“When
you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won't
come up with a handful of mud either.”
Advertising
executive and creative genius Leo Burnett used this quote to describe
his unwavering quest for greatness. Burnett's reach for the stars
inspired many memorable ad campaigns; the Jolly Green Giant, Tony the
Tiger, the Pillsbury Dough Boy and others. There is no mud in this
cast of commercial characters.
Burnett's
model of reaching for the stars could easily be applied to John
Williams. Throughout his career, Williams has scored hundreds of
films with a seemingly endless amount of energy and creativity. He
has on many times reached those celestial bounds. His score for
Superman:
The Movie
is a perfect example.
That
film landed in cinemas in 1978. The superhero film has since changed.
The starry-eyed vision of hope was laced with a grittier, more
cynical demeanor. This dark shift is perfectly captured by
Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy. In their own ways, these
films reached for the stars.
Hans
Zimmer received a lot of negative press over many of his recent
works. His Dark
Knight
scores have been lambasted as “predictable,” “painful,” and
“shapeless”. Inception
was considered as Zimmer writing from his “comfort zone”; that it
lacked originality. This is a sad turn of events for a composer who
once was acknowledged for his stellar work such as Driving
Miss Daisy,
Backdraft,
The
Lion King
and Crimson
Tide.
Man
of Steel
offered Zimmer a chance to shake off this criticism. All he needed to
do was reach for the stars.
He
reached within his bag of tricks, and pulled out a lot of mud
instead. It is hard to accept that where Williams succeeded, Zimmer
failed. Man
of Steel
has a simple, percussive theme that is more headache-inducing than
heroically uplifting. The rest of the score varies in volume from
loud to ear-splitting. It drifts aimlessly from one scene to another.
It lacks the cohesion that Williams worked into his Superman:
The Movie.
It is bogged down by its own heavy-handed approach, its insistence on
synthetic-sounding instrumentation. It is mud.
There
is a small sliver of hope that Zimmer will once again reach for the
stars and produce work that truly befits the tag-line, “Music
composed by Hans Zimmer.” Man
of Steel
is not that score, though it truly should have been.
