music on film reviews | The Dark Knight

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

Riding high on a mighty wave of expectation, The Dark Knight explodes onto cinema screens this summer. After a great deal of secrecy and the untimely passing of one of its stars, the furor over the film has reached a level not seen since The Phantom Menace back almost ten years ago(?!). The film and its stars are already getting amazing reviews with Oscar mentioned more than once - but what about the score? This makes the second teaming of James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer (not counting previously abandoned efforts like Secret Window), following the last Batman movie - but is it anything to write home about? Well, the real question to ask is how challenging do you like your music?

The first thing to mention is the typical Hans Zimmer brow-beating theme use. While its still evident in the score - namely, the two note question-answer horn call for the hero - the composer takes a turn by writing something much different. Right from the opening notes of "Why So Serious?", we're taken down a road loud with dissonance and chaos. Synths, sampled percussion, electric guitar slams are all typical of Zimmer's musical constructs but the ensuing madness is not. Ignoring the power anthem motifs hes usually butters his bread with, Zimmer crafts something closer to Goldenthal's best urban expressionism. Its not so much orchestral as it is more like the dissonant passages of SWAT or (preferably, as its conceptually closer) Heat.

While this sudden turn toward post-modern arrangement is an interesting one considering the source, it runs its course very quickly. This is in part because the idea of a "themeless" score lends its self to a great deal of sameness. When you're not getting the biff-wham-slam (pun intended) of Zimmer banging on his Casios, you're getting a lot of cut and paste material from the previous film. As effective as that score was in the film, it was short on ideas on disc - and this sequel doesn't go any further with them. In fact, outside of some minor changes in "Introduce A Little Anarchy", the Batman theme doesn't change or blossom into anything else. It doesn't evolve, and its repeated use eventually makes it almost lifeless.

But what of James Newton Howard? Since the focus is less on the humanistic portions of the score and more on the action (at least on this album), James takes the backseat. Outside of some brief if stirring moments - a beautiful reprise of the Gotham theme in "Harvey Two-Face" and a tender moment in "Blood On My Hands" - Zimmer takes hold of the score and not always to the best effect. A shining example would be "Aggressive Expansion" - a track that lasts exactly four minutes and thirty-six seconds where two minutes forty-eight seconds of that is little more than a drum loop.

The final insult is a rather rough one. Don't bother trying to put this album on your desktop - it seems Warner Brothers has devised a way to stem bootlegging by making the final track ("A Dark Knight") click and pop as if the CD was scratched. While I'm not a fan of bootlegging, I would like to be able to choose to put something on my MP3 player or not. One can imagine this practice not going very far, after the problems Sony/BMG had with putting rootkits on some pop albums three years ago.

The Dark Knight manages to not play it safe at all. Its not the heavy brewed Zimmer action score that was Batman Begins yet it doesn't have the drive or ideas to keep the dissonance afloat either. The result is ultimately alienation - both for those who liked the original score and those who already have misgivings about Zimmer's way of writing. The Dark Knight ends up as a missed chance - and an unfortunate one at that.

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