Bad Movies with Good Music/Good Movies with Bad Music

[Darth Kermit]

Also, I'm kind of exhausted of people saying "I love all these other themes" when what they really mean is "I love all John Williams' themes". If we're going to compare the MCU to Williams, then lets compare everyone to Williams. Where is the Fast & Furious franchise theme? The Wonder Woman theme? And so on. Williams is peerless, but others are doing great work as well, and their work should be compared to their peers. Zimmer is a good start, so let's talk Goransson, Giacchino, Newman, Desplat, Newton Howard...where are everyone's most memorable themes?

Don’t forget about Howard Shore and Lorne Balfe. But speaking of most memorable scores, LOTR is the gold standard for me. Star Wars is incredible and Williams is great, but LOTR is my favorite score ever. I could hum every tune for days on end. But also, I really love many scores without memorable themes. I absolutely love Zimmer’s Dune score. To me, it perfectly captures Arrakis and what the photography shows us. I feel like I’m there hearing the rhythm of the desert, and even though it’s not as memorable as my previous favorite Zimmer score Interstellar, it’s damn impressive and majestical to me.

 

[mnkykungfu]

^I'm with everyone on the LOTR, but also that goes back to my point about repetition. Those films had the same composer over three (long) films who kept reworking the themes into new themes and repeating them hour after hour. It's not (necessarily) that the music is head and shoulders better than that in other modern films, it's the intention of building and repeating, building and repeating. Until recently, the MCU films hadn't embraced that philosophy, as many other big modern films haven't, even series. Bond, for example, despite being supposedly re-invented and set apart in Craig's era, has never had his own theme other than the one established 60 years ago that they occasionally had to nod to.

To get back to the MCU, I think several of the films also made an effort to focus more on an association with soundtrack rather than score. For example, AC/DC for Iron Man, rather than an old-fashioned theme. The punk version of Spider-Man's song rather than Elfman's score. The GotG throwback songs, and so on. It's easy to criticize this stuff in retrospect, but when Marvel was trying to get the machine running, I think they really wanted to avoid the pitfalls of being lumped in with cheesy films that had come before. Score choices were part of that, and you can argue that they at least defied expectations in a way that made people notice.

 

[Moe_Syzlak]

Again, I don’t think it’s about repetition. Sure the musical themes in the movies we’re talking about are repeated, so are the pieces in the more Zimmer-esque (and yes, I’m going to continue calling it that) scores. It’s just that it’s percussive, less melodic music that isn’t as easily recognized. Also it’s computerized. Again, at the risk of betraying my age, this stuff lacks fundamental aspects of what we as humans relate to on more emotional levels.

And if we want to continue to harp on Marvel, which I don’t think is the only culprit by a long shot, I think it’s fair to speculate that they were going to generic. They wanted their movies to have a certain McDonald’s quality where you knew what you were going to get. Strong artistic stamps—whether music, direction, or otherwise—tend to set a bar, for better or for worse. I’d speculate they wanted a repeatable formula that felt consistent from movie to movie. For me the most memorable decision of the MCU was the hiring of RDJr.

I want to be clear that this is not bashing the MCU. I just think the MCU treats its movies more like a TV series. Even prestige TV shows exhibit the same tendencies. Although widely heralded as some of the best episodes of Breaking Bad, there isn’t much in the Rian Johnson episodes that is distinctive in terms of music or direction that separates those episodes from the rest. His episodes are simply a part of a whole. And I love Breaking Bad.