movie-wave.net

I am easily entertained

I'm happy to report that my take on Zimmer's Man of Steel (in fact I have seen a press showing of the movie today) is exactly middle ground, if the one star reviews and the glowing praise wherever else are the general assessment, my own is a three star score.

I find the most simple thematic material, when used in chamber arrangements, to be the most enticing material I've heard from Hans in quite a while (even in some moments beating Inception maybe!), especially the vocal lullaby in the beginning of the score works for me very well. The action music is a rehash of the same old stuff, with some examples that actually work very well for me (Terraforming and If You Love These People, which to me, actually work great in the movie).

There are moments which don't work for me at all, for example the sudden change of tone in Krypton's Last was something I found dodgy on album, but in the film it was even more extreme (with the violin solo, I found, being very, very effective).

The score as heard in film has a generally better mix of the music put in it, there are great string runs in Flight that I couldn't hear on album at all, and cutting it off the album would be a very weird decision. And it's not a very disparaged or weird case of editing, Hans' choice of scoring the scene will be understood when you watch the film.

As heard in film, I generally find the score mostly serviceable, sometimes very effective (the more chamber/simplistic material really works the best in the film for me; also Flight), but also with moments of being just inappropriate (there are several suspense/mild-action scenes that have ostinato-ridden material that sounds stolen from a spy technothriller not far from being the right music... but for a Tom Clancy adaptation).

As heard on album, I also dig the most emotional/simplistic material. Some action music I really like (aforementioned Terraforming and If You Love These People), sometimes it's just too much ostinati. The atmospheric ambient music, semantically associated mostly with Krypton (which I sensed would have been the case), also convinces me. The action and generally the epic stuff, only sometimes.

That said, as much as I love the piano stuff, I just imagined some time ago how would the Clark Kent theme sound on a lone trumpet... and it would be actually quite great.

This is ... interesting.

V.

Edited my post. I spotted a spoiler and stopped reading as I'm seeing the film tomorrow.

If the review is trying to sell iTunes sales or CDs, I agree. If it's trying to make sense of a work of art in its primary originating context, then a detailed analysis of the film against the music is a fair approach, and kind of necessary to hone analytical abilities about how music actually makes films work. I'm not the world's biggest fan of Shore's Lord of the Rings anymore, but the attempt to discern what was going on there at a granular level made me much more attentive to the real art we're privy to with these albums.

Very cool, Volker, and good luck!
...it'll be tough though: most Dutchies are SO keen to show off their (presumed) language skills that oftentimes you won't even be able to start in Dutch! Let alone practise it!
British friends of mine, living here for nigh to nine years now, simply gave up after a few years as every single question they tried to pose in Dutch was invariably answered in English!

Wait, so do they not speak Dutch?

Oh.

I'm exceptionally good at it when pissed...FACT!

This review has a lot of ideas that mirrors my own. Hopefully I'll be able to write those down. And, as someone who haven't seen this movie, the music has, so far, been perfectly evocative, of what I thought the movie would be. It seems to be one of the most thematic score that Zimmer had produced, with myriads of melodies and motifs bouncing about. My initial assessment of the score was that it was too ambient and too loud, and too synthesized. And now, while it's still not as orchestra-biased as I wanted, it's still very organic sounding, and there are much nuances that I didn't expect to hear that made every repeated listening a progressively improved experience.

One thing for sure is the fact that this movie made a lot of money and probably not very many people in the world got up and left the movie because they couldn't stand the music.
Tom

Love the disclaimer. :D

Powell should have scored at least a second Marvel film. Or all of them.

I think he should take a sabbatical from sabbaticals.

He clearly gets paid too much.