TheUlyssesian

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Filmtracks tears apart The Dark Knight Rises Score.

Some choice quotes.

"Buy it... if you've bought into the hyped notion that Hans Zimmer's music for the prior two films in this franchise is the work of a genius"

"Zimmer, in the process of intellectualizing everything he does for his major assignments, somehow manages to make contradictory and senseless statements all too often. He has declared in recent years that he would retire after his next assignment (which did not happen), develop franchise themes in radical ways (which has not happened), and explore revolutionary new methods of applying music to movies (which has not happened, either)."

"beneath the glitz and glamour is a composer whose music has become stagnant and underachieving."

"Nearly everything Zimmer has stated about this score is a gross exaggeration of what he actually accomplished, predictably causing the usual eye-rolling from Zimmer skeptics who regularly lament the difference between the composer's spoken intentions and his underwhelming results. Fans of his will not care; in fact, they will declare "intellectual" film music enthusiasts to be party-poopers and continue blasting Zimmer's music to their balls' content."

"not disputed by many enthusiasts is the fact that The Dark Knight Rises really does reprise much of what came before, even emulating Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides in its technique of yanking exact cues from the prior scores for new applications."

"The main theme is still only two notes long, a rising minor third that does absolutely nothing to convey the complexity of Bruce Wayne's existence. There is still no dichotomy between minor and major key usage to denote this man's two personas. Zimmer's promise in 2005 to flesh out this theme when Batman matures is ignored."

"A score that almost never changes key is one that is not capable of being nimble in its response to changing emotions on screen, and if you wonder why so much of his music seems to drone along in boringly derivative fashion, then the key has much to do with this stagnation. Always using the same key must make life easy for the army of ghostwriters, though!"

"you also have to mention the lack of diversity in instrumentation and tone, as well as the continued reliance upon figures (like low string ostinatos) that remind as much now of Steve Jablonsky's Transformers music as their appropriate heritage"

"The totality of the dwelling in the bass region has reached the point of laughability. Any veteran composer can unleash horrifically rumbling, masculine force from the bass while also employing concurrent appeal from the treble, a technique Zimmer still chooses not to attempt. Again, this refusal to explore the full spectrum greatly diminishes the composer's ability to address emotional range."

"There are, of course, no woodwinds in this score. The violins seem mixed far in the background."

"Zimmer's evolution of music for the franchise, both in terms of tone and theme, is completely nonexistent."

"In "On Thin Ice," Zimmer torments listeners with the possibility that this main theme will gain at least a third note, but this idea is subsequently abandoned."

"the composer doesn't feature these vocals in such a way as to really make an impact on the score. They exist, and they serve their purpose, but they are not as obvious as the obnoxious, single-note theme for the Joker in the prior movie and the same results, quite honestly, could have been generated in studio without all the public relations fuss. Like most aspects of this score, the chants represent the great promise but very little delivery from Zimmer."

"Don't be fooled into thinking that these scores are the high art that the composer's interviews suggest, however. The fanboys will feast on its loyalty while the intellectuals will expose its many faults."

"Between the extremely irritating release format of the soundtrack on album, Zimmer's continued promises of greatness that go unrealized in the finished product, and the inexplicable hype that surrounds this franchise's music, you receive music that is functional at best, mediocre most often, and insultingly simplistic at worst. The composer needs to shut his yap, dump the ghostwriters, shift to F major, conjure a fluid theme, and drop a wicked oboe solo on us. Perhaps then he'd deserve an interview."

So that was that.

There is NO WAY Zimmer will write as good a theme as Williams. Nothing in his entire career could come close to that theme.

But even besides that, he will probably write a themeless score with relentless electronic pounding and progressions. Zimmer even when he writes themes these days writes shit themes. They probably picked the worst composer for this.

What an excellent follow-up, from Williams melodic classicity to ridiculous pounding. They could have atleast picked Powell. Zimmer sounds like a horrible idea. Elfman wrote an excellent theme for Batman and Zimmer wrote nonsense.