Shoe wrote:
It's no secret that I'm a big, big fan of the Marvel movies. Big fan.
But this criticism is dead on. Some 14 movies or so and counting, and there is nary a memorable musical theme or moment in any of it. I vaguely remember the Avengers main theme, but that's it. Every bit of music you remember from the movies is pop music. The scores are aural wallpaper, nothing more.
Look at the
X-Men movies...we'll be getting the tenth one (
Logan) next year, and to date, the only composer to write a theme that has carried over into multiple movies has been John Ottman. EVERY OTHER MOVIE in the series has had a completely different composer with his own set of "themes" (if you can call them that). Imagine if
Star Wars had the familiar John Williams score we all know and love...but
The Empire Strikes Back was scored by, say, Jerry Goldsmith, with a totally different set of character themes. And then
Return Of The Jedi was scored by Elmer Bernstein with yet
another set of themes. I'm sure that Goldsmith and Bernstein could have written terrific, stand-alone scores, but you would have lost the subtle interplay of how the character themes intertwined and matured over the three films as scored by Williams.
The closest to what Williams achieved in the
Star Wars OT within the last fifteen years was Howard Shore's music to the
Lord Of The Rings trilogy, where every single character and/or Middle Earth setting had their own unique theme or motif, to the point where you could listen to the soundtracks with your eyes closed -- not even perusing the track titles or liner notes -- and still know
exactly where in each film you were, and which character was at the fore. Say what you will about the
Hobbit movies, but just hearing the lilting strains of the Shire theme at the beginning of
An Unexpected Journey made me smile...it felt like coming home, or visiting old friends you haven't seen in a long time, and that was before a single line of dialogue was uttered. You'd think that, with Hollywood's obsession with "branding" everything, that a bold, immediately-recognizable piece of music would be an EXCELLENT marketing tool. I mean, for those who came of age in the 70's or 80's, all you have to do is hum the "Raiders March", or the Star Wars main title, or the Superman theme, and people will know EXACTLY what you're referring to. That's the kind of advertising that pays for itself ten times over, so it continues to baffle me why every superhero, action and horror movie has the EXACT SAME SCORE these days. Hell, even the
Harry Potter movies, which started off with John Williams, barely used his familiar themes by the last few movies, with maybe a token, morose arrangement of "Hedwig's Theme" over the opening credits and nothing else. It's like Hollywood is SCARED of having music in movies that you can actually recognize.
Titanic's score might have been turned into mall muzak torture, but imagine how many times people went back to the theater because the heard That Song on the radio, and went, "Hey, let's see Titanic again!" It makes no sense to me at all.