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Timmer, Does that symphony have five movements?

NP: Total Recall - Harry Gregson-Williams

"Could be worse" is the nicest thing I can say about it.
I don't even like the Goldsmith original very much but I have to say it is far better than this.

I actually think it's better than Bourne: Legacy (considerably better, really) and a decent half-hour album could have been produced from it.

NP: Amazing Spider-Man - James Horner

The child vocalist segment in the opening cue is quite beautiful. Vocal work has always been one of Horner's strong suits.

I am not familiar with it, but inspired by your post I tried to seek it out. I found a five movement version of this, but it was labeled as the film score, but the score has a lot more than five tracks, yes? Anyway, I think I found the symphony. I'll give a proper listen when I have the chance.

Absolutely amazing score for a great movie. Watch it if you haven't yet

He has to be high if he thinks his music is brilliant!

There is nothing in Tyler beyond being totally derivative of everything fashionable in film music AND musically...

correct.

Then I'll put it this way. The way he used Goldsmith's themes in his Rambo scores deserves a Darwin award and says a lot about his (sadly, not really existent) narrative abilities. The guy can orchestrate, but not much else than that.

I could really make a proper semantic analysis of what the Goldsmith themes mean and how he misused them in his score just to appeal to the fans and his own ego. When I realized this after giving the Goldsmith trilogy a proper analysis also in functional terms, I realized how he didn't get the basic elements of Goldsmith's work and in the end his own score is quite offensive in context of the rest of trilogy, because, you see, there is a lot more to those scores than the synth farts you hate. The themes have a proper meaning in their respective contexts and Tyler failed completely to see what they meant. Just to give you the major examples:

The main title cue should NOT use the Home Coming theme, especially in a similar arrangement to what Goldsmith did in First Blood. Shots of Burmese (or Thai, actually) river don't call for expression of a character's loneliness, when he's hardly on screen and we just establish the location. Had he included parts of the Goldsmith theme as a counterpoint to his own (though somewhat derivative of Beyond Rangoon, which makes sense, provided the location used for the movie, which, as in Zimmer's case, is Burma), this could have worked quite well to both set up the new place AND remind us of the character we will get back to in the next scene. The Goldsmithian Home Coming arrangement works perfectly in the final scene, which is actually very reminiscent of the way Ted Kotcheff (a consultant on the fourth part) shot the first scene of First Blood. Rambo goes back home, so we retain the homage and actually make a proper semantic reminder of what happened in part one. That was good. In the main title cue, the arrangement of the melody was totally uncalled for and there is no place in the movie to make it pass as a red herring. When Rambo himself first appears on screen, Tyler rather uses his music anyway, so it's just there.

Another Goldsmith reference that doesn't make sense and in fact one of the only two thematic references in the Tyler score. Final setpiece of the movie features, in the end, a reference to the Goldsmith Betrayal cue. In the Goldsmith score, the theme is re-used when Rambo destroys the crap out of the machinery in the room of the guys who sent him to the mission and later betrayed him. It's a direct reference to Rambo being betrayed by who hired him. Disemboweling a stupid colonel or general is a heroic moment for Rambo, but while the cue is necessarily dark in a heroic way, using that particular theme makes no sense whatsoever. It screams "OMG, Goldsmith fans will compare me to the original, I HAVE TO INCLUDE SOMETHING ACTION!" rather than proper narrative thinking, which I would demand from a pretty high-profile composer that Brian Tyler was at the moment. There is NO betrayal in the fourth Rambo movie and this kind of dark Rambo success doesn't mean that you have to reuse THAT particular Jerry Goldsmith cue.

In other words. While genius, the narrative choices made by Goldsmith are very clear and understandable in their application. The particular arrangement of the main Home Coming (or as some called it It's a long road, based on the song, of course) theme was tailored to show Rambo's state of mind in the first scene of the first movie and, in an admittedly cheesy, but knowingly so, Betrayal theme did exactly the same in part two. Tyler semantically mutilated the Goldsmith work by misunderstanding the thematic material at hand.

When I realized what Tyler did there, I used to start to like the guy after Eagle Eye, but when I realized what he did there with the Goldsmith themes, I can't treat him seriously as a narrative film composer anymore, sorry. If there is genius in him, then I'll rebutt it, but as of now, to prove if he really has the talent so many people speak of, what has to happen is for Tyler to be treated in the way Horner was on The New World. Really, he needs to be treated like a piece of crap and he'd either deliver his masterpiece or run away from film scoring. In both situations, that would be for the better of the genre as a whole.

You can send all comments about Zimmer haters to:

HansZimmerSucks@thescoring.biz

So, if we REALLY piss him off and then lock him in a room for, say, a week, what would he do on "Man of Steel"?

Do we have to open the door, by the way?

!8 tracks to the film score, the complete recorded on CHANDOS

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/2zw6

I'd love to hear what you think of the symphony. it's a joy to be talking about something other than Tyler, Zimmer, Horner.

Regarding Rambo 4, I think the Homecoming theme use in the opening is absolutely perfect and one of my favorite things about the film and the score. I get what you are saying Pawel but in this case I really don't care about themes being used only in their proper narrative meanings...it just works. I probably feel the same way about it that many directors do about their temp tracks

I hate to tell you this, but I wasn't a big fan of it. I was excited to hear it, because I really like everything of RVW's that I've ever heard. There are moments of this I really liked (the huge climaxes in the first movement, the lovely strings toward the beginning of the 2nd mvt), but overall the symphony was too unsettling for my tastes. The symphony is great at projecting an air of dark mystery, and grand consequence, but I prefer his Rhapsody on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, or The Lark Ascending (which I discovered thanks to you), or his take on Greensleeves, or three other pieces I'm familiar with, though not by name. Still, I'm glad to have heard it. My familiarity with his body of work has just been greatly expanded. And if I ever got a chance to hear this performed live, I would take it. I think it would be really amazing live.

Love it, great score! Not a fan of the songs on the cd though.

Brian Tyler - Expendables 2

His orchestrations and recording got a lot clearer and much wider in the stereo spectrum, less noisy, since his last 3 scores. I like what i hear, a lot. The opening cue is imaginative and fueled with action.

But those synth farts actually suck in the first track! The cue would've been so much better without them.