The Dark Knight - Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard

SWAT is really good, agreed. Better than all-but-two-or-three of Zimmer's scores, in any case. The Kingdom is just about Elfman's worst score I think. Still better than Batman Begins.

Marselus, where are people bashing The Dark Knight? This thread mostly concerns people saying how brilliant it's going to be. At least those expecting it to be awful are basing that on the first score, rather than the rather curious expectation that the score for the sequel is going to be completely and utterly different from the first one.

You're quite right. It's a real shame he's like that (well, I think so anyway) and I return to the point that if you want 120 minutes of drone you may just as well pay David Julyan $20k to do it as pay JNH&Hans $1m each to do it.

Things like this don't help at all. Suppose the man dies, his influence won't. Film Music's re-birth or resurrection watch is more like it.




I always say, if there's someone to blame for murdering film music, that be the film makers. After all, it is the directors/producers who pick Zimmer and his crew up. Why do they do this? Because they want more of what they did in the past. Hence the same name, same style and stuff attached to every movie.

I never hear people complain about why directors pick RC dudes which is the problem, I always hear them complain why the RC dudes are scoring a certain film. What should they do, resign and ask another non RC composer to come on board? Who would do that?

Some one should have aborted this "baby" before it was re-born!

-Erik-

I guess that should lessen its suffering from the lack of a strong theme... at least for me.

Yeah, but I hope HZ-JNH tried their best to help it fit the movie well even without a strong theme.

Thanks for that!

IMHO, that topic's neither fun nor of any use. Better utilise that time playing a nice John Williams score, that's more fun

Ok... enjoy! I'm outta here

Don't know about Elfman, but for Goldenthal i am sure that no matter how much i like some of Zimmer's work, he could never even scratch Goldenthal's shoes when it comes to superior film music writing.

Aye aye, Captain! :salute:

Comic book films DO!





I was making a general comment, Dan. But based on the sonic wallpaper in most of Nolan's films, why would this one be any different?

-Erik-

BTW, here is Zimmer and JNH discussing the lack of a theme in the Batman scores from the soundtrack.net interview.

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HZ: It's something that occurred to me. I have a feeling that out there in the world, there are people waiting for James and me to "come to our senses" and stop this dark nonsense with the iconic two-note thing and write a happy jolly theme like the old Batman. You know, like the Danny Elfman one. It ain't gonna happen. Because this is not the world we're in. This is not the character we're doing. It's not the movies we're doing. They just need to get over that. For our Batman, it would just be wrong.

JNH: It would give you too much information about this character, which is not true. It would be misinformation. When you assign a heroic theme to something, some kind of a tune, you're giving away a lot of information that may or may not be true about this guy. We still don't really know who Batman is yet. Very complex, he's constantly evolving that character. He doesn't know who he is. We feel that it's much stronger to say less, musically, about him and let his character sort of speak for himself.

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IMHO, this is utter nonsense. They are over analyzing it. You know, all on-screen "super" heroes are complex, most of them get wonderful and fully developed themes and they work brilliantly... including Elfman's classic. All due respect to James Newton Howard but I personally think his reasoning is BS. I mean, why write music at all? It's manipulating our emotions and telling us how to feel. It that too complex for Nolan's Batman?

-Erik-

And there, ladies and gents, is JNH showing why most modern film music is so crap: It's better to write music that says nothing than music that says something. No it isn't, it's better to fuck off and let people with something to say write the music.