Music @ XMART.US

… if you have never listened to Debney, or Korngold, or Herrmann, or Williams. Everything in life is relative. Compared to the previous two installments, “At World’s End” is a top-notch orchestral work.

Compared to other entries in the genre, or music written for a similar kind of film, this ship has no sails, its crew is starving to death, and the captain shoots leaks into its sides himself.

For those who already know my reviews for the other two Pirates scores this won’t be surprising, but I don’t really like this score. Which is a great improvement over Dead Man’s Chest, though, which I genuinely hate.

I heard it the first time and found it okay. Then a second time, a third, a fourth time. And each time it got worse.

Zimmer’s principal idea for “Hoist The Colours” is good, and it may be the only truly original track on the album. That and the World’s End theme, which heavily reminds me of Titanic. The rest is typical Zimmer, which means it varies between “noise”, “padding”, “static”, “loud”, “extremely loud”, and “one-more-minute-and-my-ears-bleed loud” – the Hans Zimmer equivalent of the traditional p-mp-mf-f-ff-fff.

Established themes from Dead Man’s Chest, “Jack Sparrow” and “Davy Jones”, for better or worse, return here, and don’t do much or go someplace new. The themes don’t resolve, and quite understandably so, since they had neither much substance, nor any remarkable versatility from the get go. They are not strong enough to survive outside of Zimmer’s comfortable approach to all of his scores. This approach of overly simplistic chord progressions and über-harmonic movements not only lack style and substance, it also proves that any children’s song can sound heroic or dramatic with sufficiently bombastic orchestrations.

And this approach is applied to every theme, no matter how big or small. Only Zimmer can, or should I say dares, to take a relatively small idea of romance between two people and make it sound as important as a historic war.

Subtlety is still a word unknown to Zimmer.

And there’s only so much bombast a score can hammer on your ears with, until you don’t believe in the score’s intelligence anymore.

Hans Zimmer himself calls this score flamboyant and “swashbuckling”. But the music says something different. But Zimmer can’t be flamboyant because he insists on his masculine style of overboarding and overbearing brass and percussion. The best he can do is achieve a sense of overly dramatic adventure.

I know people in the theatre are going to laugh long and hard when they see Will and Elizabeth marrying to the tones of Tara’s Theme from Gone With The Wind. Is this a conscious decision from Zimmer? How can anyone write such music and not see the blatant similarity, not to say rip-off?

Then, Zimmer says he didn’t want Singapore to sound too asian. I can’t imagine music sounding more asian than “Singapore”. Listen to Memoirs Of A Geisha and hear how delicate chinese music can be interwoven with our music styles. Some may say it’s a wrong comparison, but these are the standards Hans Zimmer has to be measured by. And he’s lightyears away from it, that’s the cruel “truth” (in the vaguest meaning of the word).

What else? Music from Dead Man’s Chest being recycled note for note and instrument for instrument in “I don’t think now is the best time”, choir pieces that sound like they’ve been edited into the film from The Da Vinci Code, cues like “Up Is Down” and “Multiple Jacks” that seem to more satisfy the desires of the composer than the needs of the film … who knows? Maybe a couple of co-writers had the chance to go wild on one of these …

And it all suffers from the usual horn overkill. Zimmer says he doesn’t use samples very often. Very well, as absurd as that subjectively sounds to me, so be it. He’s interested in unusual recording techniques. Very well, so be it. But it doesn’t matter whether the horns play in the back of the hall, in front, left, right, dead center, on a balcony or through a toilet bowl – as long as the notes that come out are still bad, as long as the orchestration is still dull, the score will be dull, too.

I can’t believe, and I mean this in the strongest possible meaning of this expression, that Hans Zimmer has been working on this score since last October.

It’s maybe “as flamboyant as Hans Zimmer gets”, but it’s defintely not flamboyant in the traditional meaning of the word. To pompously announce “I can write swashbuckling music in my sleep, it’s easy”, and then come out with something like At World’s End is not only insulting, it’s an embarassment to the whole film score world.

No wonder truly inventive film scores can’t get a foot, or even the big toe, into mainstream, when Pirates Of The Caribbean is presented as the ultimate incarnation of swashbuckling music.

And now the main argument of all PotC defenders, that the music is perfect because the movie doesn’t want to be pure pirate films, doesn’t count anymore, too. Because Hans Zimmer recently proclaimed it as “swashbuckling music” himself.

Rating: 2 / 5

Even if I knew nothing about the Pirates franchise’s soundtracks, it was obvious to me within about 30 minutes of sitting down to see the film this weekend that Hans Zimmer was the composer. I don’t know if that is a good thing or not – I suppose it depends not only on what you think of Zimmer’s work but what you expect from movie soundtrack composition itself. The music works very well with this movie. There were times when I was really quite entertained by the sound work in this film – unlike more “serious” adventure movie soundtracks Zimmer has done in the past, this one has moments of comedy, as when Jack interacts with himself; but at other times it is the same Zimmer cliches, as in the scenes that correspond to the tracks titled “Up is Down” and “Drink Up Me Hearties”. But, as is often typical of Zimmer soundtracks, there were times when I found the recycling from other movies quite distracting. In fact, by the time the movie had ended and I was walking out of the theater, the accompanying music was almost identical to Zimmer’s battle scene music in Gladiator. I am ambivalent in the end – there is enough originality at times in this soundtrack to delite, but it is a mixed bag full of Zimmer cliches used over and over again in movie after movie as well.
Rating: 3 / 5