music on film reviews | Batman Begins

rating:	**
composer:	Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard
label:	Warner Brothers Records

The Dark Knight returned in one of 2005's best feature films - a sprawling and at times personal epic that paid respect to the source material while questioning the very nature of what drove the billionaire playboy into becoming a crime fighter. Christopher Nolan's neo-noir design and tasteful direction was lifted way, way up by one of the best ensemble casts in many years.

Fresh from a failed pairing on the troubled production of Secret Window, another dynamic duo appears! James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer had attempted to work jointly on a movie for a number of years but it only came to fruition with Batman Begins. The result is a moody, distant score that is about as far from Danny Elfman or Elliot Goldenthal as you can get.

While maintaining the gothic overtones of the previous films, the score takes a decidedly abrupt turn away from the motif driven styles of other composers. Replacing the anti-hero march from the 1989 movie is a simple yet startlingly effective two-note horn call to accentuate the heroism Batman represents. It's a singular sound that's inspired in it's simplicity.

However, outside the film - the score seems to lack any personality. One track leads into another without a break and much of it is gray-on-gray - the score is full of long, morose notes that meander and discernible themes are replaced with a somewhat generic sound. It also doesn't help that the track titles are after types of bats - which doesn't allow you to identify what cue is used in what part of the movie. Basically, the entire CD is a sixty minute wall of sound.

The stronger points come when James Newton Howard takes up the baton for the more introspective segments of the film. It's not really a reprieve from Zimmer's droning sound but there is a sense of longing in the work, particularly during the opening of "Tadarida" and "Macrotus". While Zimmer's addition isn't at all bad, it is pretty dispassionate. The ramming synth work of "Myotis" or the percussive "Molossus" sounds less like Batman fighting crime than Batman fighting in Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor. Zimmer can be a great composer when he's forced to stay on his toes by a director but when left to his own devices, he can be incredibly redundant and boring. It continues to surprise me that given James Newton Howard's sublime score for Unbreakable he wasn't given full control over the score to the film. The Zimmer material does fit the overall sound of the score but the lack of compositional depth makes it feel tacked on like a cheap temp track.

Batman Begins remains one of those strange oddities of film score. While it works with style and skill when attached to the film, it's a bland and uninteresting block of noise when free from it's visual aid. The work is by no means terrible but lacks a certain clarity that would've helped make the album great.

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