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Had to figure the leak was coming with this slow trickle of tracks on YouTube and the Digital release happening tomorrow. Will be listening to this on Spotify all day. CD is already pre-ordered.
One week left! It’s been a dream come true to write additional music for “Justice League” and to… https://t.co/dppL72eXd2
— Pinar Toprak (@pinartoprak) November 9, 2017
The recording is off and the score would’ve benefitted more from a Justice League suite than the ‘Hero’s Theme’. Other than that, I’m smitten. I love when Elfman gets this dense. It’s a sibling to Hellboy II and I love that one.
Only I hear in track “Enter Cyborg” theme from t4?
I really dig Aquaman’s motif and love that ‘Aquaman in Atlantis’ cue.
Watched an interview were Ezra Miller praised Elfman’s score – pretty cool.
Which one is it ? I gave it two/three listens but I didn’t take the time to associate the motifs with their character.
4:50 in the shorter ‘Tunnel Fight’ track. It plays later in that track too and in ‘The Final Battle’ and ‘Aquaman in Atlantis’.
Finding the online response to the score quite odd – from the film score community I mean. The action music in this is everything they clamour for and, now that they’ve got it, they don’t want it.
Expecting a lesser Force Awakens-style revision to happen soon with this one. There’s so much going on.
Danny Elfman AMA on /r/movies: Tuesday, November 21 at 12 PM PST from movies
So, what funny things could that piece of paper say…
DannyBiker:
I gave it two/three listens but I didn’t take the time to associate the motifs with their character.
The score makes sense once you’ve seen the movie. It’s… Spider-Man-esque. The Flash, I would argue, has the most prominent theme since the slow-motion gives Danny Elfman breathing room. Unfortunately, the score as released, is kinda of a mess. The tracks are all over the place and I can’t quite pin-down where’s what without listening to the whole thing and taking notes.
Oh man, that big Batman theme statement is completely buried in the mix. So disappointing. The opening Batman cue goes on as well and there’s some good stuff missing there.
Movie was boring, though I liked Flash and Aquaman.
As I said earlier on FSM, the only thing louder and more vulgar than Zimmer/JXL’s music is their fans…
Danny Elfman has been there before. Spider-Man in 2002 was highly criticized, to the point that Sam Raimi felt the need to second-guess the music in Spider-Man 2 & 3. History has proven Elfman right, however, since James Horner, Hans Zimmer and Michael Giacchino did lesser work and people now see Elfman’s score as the good one. So give it time. People will come around to Justice League. That said… Spider-Man nor Justice League are Batman and Batman Returns. Elfman has a difficult time acknowledging his legacy. After Superman, you didn’t see John Williams do another superhero movie. After Star Wars, you didn’t see him do another science-fiction franchise. He understood you could cheapen the brand if you carelessly indulge in a specific type of movie. Elfman set a gold standard with Batman and Batman Returns. Anytime his name is attached to a superhero movie, people expect that level of quality. When they don’t get it, they’re gonna complain. I wanna hear the Elfman sound in superhero movies, but not if Elfman is gonna treat it like any other assignment. If Tim Burton and Sam Raimi had directed Justice League, YOU KNOW he wouldn’t have done a half-assed job because he cares about his legacy in those situations. That’s the mindset he should have brought to Justice League.
I’d probably agree with that, but there’s really no shame in not being as good as Batman, Batman Returns, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Hulk or Hellboy II.
Actually, I think I prefer it to Hulk. The main titles to that are better than anything in Justice League, but the latter is probably the better score IMO.
Hulk happens to be a real favorite of mine and I still listen to it regularly which only proves it’s all taste and purely objective. I can’t believe how good that score was when you take the time he had to compose it into the mix (Mission Impossible and Hulk both prove he can work miracles given just a few weeks). As for Justice League, I will see the film and listen to the score a few more times before I rush to judgment but I have liked a few of the tracks and agree that it sounds very scattered, which might also betray the chaotic nature of the making of the film itself. That being said, I still love to dive into all of his works because he has always given me a reason to listen to his work multiple times and usually I enjoy them more and more each time.
This is disappointing at the box office and is getting trashed by critics.
That’s 6 critical duds in a row; hopefully Van Sant’s next movie is more Milk and less Sea of Trees.
It’s pretty much a Hellboy II situation : weak themes (or at least, not strongly recognizable ones), fantastic score. And in the comicbook genre, that’s a DOA case even among the film music fans because everybody wants a great theme to hum along.
But the way he works around his themes and writes the action cues is pretty darn impressive. It’s a really exhausting score to listen to as there is a lot going on, all the time.
As for the haters…mark my word, the Zimmer/JunkieXL scores will age terribly.
Saw the movie this afternoon and didn’t find it as bad as the critics have made it sound. Yes, weak villain, but this alone can’t sink the picture. I really love the score and have listened to it non-stop since its release. In the film it is often buried, like mentioned before, the single, clear statement of the Batman Theme is buried under a couple of explosions. But the action music is so strident, interesting and energetic that I can’t help but, er, marvel at it.
I would love to see if some alternate sequencing would considerably change the makeup of the score. If I recall “Wonder Woman Rescue” occurs before “Enter Cyborg”, and “Bruce and Diana” is actually before “Cyborg Meets Diana”… or maybe I’m developing memory loss. Elfman usually sequences in film order so perhaps I’m wrong about all of this.
A few thoughts on the score as heard in the film… The first proper cue in the film is “Batman on the Roof”. “Wonder Woman Rescue” is actually longer in the film. It opens with the cue as heard on the album before segueing into a statement of the Wonder Woman theme, before going into someone pretending to write busy action music by Danny Elfman (maybe the Pinar Toprak cue?)
There are two Elfman cues in the end credits — the “Spark of the Flash” motif (not sure which cue it comes from) and “Anti-Hero’s Theme”, which plays in its entirety.
If this score has one thing wrong with it, it’s that it has too many ideas. I think that’s probably a good problem to have?
All the comments were probably abuse…
I saw the movie again (I know) and I really didn’t think the mixing was that bad? Maybe that’s a comment on current mixing trends, but all of the softer cues took centre stage (impressively so, I thought), and cues like ‘Wonder Woman Rescue’, ‘Aquaman in Atlantis’, ‘Spark of the Flash’ and ‘Justice League United’ were mixed prominently too. The big action cues are less lucky, but I could still keep track – bar the big Batman statement.
It’s far from an AoU/Terminator Salvation situation.
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