From risk-taking imagination to formulaic templates: an irreversible trend in Hollywood film scores?

 

Jerry Goldsmith conducting

There was a time, like the somewhat distant 1950s, when a film intended for mainstream market dared to wildly experiment with its soundtrack. 

One enduring example is The Forbidden Planet (1956), which featured a truly ground-breaking  experimental soundtrack. Nothing like that was heard before in a Hollywood film. Further examples from subsequent years abound, and perhaps the secret is that the directors in those cases had more control over the end product than in the case of current (wannabe or actual) blockbusters...

Omen was not exactly an elitist art house venture either, but the late Jerry Goldsmith was given the freedom to experiment... and he did. Who could forget the sheer genius of using a repetitive, whispering but utterly menacing choral motif as the sound of the demonic dogs' breath? 

There was a time when John Carpenter was tinkering in rather superb way with his synths, we had William Friedkin resorting to progressive rock visionary Mike Oldfield or used the sonic imaginings of trailblazing electronic music giant Tangerine Dream. 

When Terminator shook the movie theatres with its footsteps, it did that with a musical backdrop provided by Brad Fiedel. He relied on the very early incarnations of digital sampling technology to produce many of the movie's signature sounds, too. He even had the audacity of using an aggressively pitch-shifted cello sample for one otherworldly sound that now everyone recognises as the ominous cue for the appearance of the Terminator.

Michael Mann, firmly rooted in mainstream and popular genres, had a look at his music collection - and then used everything from Kitaro to Michael Brook to Moby in the soundtracks of his famous thrillers. Think of the music, and its effectiveness, as used in Manhunter and Heat, to name just two key examples...

Oliver Stone and Ridley Scott brought in Kitaro and Vangelis, David Lynch pitched some ideas about a certain TV series to Angelo Badalamenti... 

And then... Hollywood, and not just, had a severe bout of selective amnesia. 

They, and soon everybody who was attempting to replicate successful-looking movie recipes, forgot what film soundtracks could be like - and stuck to some admittedly charming and successful solutions. These recipes that were then endlessly repeated by endless series of imitators, even big names succumbing to the charm of the found and tested formulae.

To say that it is a sound "expected by audiences" is like saying, with similar disregard for the causality chain, that Alex DeLarge expected to be a good lad in Clockwork Orange. If not brainwashed, we have been auditory cortex-washed by the omnipresent 'norm' that certain compositional and instrumental arrangement recipes have become.

It may rattle many cages if one drops Hans Zimmer's name here. Not that he is the problem, but what happened to his highly successful compositional formulae remains a perfect example.

Many may not recall how experimental and cross-genres composer he used to be. Maybe it is worth revisiting his soundtracks for Rain Man, Thelma & Louise, or Crimson Tide... or even some parts of Gladiator. None of them were intended to be art house movies with experimental scores... They were squarely aimed at the mainstream market, but Zimmer had vastly experimented with exotic ranges of sounds and arrangements. 

Apart from a few moments of absolute genius, e.g. S.T.A.Y from the soundtrack of Interstellar (a track that had flavours of Philip Glass's Koyaanisqatsi, seasoned by a pinch of Max Richter), there is a Zimmer recipe that has become a template for what we hear in movies. Using the orchestra for rock-like riffs, staccato minimalist patterns, punctuated with electronic and/or acoustic percussion layers... it is hard to find action scenes in blockbusters that do not follow the template.

Hollywood, a hollow shadow of its former adventurous and risk-taking self, has essentially stopped and even reversed what one could call the evolution of soundtrack composing and orchestration. 

Sure, we have Clint Mansell, or Cliff Martinez, or the spellbinding maestro Thomas Newman as examples of stunning geniuses when it comes to thinking in sounds.

We have had Villeneuve taking risks in Arrival, using Johann Johannsson and Max Richter in memorable and mesmerising manner.

We may have had M83 scoring Oblivion, Daft Punk scoring the sequel to Tron, but then their not quite Earth-shattering success was perhaps a re-enforcement for the mainstream studios' perception of "let's just stick to minimalist ostinato orchestral riffs" à la Zimmer & Co.

It is as if huge majority of studios and soundtrack composers are copying the very same formulaic recipe, and then we have even Zimmer self-plagiarising in astonishing manner. Care to hear the shocking "similarities", to put it mildly, between Time from Inception and Journey To The Line from the superb The Thin Red Line?... Some even made videos directly comparing the two. 

The fear of moving outside the small world of admittedly captivating but used-to-death compositional recipes we hear in almost every single successful action or thriller movie of recent years has basically killed mainstream movie soundtracks.

"Serious" soundtrack composing with completely cross-genre and cross-technology approach can be phenomenal, and yield mainstream success. 

Should we mention at this point Blade Runner by Vangelis?

The significance and the highly representative details of the original's soundtrack are a matter of music, and specifically electronic music, history. 

However, the sequel was a superb example of what happens even in such films. 

The firing of the late and sublime Johannsson, the hiring of Zimmer to make an incredibly self-conscious, trying to avoid imitation and still ending up terribly derivative, soundtrack is a splendid example of the forces that decide what we hear in our movies nowadays.

Is it because directors are not really at the helm of the monster productions any more? Is it because vast budget blockbusters are made by committees, often pre-calculating (or so they hope) the audience reactions with (what they think is) minimising of risks?

James Cameron had quite a say in what and how he used in eminently blockbuster movies not so long ago. Famously, he decided to use for the Titanic drawing scene one of James Horner's early piano-based sketches of what became the main theme, a piece that Horner had not intended for actual use in the film. He himself was quite surprised that Cameron decided to use the piano piece in the very form that it was sent to him - and, as we know, it fitted astonishingly well for the scene in question.

If directors and those with, dare one say, artistic say in the making of mainstream movies do not regain that level of control, we shall see a further flattening of already desperately bland soundtrack compositions. Latter can sound fantastically enthralling and they shake the cinemas' walls with great effect, but they can be lethally bland musically.

Sure, bits of Transformers or Marvel movies are stirring and effective, but that does not negate the fact that they are incredibly formulaic when it comes to compositional and creative thinking. 

So Zimmer and his copyists by now are not really a cause or manifestation of a disease, they are the symptoms of a disease... and the direction in which the disease is evolving, in seemingly unstoppable manner, is clear.