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My problem with Zimmer stems from 2 different problems:
1. How much of the music in his scores are REALLY COMPOSED by Hans Zimmer. Look, it's one thing to have another composer come in a pinch (i.e. ST-TMP with Fred Steiner) but these scores are PLANNED to be written by committee.
2. All of these scores are for the "Comic Book Hyper-Trash" genre that pollutes our cinemas. Seriously, we're REALLY debating creative impetus of the directors of these "movies"? Maybe Zimmer's scores are so repetitive because he's having a hard time differentiating between which movie he's scoring...Maybe he's really not to blame after all!
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That's exactly the shallow answer that I expected from Ridley Scott. The surface gloss of his movies isn't accidental, there's nothing inside his films or himself. No surprise he doesn't understand the role of music as an adjunct to drama. He must have been very pleased with the insipid wallpaper provided by Marc Streitenfeld for Robin Hood then, too.
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Don't tell me you think that Gladiator was an incisive, musically differentiated score. 
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In an interview with Ridley Scott, he was asked, what's your best advice for someone composing a musical score to one of your films? Ridley's answer was, "Don't write me a symphony." And there, I think, you have the contemporary state of the union in a nutshell. Write me nothing that competes for attention in any way, with my glorious photography and sound effects.
That's exactly the shallow answer that I expected from Ridley Scott. The surface gloss of his movies isn't accidental, there's nothing inside his films or himself. No surprise he doesn't understand the role of music as an adjunct to drama. He must have been very pleased with the insipid wallpaper provided by Marc Streitenfeld for Robin Hood then, too.
How does that explain away Gladiator? That certainly wasn't sonic wallpaper. 
He got lucky that the film fell within the "1 out of every 10 scores by Zimmer is not that bad!"
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I do wonder how people reconcile 1) he’s such a no-talent hack that he doesn’t write his own music but then 2) his scores are no good. Why would he hire ghost writers that are no good?
Ender’s Game (not Zimmer, I know) has been a revelation for me. I hate it. Maybe I’ll think differently when I see the movie. But I really can’t stand it. It is everything that people complain about RCP on a single score. (I’m actually unfamiliar with Transformers and Battleship. But what could Horner have done that was so bad that the creators said “No, get us THAT guy!”)
This tells me that the Zimmeratti are not all the same. I love Ramin Djawadi. Pacific Rim might be my favorite score this year. (Why didn’t they let HIM do Ender’s Game?) How to Train Your Dragon (Powell) is one of my favorite scores ever. I’ll take some Gregson-Williams any day.
I wanted more from Man of Steel. It’s not BAD. It’s just not GREAT. No I didn’t want a Williams re-tread, but I think it was as amorphous as it was because face it, that’s what it was up against. I wanted something that was at least as melodious as Pirates 3. I listen to about ten minutes of MoS on a regular basis. (Not always the same ten.)
I have many Zimmer scores that are my all time faves. (I still love Point of No Return and Crimson Tide.)
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Posted: |
Oct 14, 2013 - 10:51 AM
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By: |
Ado
(Member)
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One of the biggest problems is that the Zimmer non-haters (Zimmer lovers Ick!) may be hoping the Zimmer haters stop hating him and stop expressing it.
It is just not going to happen. Give up.
Nor is that my goal. If you really feel that you "hate" his music, that's fine (although 'hate' is such a strong word, it should be used sparingly, IMO). However, there should be ways to express said feeling in a way that makes conversation or debate possible. Angry, über-dramatic rhetorics and cheap oneliners don't really create that environment. And it's made even worse by the fact that it's an online forum where body language is not available.
So dislike all you want, but asking for a calm, rational debate is not altogether unreasonable, one would hope.
I am with you on that Thor, and I dislike the word 'hate' I merely referenced it because it was the theme in the thread subject. I certainly do not hate him personally. In text and video interviews that I have seen he is personally likable and sometimes self effacing. I have never seen anything in Hans Zimmer that make me think he is a jerk or anything like that.
I have never used insulting personally attacking words against Zimmer.
But like the others here I dislike his music, especially in the more recently say 10 or 12 years. I dislike it because of the degree to which he has become so extremely popular with directors. This success, and the composer colony he established in RC, has had the unfortunate impact of this Zimmer sound being inescapable even when he is not the composer, and too many 'large action pictures' seem like to either have to go to Hans Zimmer, or copy the 'Hans Zimmer sound' with one of his ambassadors like Steve Jablonsky etc etc. (For example most recently Enders Game dumping Horner).
How I feel about the ubiquity of the Zimmer sound is similar to how I feel when I see an overproduced car everywhere I go, my eyes weary of seeing the same boring popular make in multiple copies everywhere I drive. Yawn.
Further, it is sad because his success at the propagation of this sonic model has effectively retrained the ears of a lot of important people in the industry so that they are no longer interested in a traditional orchestral melodic approach, and it is not even considered as a possibility.
I think it is also a complete intellectual failure for Zimmer defenders here to attach non-Zimmer people as not being 'open minded'. Nothing is more irritating than saying I do not like what you like because my mind is smaller than yours. There is nothing more intellectual or educated about liking Zimmer.
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and they add absolutely nothing to any conversation 
