HunterTech

Is it that they didn't work, or that Balfe is too one track minded about these sorts of projects to naturally work in more foreign sounds? Of course it wouldn't fit if the main requirement for the score is for it to always be big sounding and/or brooding. And I say that as someone who actually likes DR1's score in both times I've seen the movie!
 
This might be part of why Ghost Protocol is my favorite of the films, since there was more room for overt goofiness to occur, versus the naturalistic tone McQ goes for in his last two films (which definitely isn't an issue for my money).

Oh fuck off

Not true.  There are many possible reasons to doubt it.  One scenario I experienced firsthand; a young woman hired by a prominent composer used that opportunity to promote her own career - a big no no.   While she was working for the composer, she presented herself and her music in secret instead of the composer she worked for just to get an in with the producers.  She was fired on the spot when it was discovered.  That isn't unusual.  Opportunities are rare and people sometimes take a risk that can get them fired.  It can be a cutthroat industry.  Your teammate could say I have your back till it benefits them not to.  Did you ever hear of her before this?  I doubt it.  I'm not saying if her allegations are true or false, just that you can't possibly claim her name and reputation were destroyed.  She had no name and Elfman was a major name.  That's the whole power imbalance.  By the way, women can be guilty of this too!  Read the massive thread by Jeremy Soule's accuser...women executives were at fault because they were part of the old boys club when they became executives.  It's way, way more complex than you make it to be.
 
I still think it's worth adding substance abuse and other topics because all of these happen at the same time and what someone might think is sexual assault might actually be something else.  It can be very unclear.  Here is another example...I dated a musician.  During that time, I hired an orchestra for a score.  I asked the contractor to hire my gf.  He said that would not work well for her.  The other musicians would banish her because she got "special treatment".  So by my hiring her as my gf, I would harm her career.  We then broke up.  She claimed I hurt her career by limiting her opportunities.  It's really tricky and your "no reason to doubt the story" is not true.  

There is nothing wrong with showing off your sex appeal. That is not a crime. Guys and ladies in the entertainment industry do it all the time. People in other field do it as well. Sexual assault on the other hand, is. I am not saying Elfman is guilty, but her sex appeal is completely irrelevant. 

I agree with you that it's a bad situation either way and I haven't fully formulated my thoughts on the topic as this is a tricky and loaded topic.  Some general thoughts I have though is the victim pretty much hates men.  She's in a music composer forum I'm in and is almost always aggressive towards any opinion that doesn't align with her points as being example of patriarchy and demonstrating further examples of industry wide abuse towards women.  The truth is this very same thing has happened to almost everyone in the industry, not just women.  On the other side, it is very, very hard to imagine any scenario where Elfman would pay nearly a billion dollars and be completely innocent as he claims.  My intuition is it is probably something in the middle like he probably did something inappropriate while under the influence, not that that excuses him, but might mean it isn't something in character and he might truly have no recollection yet did something very inappropriate too.  Clearly, it's a male dominated industry and there are very few protections in place (there is no corporate HR to complain to for example).  In my experiences, there have been near fist fights and blows during work sometimes between boss and staff and this happened to men and women.  Lots of derogatory talk (they might tell you to go jack off for a bit in a room full of mixed audiences if they need to chat privately), naked pictures or porn sitting openly around, stuff like that.  This was way before #METOO and I'll assume they've cleaned up their act quite a lot but the point is can be a generally abusive environment and sometimes that abusiveness is emotional, physical, sexual, or substance too and the lines can be blurry. 

Christopher Nolan is a lot less pretentious than people assume he is.  He's just a big showman like Cecil DeMille 

Honestly, I felt his and Kidder's performances were weaker compared to the first film, which might come down to how much clunkier I find a lot of the rewritten scenes to be (plus presumably not being too thrilled to work with Lester). I certainly want to revisit the Donner cut for that reason, since the tidbits I saw felt better acted.
 
I've grown to appreciate Thorne's work more recently, for as restrained as it is creatively. Especially since it still beats the RDC being such a hatchet job in regards to how it edits the score from the first one. I certainly would love someone to do like some sort of rescore project with it.

The details don't matter. What matters is that his favorite YouTuber said it, so it must be true!

The details don't matter. What matters is that his favorite YouTuber said it, so it must be true!

The details don't matter. What matters is that his favorite YouTuber said it, so it must be true!

The details don't matter. What matters is that his favorite YouTuber said it, so it must be true!

Ah, but this community likes those two, so they don't count 

It probably is overdone for a lot of people, but it certainly is a crucial fabric to Gia's Ghost Protocol score having the fun personality it does:
 
 
 
 
 
Hell, for someone who definitely takes after his mentor a lot, Balfe sure missed that HZ also managed it on his sole effort (even if the Spanish sound is too engrained into the score for it to work as an example in this particular context):
 
 
Given the rumors regarding the behind the scenes of RN's score, I'm kind of left feeling like McQ simply hates color in his preferred sound.

It probably is overdone for a lot of people, but it certainly is a crucial fabric to Gia's Ghost Protocol score having the fun personality it does:
 
 
 
 
 
Hell, for someone who definitely takes after his mentor a lot, Balfe sure missed that HZ also managed it on his sole effort (even if the Spanish sound is too engrained into the score for it to work as an example in this particular context):
 
 
Given the rumors regarding the behind the scenes of RN's score, I'm kind of left feeling like McQ simply hates color in his preferred sound.

It probably is overdone for a lot of people, but it certainly is a crucial fabric to Gia's Ghost Protocol score having the fun personality it does:
 
 
 
 
 
Hell, for someone who definitely takes after his mentor a lot, Balfe sure missed that HZ also managed it on his sole effort (even if the Spanish sound is too engrained into the score for it to work as an example in this particular context):
 
 
Given the rumors regarding the behind the scenes of RN's score, I'm kind of left feeling like McQ simply hates color in his preferred sound.

There's only so much complaining about the common banality of RCP music can do before you might as well start actually calling the audience completely braindead idiots for eating it up. I would point to this being the film equivalent of going from classical to pop music, but then someone much smarter than me would tell me that there was much more sophisticated work in even the novelty songs of the 60s than what we hear now. Makes it a bit hard for me to know how to argue, other than my initial tastes in music making it easier for me to appreciate the dumb fun sound.
 
(Also, you could probably blame the suits for wanting everything to be so homogenized, especially with composers that we know can tackle various sounds. I really don't know why that's so hard to reconcile.)
 
(Also also, given how much people have been concerned about the potential loss of hired musicians for projects like these, are we actually pissed off that the guy who could easily work without them is still keeping them employed?)

I would use many of his terms to describe Gladiator, a score I love, and no doubt there are some choice words to be said to describe the lack of talent or proper orchestration in that score. The bit you're sadly missing this this: I don't care because I still enjoy it. What a boring place this would be if everyone just liked one style of music.
 
But I get the sense you enjoy demonstrating your perceived superior musical knowledge by routinely shitting on the tastes of those who enjoy such scores.

And Herrmann had 9 harps in Beneath the 12-Mile Reef. From what I remember, Williams had 4 pianos for the Hoth sequence, and Goldsmith had at least 4 in Twilight Zone. But in all of these cases, specific instrument was multiplied to create a distinct sound, or to be able to write for a particular instrument against a massive orchestral backdrop.
 
When it comes to the whole orchestra and a massive sound, it's not really the size of the orchestra that matters. More often than not, a large orchestra doesn't mean extra loud all the time, but rather different colours in different sections (without thinning out the sound). Therefore you have a larger number of players and instruments in each instrument group, but they're not usually playing at the same time. Or perhaps you've got extra string players because you put two separate string orchestras at different ends of the room - it's still a specific effect that's the goal, not merely massive sound.
 
As Richard Strauss showed, an orchestra of just 36 players (and that includes 3 percussionists, two harps, and three keyboards!) can sound just like the proverbial massive Wagner orchestra. Compare the Mozart-like opening of the prologue to the epic finale:
 

I ran it through Google Translate and got "I couldn't believe how much my music budget was so I figured I might as well use it to have a jolly time flying around to places that were vaguely connected with the film and something, something, something...  abort, retry, fail?"

I’m sure he didn’t have 550 in a room at the same time.  Given the amount of material recorded and the extremely long post-production period for this movie, the musicians probably changed from session to session.

I'm a fan of Zimmer, some Balfe and some RCP composers, but I have no trouble recognizing what you speak of, and I agree. NOT a fan of the "wall of sound" approach either. Balfe has proven many times that he can create excellent music without that orchestra size -- HIS DARK MATERIALS, AD ADSTRA, TETRIS etc. I hope he nurtures those more restrained landscapes further.

There's only so much complaining about the common banality of RCP music can do before you might as well start actually calling the audience completely braindead idiots for eating it up. I would point to this being the film equivalent of going from classical to pop music, but then someone much smarter than me would tell me that there was much more sophisticated work in even the novelty songs of the 60s than what we hear now. Makes it a bit hard for me to know how to argue, other than my initial tastes in music making it easier for me to appreciate the dumb fun sound.
 
(Also, you could probably blame the suits for wanting everything to be so homogenized, especially with composers that we know can tackle various sounds. I really don't know why that's so hard to reconcile.)
 
(Also also, given how much people have been concerned about the potential loss of hired musicians for projects like these, are we actually pissed off that the guy who could easily work without them is still keeping them employed?)

I know nothing about these scores or this composer, but I'll offer my completely uneducated opinion anyway: I would be shocked if all those musicians were ever in the same room at the same. Sounds like a case of multiple recording sessions with different sets of musicians.

Ah, but this community likes those two, so they don't count 

I saw a post by him saying that they recorded all over the world, trying to record in all the locations where they were filming. So surely the total number of musicians comes from all of these sessions added together. Part of the score was recorded at Vienna's Synchron Stage (as many modern blockbuster scores are).
 
In his post, Balfe claims that recording in the cities of the actual filming locations lends a flair of authenticity and locality to the music. There's certainly something to be said for a composer being part of the pre-production and production process (if they're the kind of composer who likes that sort of thing, at least). But I doubt that the streamlined sight-reading style of a modern film scoring session leaves much room for local flair (especially if little to none was written into the score to begin with).
 
For what it's worth, I thought the score to MI7 was a hundred times better than that for MI6. Meaning that it actually noticeably supported the film, most of it seemed to do *something* (rather than just scream trailer music at 11 non-stop), and there's probably three or four bits in there that might even be musically interesting. Which still doesn't leave enough for me to be even marginally interested in the album, or to remain a glimmer of an interested in modern blockbuster film music. But when it stayed away from Schifrin's material (where the clash with the score's MV stylings is just too grating), it actually seemed appropriate for the film. And I guess that's something.
 
That sad truth seems to be that the time where a Hollywood blockbuster had room (stylistically and marketing-wise) for properly interesting *music* really is completely gone.