Welcome to the main discussion thread for the Marvel Cinematic Universe! This pinned post is here to establish some basic guidelines. All of the Media Forum rules
still apply.
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. Extended digressions may be thumped as off-topic.
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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
For those in Atlanta, marvel is casting extras for Infinity War and Black Panther
.
sounds like they're looking for asgardians in the former.
edited 6th Feb '17 4:58:05 AM by comicwriter
We already knew Earth would be minimized but apparently only three scenes in Thor Ragnarok will be set on Earth
. Nice.
Lmao @ Thanos just running into groups of heroes that he has to smack down.
Could be interesting if the whole thing is a blitzkrieg by him to catch everyone off-guard before they can group up and mobilize but fighting so many people in such a short time span wears him down to the point that he can't use the infinity stones to the best of their abilities as he's not in his peak condition.
And then as he tries to escape more and more heroes keep getting in the way of his escape route until he collapses.
So he'd basically be a Marathon Boss that you need to attrition down as the heroes keep invoking We Have Reserves every time he gets close to winning.
Thanos' Very Bad No Good Day!
@ Swanpride: That was a pretty cool article you made. The inciting video "The Marvel Symphonic Universe" is generally accurate when it comes to the nature of film scores but when you're talking about a 13+ film series, not all are going to be equal. In general, the MCU has some pretty good main themes but it's rare they just let the music speak for the movie instead of having a lot of talking or other sounds share the space. Even in epic soundtrack moments like when Banner Hulks out and the Avengers are gathered for the first time, the main theme is blaring but you also have noise of the Leviathan crashing and Chitauri roaring at them. I think the solution is mostly to allow the other sounds complement the music rather than fight with it, have the sounds make their own melody. The Iron Man theme in particular works wonderfully when we get a suit up and start up sequence. The tank buster moment of the first film was also awesome because the soundtrack was silent and used the tank exploding as the cue to restart the theme.
I think the problem with the original movie was that the creator wanted to point out a potential problem in the way film music is done nowadays - said problem being the use of temp music influencing the director to much and the trend to have music is not supposed to get noticed - and used the MCU as stepping stone to do that. But the fact that the Avenger theme isn't that well-known is truly more a marketing problem than anything else, and we have no idea how the MCU movies are actually scored.
Though I did stumble over quite an interesting interview with Henry Jackmann in which he described how he was called to do the Winter Soldier and initially thought that he would have to go in exactly the same direction Silvestri did, with the rousing, patriotic themes, until he actually read the script and immediately went in pretty much the opposite direction. He also goes into great detail how much time he spend on getting the Winter Soldier track right and how difficult it was to put together something which sounded appropriately menacing. All this doesn't sound at all as if he was limited in his work, it sounds more like he was called in early and had the opportunity to bring in his own idea. And that kind of approach seems to be typical for the Russo brothers in general, they seem to put a lot of trust into the people they work with.
Doesn't mean that composers who worked on other MCU movie weren't more limited, though.
But I have noticed three trends with the MCU movies: 1. They like to pick-up previous themes - just not always the same ones. For example a very interesting choice was to play the theme from the original Ironman TV-show in a scene in which the "new" Iron-man isn't present, because Tony skipped getting an award. 2. They like to use pre-existing songs in-universe....Got G naturally does it really obvious, but the trend goes back to the first Iron-man. In general the characters are more connected to a specific style of music - i.e. Heavy Metal for Ironman, Old Jazz for Cap (and Peggy), Soul for Sam, Classic Music for Bruce - than scores (though some of them do have their own scores). 3. And they like to work towards some sort of big finale sound. In a lot of soundtracks, the "big track" is at the very end of the movie or at the very least in the third act.
Well that's a different issue, there is no indication that the main themes themselves are being based on temp music. Temp music is usually about the mood music used in between the big themes, something with a little bit of personality to help inform the emotion. Recycling main themes with temp music usually depends on the composer, the main Doctor Strange theme is essentially the Abrams Star Trek theme with a middle eastern twang to it. The Harry Potter theme is reworked from Hook.
And, as the videos I used in my article point out, Star War is based on temp music, too, and Pot C sounds very similar to a track from Gladiator.
I mean he is right that the Got G theme kind of sounds like The Avengers theme, but I think that is entirely intentional.
edited 7th Feb '17 11:06:03 AM by Swanpride
Temp music is like most everything else, Tropes Are Tools. Thing is it is primarily to assist the editor, and while having some limitations is a good thing every person involved with a movie wants their work to be seen and heard. Actors, wardrobe, props, folly, everyone. So while some composers are fine mimicking temp music, they live for the movie when someone tells them to go crazy and the film will be edited around their original music.
On a side note, the legendary John Williams Superman theme was basically a fully orchestrated version of the 50's Superman TV show theme.
Marvel Studios Is Perfectly Okay With Its Villain Problem
http://io9.gizmodo.com/marvel-studios-is-perfectly-okay-with-their-villain-pro-1792101084
Regarding the Marvel music discussion, I haven't watched the various videos of yet, but I would say that I agree with the idea that it's not necessarily fair to hold the Marvel movies wanting compared to say John Williams/Star Wars movies or Hans Zimmer's soundtracks, such as for the Sherlock Holmes movies.
With Star Wars and Holmes, my impression is that the composers of the soundtracks basically wrote them like a sympathy and have various lietmotifs and takes on theme music throughout. I see something similar in Ramin Djawadi's soundtracks for Game of Thrones and Debbie Wiseman's soundtrack for Wolf Hall.
All of these are great soundtracks by talented people, but I don't think that means that all movies and tv shows have to have this and are mediocre if they don't. To the extent I know about film music, I understand Williams to be in the mold of Korngold
, who basically started the idea of movie music and was an actual classical composer, which is why Williams likes to "borrow" from classical music. This is a model of film composing but as should be obvious, not the only model.
Well, I did summarize the major points of the videos (though I naturally recommend watching them nevertheless, to see the actual examples used).
I think when it comes to the "why people don't remember the theme", the marketing point is the best one. I mean, everyone thinks immediately of Guardians of the Galaxy when they hear "hooked on a feeling"....why? well, because of all the songs which are used in the movie, this was the one which was used extensively in the marketing. Play the creepy version of "No strings on me", and there is immediately an association with Age of Ultron, even though the song is only very briefly in the movie, and in a different version to boot.

OK.
1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KV