Very well then. Here we go. Please note that I do not mean any of this as offensive. It's just my personal opinion that is most likely to be quite contrary to your own. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/whistling.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
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I'll start with telling a little story. I've been a film music fan since before the release of the first PotC film and John Williams (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, etc.) has always been my favourite composer. When I first watched PotC, I wasn't all that impressed with the music, but I got it anyway and I ended up liking it a lot. I even considered it one of the best soundtracks written for a movie. Then a couple of years later I was fortunate enough to find the CD to Cutthroat Island in a store in England and, having read many raving reviews of it on the internet, decided to buy it. That put my opinion on the music for PotC firmly into perspective. The film "Cutthroat Island" is not quite as bad as it's made out to be, but the music is absolutely amazing. On the other hand, the first PotC film is absolutely amazing, but the music is just OK. It's got some good parts and is quite enjoyable, but not all that impressive compared to Cutthroat Island as far as I'm concerned.
I personally think the best composers for film are (or were):
- John Williams (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, Superman)
- Jerry Goldsmith (Air Force One, Rambo, First Knight, Mulan, The Mummy, Star Trek
- Basil Poledouris (Conan the Barbarian, The Hunt for Red October, Lonesome Dove, Quigley Down Under, Robocop, Starship Troopers)
- Alan Silvestri (Back to the Future, Van Helsing, The Mummy Returns, Judge Dredd)
- James Newton Howard (Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Dinosaur, Hidalgo, King Kong, Waterworld)
- John Debney (Cutthroat Island, Lair (computer game))
- David Arnold (Independence Day, Stargate, Last of the Dogmen, Godzilla)
- Harry Gregson-Williams (Kingdom of Heaven, Shrek, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas)
Originally Alan Silvestri was set to compose the music for Pirates of the Caribbean and I now find it most unfortunate that he didn't do it. His Back to the Future, The Mummy Returns and Van Helsing prove that he is very capable of writing big action-adventure music with good themes and with proper use of orchestra. Klaus Badelt and Hans Zimmer, on the other hand, have got a completely different way of writing music. They make much less use of orchestra and are, arguably, more modern, which I don't think fits with a pirate film all that well. Especially not with music as heard in Moonlight Serenade (PotC 1 - trackname from my extended version; it's called Swords Crossed on the original CD) and The Kraken (PotC 2). Especially The Kraken really took me out of the scene and put me into the theater, which is really what film music is NOT supposed to do.
All this being said, I do think there's plenty of good stuff written for the PotC films. The music for Jack's Entrance in PotC 1 works very well indeed. It's a shame it is now used EVERY TIME Jack enters the movie. I'd rather have something new for Jack's entrance. The action music for PotC 1 is really enjoyable and engaging. The <i>He's a Pirate</i> main theme is also good fun, though not entirely piratey-sounding. Jack Sparrow's theme for DMC is really quite good and does illustrate the quirky-ness of the character well. Davy Jones's Theme is also very good. <i>Two Hornpipes (Tortuga)</i> actually sounds like it belongs in the time period and is good fun (not written by Hans Zimmer though). <i>Wheel of Fortune</i> is a good fun action track. The "love theme" for AWE sounds very nice, though it somehow does sound very familiar. As if Hans Zimmer just wrote the word "romantic" in notes. <i>Up Is Down</i> is as far as I'm concerned the best action track on the AWE soundtrack. VERY good fun. I wished the rest of the action music was similar to this.
On the other hand, I find a lot of the music is either overly dramatic, inappropriate or weird. The low male choir in <i>Hello Beastie</i> feels really out-of-place to me, because I've heard that plenty of times before is scores like Crimson Time and The Rock. I don't like it one bit in a pirate film. <i>The Kraken</i> sounds too much like hard rock to feel at home in a pirate movie. <i>Parlay</i> is fun, but sounds like a western. Which is intentional, but weird. <i>Multiple Jacks</i> is REALLY weird. Of course it makes sense in the context of the film, but I don't think there's much remotely piratey about it. Of course you could argue that it is "original" or "modern", but it's not really my cup of tea.
Now that I've made clear what I think of the music for the current PotC films, let's move on to what I think about the music for our PotC film. Ideally I'd just have Alan Silvestri rewrite the music for ALL pirate films, but that is a bit unrealistic. A certain sound has been established and I suppose we should stick to that. At least somewhat. However, I really DO want the music to sound appropriately piratey with heroic brass fanfares, fun woodwinds (<i>Up Is Down!</i>) and nice seafaring music and I really DON'T want music that sounds either overly dramatic, inappropriate (too modern) or just weird or any combination of those. I think it should be a healthy mix between the kind of music established in older pirate films such as Cutthroat Island and even The Sea Hawk and Peter Blood which make proper use of orchestra and the more modern modern influence as heard in the PotC films.
Also I really don't like the practice of re-using music. Of course there should be themes; that is a MUST. But in DMC and AWE many times I heard actual re-used music. I heard <i>The Black Pearl Gives Chase</i> (Barbossa is Hungry on the original soundtrack) in the finale of DMC. I heard some of the CotBP fight music in <i>Wheel of Fortune</i> (DMC) and <i>Destruction of the Endeavour</i> (AWE: first half of I Don't Think Now Is The Best Time on the original soundtrack). And the music for Jack's entrance is now used every time Jack enters the film. Of course it is re-recordings, which IS better than an ordinary cut-and-paste job, but I'd still rather have NEW music. To me there's a main difference between using themes and re-using music. Using themes is something that SHOULD be done and re-using music is something that SHOULDN'T be done. I've been hearing some conflicting information on how much music Hans Zimmer wrote for AWE. Somewhere he said he wrote 1,5 hour of music (then what was used for the other 1,5 hours of the film?) and elsewhere he said he wrote 5 hours of music for AWE (then what happened to the unused 1,5 hours?). Very strange. And why are there two suites of the Beckett theme (Lord Cutler Beckett and Just Good Business) when the theme is hardly used in any of the films and the music heard in these suites is for the most part nowhere to be found in the films?
Obviously I'm rather critical, so we'll have some nice discussion ahead of us. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/whistling.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
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" border="0" alt="piratesing.gif" /> ). And in the case of science-fiction movies like Star Trek, I don't mind computer-sounds that much.
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