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Yes, it's right up there with Gone With The Wind, Moon River, Born Free, Lawrence of Arabia.....

It's a complex ordeal (also includes Harry Gregson-Williams, Don Harper etc.), and I'm sure Pawel can give you a better breakdown, but the crucial thing for me is that the two main themes are Zimmer's -- and they really guide the whole thing.

Perhaps not in terms of public exposure, but I prefer it over all of those you mentioned there!

This. Very this.

Hmm.

Only in Bizarro world.

I mostly detest "power anthems", one of the worst music creations in the entire existence of human kind.

While The Rock is a very good to great film score, I think Crimson Tide would be the one that actually elevates the picture. I don't agree with all the album choices on Crimson Tide (keeping the very length of the album, you could have chosen some better fragments instead of some least interesting parts of Alabama, for example... I also miss the main title cue itself). So I would say that while I understand the arguments that The Rock is the more entertaining album (though it aged a lot to me in the years, I very rarely get back to that score, to be honest, and it was my first ever!), I think on a purely artistic level (the meaning of the music, its application in the picture, even the main theme, actually), Crimson Tide is the better score.

For me, if it was a "Sophie's Choice" I'd say fine, kill em both!

NP: Interstellar (2014) - Hans Zimmer

One of Hansi's finest efforts.

To me, the "greatest" music is defined as that which has the greatest power to make me feel positive emotions. So I guess we are arguing about different parts of the elephant here...of course the legs are not going to be your best source of drinking water if that's what you're looking for...

Well, in case of film music, what I deem the "greatest" film music is the music that does exactly what it has to do. The greatest horror score won't make you feel many positive emotions. The greatest sports score though will want you to work out like hell, because that's what it has to do.

In case of epic scores or generally blockbusters... I don't think it's exactly about giving you a sense of the period the film takes place in, as most of recent epics don't aim at giving you a sense of the period, as they're (I think more than ever) allegories of the modern world. Some people claim that Gladiator is a bit of a media satire for example (Maximus and his rise to celebrity status leading to him beating Commodus, who wants to become a celebrity of his own), there is no recent film that shoves that allegorical aspect more than Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (at a point I'm always wondering why they don't just topple the monarchy and plain elect Balian for president... a Medieval knight fighting for religious tolerance... yeah) and so on.

So while I mourn the loss of the sense of epic present in Rozsa or even Alfred Newman (though Newman most of the time was somehow more restrained... which is a bit of my preference), on the other hand you have to apply for the modern viewer's identification of the character. There are better ways to pull that off without resorting to modern trends though. On my Polish forum we had great fun of the score to The Bible and the attempt to give a power anthem to God. Zimmer himself (a self-admitted atheist) gave a great sense of the Old Testament deity and religious experience with Burning Bush from Prince of Egypt.

Ah yeah... though while the anthems can be very rousing (Crimson Tide, Peacemaker, some of the Rock)... I'd say that, say, Crimson Tide as a whole isn't exactly the most optimistic score written

And worst of all are convertites. That goes for every religion.