JOHN OTTMAN

Edmund Meinerts wrote
"...with James Newton Howard rather obviously seeping through from the temp-track" - I never knew JNH did The Shawshank Redemption!

I must say I'm surprised you like this one so much. It's certainly a step up from Days of Future Past (not a difficult bar to clear) but it still suffers from Ottman's two greatest flaws. First, there's the inevitable temping: besides Shawshank in "Erik's Rebirth" (spell it with a K, Ottman!) and the continuing Lifeforce-ness of his main theme, you've got some actual, genuine JNH in the form of The Hunger Games in "Like a Fire", the action music in "You Betray Me" pulls from Brian Tyler's Expendables scores and I get the impression that the choral stuff in the opening few cues (as well as the Apocalypse theme) are inspired by Jupiter Ascending - at least he ditched the Inception nonsense from the last score! The fact that Ottman is his own editor and picks the temp himself just makes things that much worse; you can't even use the "director made him do it" defense!

Of course, all those temps would bother me less if it wasn't for Ottman's second and far more damning flaw: he struggles more than almost any film composer I know to write cohesively. It's all rattles and crashes and sudden moments of dissonance that come out of nowhere and it just doesn't flow at all. It reacts to the movie rather than adding to it or driving it. Sometimes that approach has led to a fairly entertaining score (e.g. Jack the Giant Slayer - which this is nowhere near), but I think it's that more than anything else which makes him such a frustrating composer for me. It's a shame because he can orchestrate well and has creative ideas, but they're always mushed together in such an incoherent way.

Okay, rant over.