BRIAN TYLER

tylers best action scores for me are The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift and Eagle Eye. and Fast & Furious had with Landtrain at least a great opening track. sadly tyler isn't very good in writing themes. u can hear that also in this new score. absolutely boring stuff. kind of a copy of his Battle: L.A. score, plus the whole idea with the guitar. his Triple X score is even worse. its not a good sign, when a randy edelman score from 2002 for this franchise is much more fun than a 2017 score by a better composer like tyler. i also cant understand the praise for his turtle score to be honest. the orchestration is good, but the main theme is again the weakest part of the score. jablonsky did a much better job in that point with part 2.

Ohhh, w.t.f.

But what did you expect? the movie seems laughable teenage-aiming crap. Like most of these kinds of films these days. The theme is nice though. And definitely better than his xxx noisefest. But generally i'd say that after his gorgeous fast five score (perhaps his best work to date imo) he has gone a bit downhill since. Lost interest? too much work and too many paychecks? who knows.

Except Eagle Eye (still hands-down his best for me) my favorite scores came around or after Fast Five, actually. That would be Far Cry 3 (the one which made me reassess his work), Iron Man 3, the Now You See Me films (quite awful, saw a bit of the first part, but great scores) and Truth (a nice change of pace, I, for one, find for example Columbus Circle to have a structural flaw... a regular problem I have with his stuff).

First, I don't think it's half bad, I actually like it.

Second and the reason why it made me reassess his career is that it's the first score where I felt he was very coherent in creating and maintaining a vision of a score throughout the whole running time. One of my biggest problems with his work was that I found him to have a structural/conceptual ADHD. He would essentially try an idea until the editing told him otherwise. Eagle Eye was a notable exception, but the ostinato/Bourne influence in that one helped him maintain a coherent sound (and the fact that it was very brute-force all the time also helped). The ADHD element, however, makes him to be a very effective composer in the film.

Last time I had the coherence issue was a moment in Truth where this score, with constant subtle movement and having quite a bit of restraint, has a short moment (is it half a minute) where he goes full-on desperate percussion-plus-dissonance which doesn't fit the sound of the rest of the score at all. Why did he do it does escape me, as this particular moment was, actually, cut from the film.

Killing Room is a score I REALLY like (ah, the Partian elements there), but one I seriously got into after FC3. I mean, I heard it, I found it nice, but never really properly analyzed it outside "oh, sounds interesting". That said, I haven't heard Disappointments Room yet.

Back then there are moments which made me scratch my head. He creates something which is somewhat (if inspired by Desplat) interesting like Columbus Circle, but the score not only written for a different ensemble (a string octet), but also featuring a very interesting concept of alternating minor and major key suddenly devolves into some more noisy (yes, noisy) action.

Or something like Rambo. Frankly, I was more warm to the Rambo outing until I actually got much deeper (thank you, Intrada) into Goldsmith's original First Blood. I ended up scratching my head not just regarding the arrangement of Home Coming (slightly too harsh) but also the misattribution of the betrayal motif from part two (what were you thinking, Sly, when you temped it there?!). Another issue was when I really got into Eagle Eye and got back to the Rambo score I noticed that for Tyler standards, well, the orchestrations are some of his weakest, which I don't really understand.

I liked Final Destination 5 far more than I thought I would (Fates Bridge is a fantastic cue), but when he went full temp-track in one cue (or maybe not?) I was wondering what the hell is American Beauty is doing in a horror film. Also, to end this little summary, I have to say, that I find the score to the fourth part of Fast and Furious his worst. However, I do like probably his most original score - Bug. Which nobody else does, seemingly.

Sorry for once again commenting in a negative way, but I've played the game recently and I heard the score in context and I wholeheartedly agree with Edmund. It adds absolutely nothing in terms of excitement or even ambience, in that it somehow fits with the gameplay or the setting. It's just how I feel in general about Tyler, so it still shocks me to see this guy remains so popular among film score fans. Or more importantly production studios.

Review of The Mummy:

http://www.movie-wave.net/the-mummy/

Oddly enough, if Night on Bald Mountain was composed by Tyler, it would've worked in my original post. I like it better than anything else he's composed, and its not film music. But yeah, I meant Drift and Fall Again, written by his Madsonik persona. It's a great song, with incredible orchestrations.

If you go to Tyler's Channel on YouTube, it seems he wants to make film music popular with the "cool kids". He's really talented, and I wish he'd do more with electronics.

Hey, those retrowave sensibilities are right up my alley!

Volker

My review of THE MUMMY, for anyone who's interested:

https://moviemusicuk.us/2017/06/20/the- … ian-tyler/

Jon

Yup, great combo :-) Bring ear-plugs just in case. To quote him: "As you may know, I like loud"