The Dark Knight - Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard

Ok....here we are...

The video of the recording sessions contains Bruce wayne theme played with strings instead Piano ( wich is what it is played in Barbastella and in Agent of Chaos)

Dammed!

(Every time I love the score more and more. I really feel this muscular, Dark, Ghotic and Nightmarish mood!!! I really find this typical Zimmer string kicks perfect for Batman )

http://www.thedarkknightscore.com/

The video...

LOL

Now that I´ve finally seen the movie, I can share my thoughts...

Before I talk about the score, let me just say that The Dark Knight was a deeply disturbing movie for me. I didn´t know what to think about it after I left the theatre, and usually, this means a lot. If I like a movie immediately, you can bet it´s pure, enjoyable popcorn, but if I can´t put my hands on it, there´s usually much more behind it. And damn, I love to think about a movie for a much longer time than it takes me to drive the car from the theatre lot. Shyamalan does that to me regularly, and Nolan´s Prestige did it as well. I liked Batman Begins very much, but more on the popcorn level. This movie was different.

I had heard a lot about it and although I was very pissed about the late release in Germany, I managed to avoid most spoiler stuff. I read a lot of spoilerfree reviews, though, and got a general picture about this movie being something much deeper. So I started to expect something much deeper. It became so unnerving how well received, how well reviewed the movie was, that my expectations became bigger and bigger. Due to all those positive reactions, I wasn´t afraid about being disappointed in the end, but hell, I promise, when I left the theatre, I was so deep into thoughts that for a very short moment I even thought the movie sucked.

Well, of course it didn´t. having thought it through and through, I´ve come to the conclusion that, of course, it isn´t the second coming of movies. But it certainly is Nolan´s Empire strikes back, there can be no doubt about that. The issues it deals with are deep and wonderfully explored, the actors are on top of it all, and the story is so well done you really loose every contact with the reality of standard story development. This movie takes its absolute freedom to fuck your expectations, and every time you think what this is about, this ship is changing course.

Not one of the best movies ever, but a great movie. A really, really good one.

Now on to the score.

Every guy who has been here for a while knows how I think about Zimmer scores, and some may even remember me saying that JNH is my favourite composer. Batman Begins was a dream come true, and although I think Zimmer´s voice almost drowned Howard in it, there was certain sense of James´ stuff in it which gave it the exact amount of greatness I needed. I watched the movie before I heard anything about the score, and hell, was I blown away. The album must have been played a zillion times in our car and in our house, I used it in RPG sessions, I use it as background writing, it has become the score I plaed most in recent years.

That said about my expectations for The Dark Knight, I think this score is a beast that has to be tamed by getting swallowed and picking it in the stomach, until it lets you out by its own free will and will give you everything you want after that.

The Joker´s Theme is pure genius, it´s as simple as that. You have to hate it from an easy listening point of view, but that´s the point. You´re not supposed to dream well by being put to sleep by Hermann scores, you´re supposed to get the shit scared out of you, and after seen the movie, the Joker Theme works so well I can´t put words to it.

The Harvey Dent Theme directly grew out of BB´s lighter Gotham Theme, and it certainly fits like a glove, in every version of it.

The two-note4 Bat fanfare is back, it has many dramatic apperances, and I like them all. Oh, I specifically like how we get introduced to the BatMan in this movie, and how he is overall presented as Gotham´s James Bond, complete with his own Q and Moneypenny (God, I adore Freeman and Caine). I love his trip to HK, and I love how everything starts to slip away under his feet.

And that´s what the score does, too. The right choices were made, without a question, though I´d personally like to hunt down Nolan and smack him for not using Like A Dog Chasing Cars in that scene where, well, you know which one...

The finale is fantastic, both in the movie and on CD, and I think A Dark Knight has been played two hundred times since I decided to buy the score from amazon.co.uk (MUCH faster and cheaper than amazon.de). That monster track is without any doubt a great, fantastic, mind-blowing suite of every feeling that the title of Dark Knight evokes.

Personally, I think the album could have been slightly shorter, but I love to have as much stuff as possible, so i can edit my own version easily.

So, what do I think in the end? Of course, this is just another of those modern style scores, but we´ve had the discussion and you know my opinion. A score has to fit its movie. This one does like a well crafted Bat suite should.

And well, it´s Zimmer, it´s Howard, it´s great, what else should I give it? 10/10

Well, the film obviously afcted you Ralph judging byyour lengthy post

Most of my friends have seen it, most have loved it, some thought it was good but overlong but none said it was crap.

Seems I'll be the last to see it?

I didn´t know it would become such a long post, but I had an unexpected visit and had to press the send button without further editing. I hope you like it anyway.


It really is very long and feels that way too, but it´s the kind of long where you start to wonder how big this movie is going to get and not when you´ll be able to walk out of it (like the Rings movies or Aliens, which is probably the best long action movie I know).


I didn´t know whether I was the last one or not, so I tried to avoid spoilers.

I think there were some blunders in the scoring and one of them was the finale. The Dent material worked very well.

I find the whole blockbuster discussion unnecessary anyway. Even with the situation as it is, there are still many, many great classic style action/fantasy/adventure/entertainment movie scores.

Harry Potter, Star Wars Prequels, The Lord of the Rings, James Bond, The Golden Compass, X-Men, Spider-Man, Star Trek, King Kong... The list just goes on and on, and while it´s right we get less of this stuff each year, we still get it, plus the whole universe of "smaller" movies scored the classic way. Still more than enough to satisfy anyone, but somehow I get this feeling that the classic purists aren´t satisfied as long as time isn´t turned back.

But the last thing I wanted is to restart the discussion. I just felt an obligation to share my detailed opinion about the score, since I promised it to the man who helped to satisfy my early needs. You know who you are. Thanks again.

There's a dramatic reason why the music is not there, and I suspect many people who watched the film enjoyed the benefits of that without even realising it, except for the few random thousand who were expecting to hear an action cue tell you how to feel about a scene whose outcome was obviously intended to feel more uncertain than music would have allowed it to be. Most directors who leave out a music cue that otherwise fits the film do so for this reason, and I thought it was great to have a large scale action scene achieved largely through sound design. It recalled the great action scenes of the seventies (including the lightsabre fights of the original STAR WARS; the air chase at the end of CAPRICORN ONE; the car chases in BULLITT and FRENCH CONNECTION), where composers like Goldsmith and Williams weren't required to make things more exciting than they already were.

I think most of the score should definitely not have been used.

Absolutely. The lack of music in that scene is, IMO, an act of pedantism and self importance. As if Nolan is saying: "look what an IMPORTANT and GREAT picture I´m making that I don´t need music in the ONLY long action sequence of the WHOLE movie". Come on, even if I think TDK is the best superhero movie EVER, Nolan shouldn´t have forgotten that even if you want a mature and serious approach to the character you don´t have to remind it every second of the footage. In a two and a half hour movie, 5 minutes of an epic cue chase for (insist) the only long action sequence of the film was necessary.

From the audience member that evidently felt important enough to assume their instinct was better.
(Btw, directing on the whole is pedantism at its most glorious. I've had a taste of the waters, and they are sweet indeed.)

Yes, I realised that later when I listened to the CD. At the time, I thought I was hearing a cut-up version of 'A dog chasing cars'. (To be honest, familiarity of the audience with music they thought was going to be in the film is part of the problem here. Nobody would have cared if the music hadn't been on the CD.)

Obviously, if the cue isn´t used in the movie and hadn´t make it on the cd, nobody would have cared A least until it was leaked somehow in the future.