I like most of Hans Zimmer’s work. He is the one composer I am aware of who has started using a stable of composers. That is, he farms work out to them and then quality control’s it; reminds me of Churchill’s approach to writing his history books!
In fairness I find ALL film composers plagerise themselves, Horner and Barry are typical examples. The most egregious example I feel is Leonard Rosenman who wrote an excellent soundtrack for the animated Bakshi ‘Lord of the Rings’. He then copied this for ‘Star Trek 4 - The Voyage Home’, for which he received an Academy Award nomination!
TBH I think that soundtracks made up of songs already in existence eg Pulp Fiction, Baby Driver, Trainspotting etc can be great. But original soundtracks just don’t do it for me - they are intended to be heard while viewing the scenes they were written for. Without that they just don’t work for me as music in their own right. YMMV
I think this is a valid criticism, although not one that prevents me enjoying film music, after all it is written to evoke emotion. Some composers have addressed this by developing their score into a concert piece, such as Howard Shore.
I find the best film scores to be inventive, moving and exciting. Sure, there are better and worse ones, but that’s true of any art form. I can (and do) listen to many film scores without ‘the pictures’, get an enormous amount out if them, and have done so for decades. I’m profoundly grateful to those who produce it.
I couldn’t agree more. I know many movies better for their soundtrack rather than the movie itself.
Also I believe that in many cases the beauty of the soundtrack is somehow hidden in the movie, it doesn’t properly emerge with all its intensity and pathos.
One of these cases, in my personal opinion, is Mission: Impossible Fallout. It’s a very organic with the movie but its potential is tamed too much and I was a touch disappointed for that reason when I watched the movie for the first time (I’ve been listening to this soundtrack many times before). I did like the movie a lot, but it didn’t make true justice to its great soundtrack.
And, of course, there is the phenomenon of ‘the score is far better than the film it was written for’. John Williams did a few of these in the 90s:
Hook (1991)
Far & Away (1992)
Sabrina (1995)
The scores to the first two are so good, they’ve had expanded re-releases issued, which is very much more than can be said for the films they accompany!
Further to my advocacy of the soundtrack to Alien a few posts back, I bought it off Qobuz and I have been listening to it a lot recently and I really like it. Its worth another picture:
I did a bit of reading about the soundtrack and it turns out that the version in the film is a bit different from the soundtrack record, which I believe is a reissue of the original 1979 released soundtrack LP. Apparently the composer (Jerry Goldsmith) wanted to start off peacefully then get more aggressive and strange as the tension mounted as the film went on, but the director (Ridley Scott) preferred the more weird parts of the score and wanted more of that. For example, the opening title on the record is a romantic version introducing some of the score’s main themes, and later on the more avant-garde and cacophonic music comes along as the creature starts doing the characters in. The director asked the composer to make a less conventional opening title score and the result is like a greatest hits of the rest of the score and as a result is much stranger. There are quite a few other differences as well.
After reading all this, I wanted to see if I could get hold of the complete original score and the one used in the film. I have got the blu ray of the film and yesterday by blind chance I looked on the back of it and it said that there were two isolated musical score tracks, and this was exactly what I was looking for! I extracted these two tracks to wav files so I can play them through the music centre without having to play the film and both are really good. The two versions have all the same fundamental themes, but there are crucial differences, like the opening title mentioned above.
I think the film is a winner and it is made more effective by the score. The score goes from gentle to manic and uses all sorts of instruments, sounds and recording techniques. I think the result is very effective at creating a mood of otherworldliness and threat, and is a real original.
@SJT This is really interesting and as a big fan of the film you have given me the incentive to purchase the Bluray and also rediscover the soundtrack.
Great! I hope you like it. I got the 4k blu ray version from amazon - I think it was about £15. Its got a 4k disc and a standard blu ray disc in it, and I got the musical score audio tracks from the standard blu ray disc. I have a fairly cheap 4k tv and blu ray player and the film looks very good on this. On the score tracks there is a lot of silent parts because they have put the bits of the musical score where they occur in the film. The score tracks are raw recordings from the session (in Feb 1979 I think) and they even have bits where the recording engineer says the cue number as well! When I got the wav files out, I chopped the silent bits off in Audacity.
I remember seeing it at the cinema when it first came out and it left a real impression on me. Brilliant music. I also really enjoyed Glass’ soundtrack for Mishima
Many great movie soundtracks here, ( and indeed I’ve got some of them - Gladiator on double LP for example, which was a birthday pressie from the daughters!) but one should also consider video games. OK, so you have to be “a gamer” to hear them, but there’s some good stuff out there.
