell a Hans Zimmer score without even having preknowledge that a film had hired him. Big, orchestral, boring score that repeats the same motifs he's been using for the last 50 years? Dude has one act.
Dan Golding's response seems pretty on-the-nose to me. Although I think he's right to cite Zimmer as someone who pioneered a certain method and style that has become prevalent in a big chunk of movie genres, I think the real culprit here (if you want to lay the blame somewhere) is just the economics of the Hollywood filmmaking system, which prizes cost-control, speed, and consistency of product above all else.
It's sad to see the composer Patrick Doyle get cited in both of those video essays for his music for Thor (which I agree, is generic and boring) because it illustrates the extent to which really talented film composers can get absorbed into this system. His scores for Henry V [1], Dead Again, and Carlito's Way all stand out as really shining example of 90s-era film scoring.
Zimmer is a bit of a hack (albeit a very talented one) but I'll take one of his scores any day over Danny Elfman, who seems to arrange everything through a permanent sugar high.
No one does it like him though, or rather his team.
I thought his work on no time to die was pretty boring, but the work he did with Pfister on 2049 and on Dune are almost genre defining, I feel.
His ability to integrate the score into the sound design of the movie is something I don't think anyone can do. Maybe no one else has the budget for it.
I think Dune is probably his best work, it's the perfect blend of atmosphere, evocations of a strange new world, but also thematic and structural rigour that has let down previous adaptations.
I definitely get tired of him sometimes, but equally I never feel like I need more deliberate choices from his work. When I listened to Giacchino's mostly fairly good score to The Batman, I felt myself thinking "This motif's entropy is too low", I very very rarely feel that in Zimmer's more modern work.
That being said I think Zimmer gets more credit than he deserves because I think more than many other names he is the director of the music. There's genius in sitting back, too, but I doubt he composed all the trills and melodies in the dune soundtrack.
It was good. It did the job. The notion that Hans Zimmer is one of a handful of people that could score this much less anything is kind of ridiculous. I also disagree it sounded out of this world, it was comfortable though because it was obviously Zimmer.
It's a bit like Hans Zimmer scores, we'll never know other than that Zimmer is basically the creative director of a very large bunch of people. I think he dictates the mood rather than actually writing every melody.
I promise it's worth your time. Being honest, I fell in love with the score before I even knew it was Zimmer's, and once I found out, my first thought was "of course."
To each their own, but if you want an idea of what went into the score, that video above is insightful.
I dunno, I think it was really spectacular. It's "standard Hans Zimmer" in the way that it's a bunch of new sounds no one has ever heard before - but they are also close enough to normal sounds and cinematic themes to be familiar. To me it's the mark of true skill. It sounds like something out of this world, but also something I'm already comfortable with.
I bet there's maybe 5 people on Earth who could score a movie like this and make it as credible as Hans did.
Zimmer is often accused of scoring more movies than he actually does, because other composers are told to simply copy him. Whether you're actually paying for the real deal or not, your movie is going to end up with the same sound.
If you watched Tony Zhou's recent "Every Frame a Painting" episode about why the Marvel movies all have such unmemorable soundtracks (where he blames temp scores), you should also watch the response by Dan Golding where he claims Zhou has misidentified the real culprit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcXsH88XlKM
Carefully avoiding saying whether it's good or bad, Golding (like this article) says Hans Zimmer is almost solely responsible for why films and trailers sound the way they do right now. Whether or not you like it, and see Zimmer as a musical villain or not, it's kind of interesting that we're living in the middle of a one-man revolution in a particular artistic field.
I thought the Hans Zimmer score was only okay, in a pastiche-of-the-original kind of way, but maybe I should give it another chance.
For me the Vangelis score is one of the all-time greatest movie scores, although I’m probably biased from having heard it young. Such a unique and recognisable sound, and just the perfect mood for the film.
As this article points out, Zimmer "scores more movies than he actually does" because he's built a kind of film score workshop where dozens of collaborators turn out scores in his style by the bushel.
I first discovered this when Pandora spun up a rousing number from Klaus Badelt's Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack and I swore I was listening to Gladiator. Badelt is a longtime Zimmer collaborator.
It's interesting that Zimmer himself took credit for composing the music for the Pirates sequels once the franchise was an (unexpected) smash.
I actually like Hans Zimmer a lot more than John Williams - the latter has a very distinctive style that can seem very in-your-face, more like an "Oh hey, this was done by John Williams" than something that best fits the film. Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones are all recognizable as Williams soundtracks, even though they're very different films.
Zimmer seems to vary his music a lot more to fit the needs of the film - it's just universally good, it's not universally Zimmer. The Lion King is very different from Crimson Tide, which is very different from Gladiator, which is very different from The Dark Knight and Inception.
BTW, I think Basil Poledouris (The Hunt for Red October, Wind) was another underrated film composer whose music is much better than his reputation.
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