As some respondents to my recent Watchmen blogpost have noted, apart from its uses of 80s tracks or familiar classical cliches, the original score for the movie, by Tyler Bates, hardly registers on the imagination. Based on the decidedly anecdotal evidence of my recent cinemagoing, I think we're going through a fallow phase in Hollywood orchestral scores: recent blockbusters have variously trodden the path of the generic or the frankly redundant.
Anyone remember The Dark Knight's score? Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard's music, I thought, got mired in a single idea, an obsessively repeated minor third, that gloomy interval of impending doom, but could not generate any real tension or dramatic counterpoint with the onscreen action. It's a pity, given the complexity of drama and ideas in both films, that the music didn't add to the experience.
The last really memorable music I heard in the cinema was Jonny Greenwood's slippery, shape-shifting score for There Will Be Blood, which also has a totally unexpected collision between a spouting oil-well and the finale of Brahms's Violin Concerto - it worked for me, giving a new gloss to the rustic propulsion of Brahms's music.
So where are the really good film scores at the moment? When did you last see a movie and come out humming the tunes, or itching to buy the soundtrack?
