Good Movies with Ghastly Scores....(or just mediocre)

We have exactly two threads in which tropers can opine some films they hated or are generally hated but had scores they enjoyed.

But we don't have any with opposite as far as I know.

So yeah,feel free to enter in your favorite,or generally well received films with scores that just didn't deliver,or were outright horrible.

Me going first....The Dark Knight Saga was very underwhelming score-wise,if there really was a place that the Schumacher films [Batman Forever and Batman And Robin was better than Nolan] had an advantage,it was that Elliot Goldenthal's score was brilliant and vibrant.

But Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard both managed to make a score that was just so one-note,cliched,and formulaic. The only part of Batman Begins in the score that had any stand-out was the credits,and maybe the part where it swells when Batman drops the bat-sonar in his boots and descends in a building. There's nothing memorable score-wise at all in The Dark Knight or The Dark Knight Rises.

I feel like those scores could've been placed in Pirates or the Matrix or any actiony-movie and would just fade away.

The only really noteworthy track in Dark Knight was Joker's theme, just one note extended for 9 minutes, like the song of a deranged cicada or something.

Two-Face's theme was great, imo.

I liked Pacific Rim, and I think it deserved better.

It's every boy's romance. Hell, it have a giant robot hitting a giant lizard with a metal container. It have Cherno-Goddamn-Alpha.

I can't exactly see how Pacific Rim's rocking theme can be filed as "deserves better."

Okay, the "Kaiju emerging" DUN DUN DUN DUN theme was kinda dumb. One bad track in exchange for an awesome one.

edited 4th Jan '14 10:35:18 AM by Tuckerscreator

The music's just really bland compared to what the inspiration did. Game of Thrones guy's barely a patch on Akira Ifukube:

THAT would have made a great theme for the Jaegers, if you ask me.

Pirates Of The Carribean the first one which was in fact not scored by Hans Zimmer. Anyway,while the score was serviceable,it didn't stand out to such a good movie.

The sequels had mediocre Zimmer scores but were mediocre themselves.

I'm kinda biased in favor of movies with particularly unique scores, so at least as far as I can recall from what I've seen, any movie from the past two decades that isn't The Truman Show or Coraline

(Yeah, I'm sure there's others with good scores, but most movies I can remember right now generally have really generic orchestral scores that do nothing new, or at least nothing particularly different from the majority. EDIT: Now that I think of it, I loved the score from The Secret World Of Arrietty, but I wasn't 100% on the movie—I thought it was cute, but not too much more.)

edited 6th Jan '14 9:05:36 PM by Odd1

Anything with a score from Hans Zimmer, and by extension almost anything coming from his comrades of Remote Control (the company he founded). The man singlehandedly owns the musical score industry and he's bar none the worst film score composer in fucking history, it's unbelievable.

I've actually avoided movies I wanted to see just because he scored them (Man of Steel being one), because every time I go see a movie that he's scored I go out with a god forsaken blood-pumping headache (I swear to you I'm not kidding).

Worst offender being when he's paired with Nolan, who somehow lets him go full-on pachydermic lousiness mode, and you just have sub bass and synthetic horns ringing through the whole movie, which wouldn't be so bad if the movies weren't that long. The best example of this phenomenon I can think of is Inception : between the movie itself, the music, the sound design and sound effects and the air conditioning in the theater, I was sick for two whole days after seeing it.

Other than that, there are good movies with otherwise unremarkable scores, but even though that's not ideal, it still beats coming out of the theater like you've been drilled in the ears several times, so now I'll go for unremarkable as long as it's quiet.

Even The Lion King?

I'm really not a fan of the movie, nor the score, but this was before his "turning point" I'd say. I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened but it's probably at the same time his new "style" invaded every single movie trailer as well.

I'd say this for Zimmer, I've never been a fan of his but there was a time when his scores, while not good, were at least adequate, or listenable. I'd say the cutoff would probably be anything after The Thin Red Line, cos it first started getting consistently offensively bad around that time (Mission Impossible 2, Gladiator, etc), even though he had made a couple of scores in that style before already (I don't remember The Rock too much but I seem to recall it was quite heavy as well).

And to be fair it's probably not even the guy's fault, he's never been a really good composer but he puts out like, what, 6 scores a year ? He must have an army of co-composers and orchestrators and yes-men, and as long as the public likes it he's probably going to keep on the same path.

No what I find undefendable is that not only does it not seem to bother people, but that style (you know what I'm talking about, the "constant low-end rumble and one-note brass ensemble" thing) is spreading, not only in hollywood movies but in video games as well, and he's the main reason behind this, especially with his team of hitmen over at Remote Control (for example one of the worst pieces of music in recent memory was the score for the Conan remake, especially when you consider Poledouris' original score which was easily one of the best soundtrack works of the eighties if not the finest score of the decade).

So long answer short, no, I don't have a problem with The Lion King. It's fine for what it is (just not my thing), but I can understand people liking it. What I don't understand is what I've explained above.

That explains it pretty well for me. Funnily enough, I had the opposite problem with the Inception soundtrack. I like most of its songs, but to me there's too many quiet ones and not enough exciting ones. Which isn't helped by the two most fast paced tracks being left off the main soundtrack and having to be bought as bonuses... ("Don't Think About Elephants" aka "the spinny hallway fight scene" and "Projections", which is pretty much 80% of the third act before the climax.)

I don't know, I gotta admit I only saw Inception once and it was in the theater on (almost) opening day, and I did not care for the movie (even though I thought it was ok), so I certainly haven't listened to the soundtrack by itself, so it may very well be a sound design problem that's not apparent in the actual score.

But yeah if anything, I'm not even mad at Zimmer himself, for all I know the guy is alright, the problems I have are more against what he does, what he represents and what he's become and helped popularized.

Zimmer suffers from being too generic,...I did like The Last Samurai's score though and would even go as far as to say that is a decent score is mediocre flick.

I never really got why Zimmer was so polarizing. While there are a few scores of his I like, most of them I don't really notice.

I feel like across the board, the Marvel movies have had very generic music. Avengers sticks out the worst for me in that regard.

I think Zimmer is so polarizing because his style has influenced a large majority of the current film composers. It's one thing to not care too much for Zimmer's music, but when the style is in loads of films, it starts to get irritating and then annoying.

Well, I like Zimmer music - or music made by his studios. Not everything which comes from there is actually made by him, you know.

Rise of the Guardians...I really adore the movie, but for my life, I can't remember the score of it AT ALL. Not that it is bad (I really can't think of a single more with a bad score I like, because a bad score tends to destroy a movie), but it is really nothing to write home about.

Seriously if you can tell the difference between the scores of any of the composers in Remote Control, you're a fucking genius.

The "newbies" still try to use some melody, but after a few scores they all gravitate towards the same style and then differentiating them becomes a big guessing game of who abuses the orchestra the most.

Gravity. I didn't notice the soundtrack 90% of the time - rarely a good sign for a soundtrack, especially when it's constantly playing... or at least I think it was. Again, it was boring noise so I couldn't tell.

The only bit of music that was half-way memorable was the track with those Inception horns that played whenever the asteroids closed in on Ryan.

sometimes a score is made to fit for the mood and that doesn't always make for good listening music. Take the Shining for example.

I'd argue in those cases that you're not actually supposed to listen to the score outside of its context—it's just supposed to be paired with the action of the movie for which it was commissioned, and if it does its job effectively, good.

It depends on the context and your mood when you just listen to the score.

Granted, a lot of movie scores really are background music, but the really, really, good scores usually have one or two themes or tracks that would be recognizable even outside of watching the movie, even if they don't make good listening music. Take Shore's LOTR or Kajiura's Kara No Kyoukai, not to mention several of John Williams' scores, for example.