The Zimmernator

Last Tuesday saw the release of the score CD to The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, which made me quite happy save for one thing: I thought it was coming out on Monday, the day before, and thus I left three different record stores empty-handed that day before I realized my error. Fortunately, I did find a bit of a treasure on Monday: a cheap used copy of the score to The Last Samurai, which struck me as odd since the film hasn't even come out yet. Upon further review, the CD was actually a promotional disc issued by the recording company, which the lucky recipient dumped on the used-CD store despite the big label embossed right on top of Tom Cruise's face on the booklet's front: "FOR PROMOTIONAL USE ONLY! MUST BE RETURNED TO THE RECORD COMPANY UPON REQUEST!" Yeah, good luck with that, guys. I ain't giving it back.

The music for this one is by Hans Zimmer, who has managed to become the "Flavor of the Month" in Hollywood music circles, for good or ill. Zimmer tends to be the bette noire of film-music fandom, although there are small pockets of fandom for the guy. Mostly, though, filmscore folks are ambivalent toward Zimmer at best and outright hate him at worst. This is because Zimmer heads up a company called "Media Ventures", which is basically a corral of second-tier composers who tend to turn out very similar-sounding filmscores for all those very similar movies these days. We're talking names like Harry Gregson-Williams, Klaus Badelt, and others. They're the folks who dole out those throbbing, synthesizer-laden scores with lots of booming percussion, generic melodies and ordinary orchestration. (MV scores tend to accompany just about every movie Jerry Bruckheimer does, for example – a notable example earlier this year was Pirates of the Caribbean. Or, if you really want to take that brand new bottle of Excedrin for a test-run, there's the Armageddon score.)

It's interesting about filmscore folks: they tend to be really defensive about classical music people looking down their nose at film music, but then within their own little field the filmscore people tend to be just as provincial at times. Just find any thread of decent length on any film-music discussion forum that's devoted to Hans Zimmer and you're guaranteed to find some derisive comment about someone "jerking off on a synthesizer and calling it music". It's very odd. Synthesizers are just like any other musical instrument: wondrous in the hands of a fine musician, dull as ditchwater in the hands of a mere mortal. So, where does that leave me with Hans Zimmer?

Well, I'm of mixed mind on the guy. I hated what I've heard of Gladiator (which is not the whole thing, though). A lot of his action music really is pounding, headache-inducing stuff with dull, simplistic themes, and sometimes his tendency to "sex up" the orchestra with synthesized goodness is odd – does Zimmer have that little faith in the traditional orchestra? I can understand a lot of the complaints about Hans Zimmer; really, I can. But not all of them, because the guy is gifted, and he's turned in some really good stuff. His incidental music for The Lion King is quite good; even better is his work for The Prince of Egypt (that film's opening song is outstanding); I liked his work for the comedy As Good As It Gets; he did a hauntingly evocative score for Beyond Rangoon. Zimmer's no John Williams, and he doesn't bring the goods with nearly as much consistency as I might like, but he does bring the goods.

So anyway, how does Zimmer fare in The Last Samurai? I have to admit to being surprised at how much I liked this score. Now, in a lot of ways this is not a surprising score at all. If you ask your typical filmscore fan to imagine a Hans Zimmer score for a movie about Samurai warriors in Japan, they'd very likely imagine what Zimmer has concocted here. But there's good stuff anyway: it's a lot more meditative than I would have expected, with some very delicate passages that contrast wonderfully with the inevitable "bring the house down" music that Zimmer offers. Which, in this case, involve a lot of wonderful Japanese Taiko drums and in one really nifty passage apparently includes actual shouting warriors!

The score doesn't have quite as much Japanese flavor as I would have hoped. It uses Japanese instruments like those drums and the Shakuhachi flutes in service of a Western idea of Japanese-sounding music, which given the film's subject matter is probably appropriate. But it doesn't have the Japanese feel that a Joe Hisaishi or a Toru Takemitsu might have brought to bear. (Well, when Takemitsu was alive, anyway.) That's a minor quibble, though. I enjoyed this score a lot more than most Zimmer/MediaVentures scores I've heard. It's a very fine listen overall, and if you're looking for a filmscore CD with digital sound to show off your kick-ass stereo, well, this is a prime candidate.