Filmtracks: The Batman (Michael Giacchino)

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Written 3/12/22

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Buy it... if you approach your superhero scores for merely a brooding mood, Michael Giacchino's highly repetitive score content to increase the volume of its constructs rather than develop them.

Avoid it... on the majority of the dull, excessively long album presentation and appreciate the composer's highlights in the character suites at the end.

Giacchino

The Batman: (Michael Giacchino) There needs to be a rule about how frequently a superhero franchise can be rebooted on the big screen. Warner Brothers and Ben Affleck had been working through a new generation of Batman movies since the middle of the 2010's, and even though Affleck eventually left the production and the pandemic of 2020 delayed the release of The Batman until 2022, the constant retakes on the concept's origins are, frankly, annoying and unnecessary. Their purpose is to generate cash, certainly, and there will always be artists eager to stamp their own impressions on how a famous set of characters should be developed. The 2022 movie follows mostly familiar parameters of the original DC Comics characters, creating an even more complicated and intertwined backstory on screen for many of the villains. A young Bruce Wayne is shown in more of a detective role in The Batman, working loosely with traditional police elements to track down the murderous Riddler while trying to decide how to handle the ambiguities of a bisexual Catwoman and various other criminally-minded weirdos. The intent, of course, is to generate the potential for endless sequels. That, and keep the characters and scenery overwhelmingly bleak and dark, because audiences are obsessed with brooding and morose depictions of everything in today's world. And those audiences approved, The Batman garnering critical acclaim and box office success. With director Matt Reeves' involvement in the production came his frequent composing collaborator, Michael Giacchino, a studio darling who seems to be on a mission to contribute music to every single available franchise ever in existence. With so much history available for the Batman concept musically, it's impossible not to compare his approach to this concept with his predecessors, such names as Danny Elfman, Elliot Goldenthal, and Hans Zimmer headlining the scores across the decades of Batman interpretations. While Giacchino is a composer predisposed to be more thoughtful of a franchise's past than Zimmer, he also faced an interesting dilemma with The Batman's closer visceral and tonal connection to Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight Trilogy" than the prior visions of Gotham City.

Giacchino clearly sought to tackle The Batman by infusing some of the thematic diversity from the Elfman and Goldenthal scores into the atmosphere established by Zimmer (and, to a lesser extent, James Newton Howard) for a gloomy but motific whole. The bass-dwelling masculinity, frequently unpleasant demeanor, countless crescendos, and obnoxious rhythmic simplicity of Zimmer's techniques are all engrained in Giacchino's superhero mould here, as required by the film's tone and popular expectations. (This genre's music is rarely dynamic anymore, as the films have lost much of their hopeful, glistening appeal over time.) Yielding a personality very similar to the composer's underwhelming Let Me In, the rendering of The Batman is heavy in bass weight and never soars, its atmospheres generated by grunting, cyclical figures and moments of heightened volume often defined by a quotient of brutality on percussion and brass. The recording sounds remarkably organic despite tasteful synthetic embellishments, soprano voice and lounge musicians providing coloration for the villains. The composer handles his themes with far more distinction than Zimmer, however, even though he does resort to frightful dullness and repetition for the titular character's bat persona that is not quite as silly as Zimmer's two-note theme but also not too far removed from it. Because the pandemic delayed the film for so long, Giacchino had time to write several themes for the main characters, and he applies these to extensive suites, a generous rarity these days. He transfers them to the score proper faithfully, though their statements struggle to carry the same allure afforded to them in those suites. Part of Giacchino's difficulty here stems from a seeming inability to allow his themes to evolve obviously and gracefully in the story, the highlights of the work remaining the straight recapitulations of the main themes as presented in those suites. His adaptations of the ideas are pervasive in the score, but they are not developed clearly enough in the soundscape to generate a strong narrative. A theme that broods at the start will brood louder at the end. A theme that stutters at the start will stutter more annoyingly at the end. A theme that is repeated twenty times in a row at the start will repeat forty times at the end. A theme that performed by a particular instrument at the start will be performed by even more layers of that instrument at the end.

The repetition factor in Giacchino's music for The Batman will strike some listeners as brilliant while repelling others in search of better narrative flow in the music. Everything about this score is repetitive, its long suspense sequences churning with rhythms that carry on for minutes and typically culminate in a dissonant crescendo at the end of cues; this is a trademark Zimmer technique, and it bedevils Giacchino here. Minutes can go by without achieving any purpose other than a bed of noise, and although the composer states his themes throughout that time, they go absolutely nowhere in better defining the characters. In many ways, The Batman is one of the most boring career efforts from Giacchino, the first hour (or more) of the work offering no particular highlight aside from marginally interesting stewing and overlapping of the themes in largely subdued form. To his credit, Giacchino does state his identities during these times with intriguing orchestrations, his instrumental applications often conveying suspense quite well. It's not pleasant, but it's fairly smart. Most listeners won't notice these passages, however, leaving the film with just one or two of the themes in mind. Of the four motifs devised by Giacchino for The Batman, the most attention obviously results from his extremely basic four-note identity for Batman's caped persona. The character is also provided a longer, more elegant theme for the Bruce Wayne aspirational and family side, but nobody will recall that melody after the score is finished. It's somewhat comforting to hear the composer address the character's duality through these two different themes, and he overlaps the two at a few times in the score. But it's also a cop out, the composer failing to provide one single idea that addresses the duality of the character within the same theme. The four-note motif for Batman is not as much a theme as it is a rhythmic and counterpoint device, its pounding on key for three notes before dropping a major-third interval being about as insipidly juvenile as one could imagine. That Giacchino repeats this motif several hundreds of times in the score, altering the intensity of the motif and sometimes reducing it to simply the final two-note interval for particular emphasis, is extraordinarily memorable but not in a positive way. There's inherent stupidity and simplicity implied by this rather ridiculous construct, a highly complicated superhero reduced to a mindless motif perfect for a generic killer robot.

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It's not hard to think of Giacchino's four-note rhythmic motif for The Batman, which is coincidentally one note short of a John Williams Imperial March cocktail, as a tool not hanging too far on the wall from the famed Jaws shark motif. But Williams' manipulation and teasing of that two-note motif is far more suspenseful and masterful in how it is teased, Giacchino instead changing volume in static rhythmic formation without doing anything remotely as satisfying with the progression. The crescendo formations of the motif in "Can't Fight City Halloween" and "It's Raining Vengeance" to start the score leave nothing to the imagination and become pointless ambience before long. In "Escaped Crusader," Giacchino puts ascending lines over the top of that rhythm to hint at Elfman methodology, and we eventually hear the planetary destruction level of pounding volume for the idea "A Bat in the Rafters, Pt. 2." So static is this progression that when Giacchino offers it on chimes to open "The Bat's True Calling," all he can do is instruct the percussionist to simply hit the tubes harder and harder until he simply stops. This review will not discuss all the placements of the motif in between, because even comatose listeners will find themselves bludgeoned by its frequency. Conversely, the theme for Wayne and family is a more traditional melody that sadly has nothing to do with the four-note drug trip that otherwise occupies the character. The first portion of this theme contains a series of three-note phrases in call and answer formation, and they feel very much like something Zimmer would concoct. The secondary sequence in the theme, however, adds one additional note in between other, more yearning three-note phrases that sound like pure Giacchino but don't quite achieve the elegance and tenderness they attempt. It's a wholly pleasant but anonymous theme. In the composer's lengthy "The Batman" suite, this idea occupies the first half before the rhythmic motif long overstays its welcome in a humorously tedious crescendo thereafter. In the actual score, the Wayne theme appears in muted tones during "Funeral and Far Between," is hinted throughout "Riddles, Riddles Everywhere" along with the rhythm, receives a very slow, solemn rendition in "For All Your Pennyworth," and is finally developed to better depth in "The Bat's True Calling" and "All's Well That Ends Farewell." The performances in those two final cues are still restrained, however, with no passion or convincing optimism conveyed.

The two major villain themes by Giacchino in The Batman offer much potential but only marginally improve the score. The Catwoman theme of slightly bluesy spirit is often reduced to whiny strings in the film, perhaps as an homage to Elfman's Batman Returns. Like the Wayne theme, this one also treats Selina Kyle to three-note phrases, but in one of Giacchino's best decisions of the score, the theme has difficulty sticking to the same exact progressions each time, suggesting an identity crisis. The "Catwoman" suite opens with the theme on solo piano and shifts at 0:42 to Jerry Goldsmith-like strings with a touch of John Barry sleaze in the performance emphasis. The idea returns to piano at 1:21 in meandering variants before sneaking back to strings at 2:06. In the film, the theme is rarely so seductive, softly whiny on violins and harp in the latter half of "Don't Be Voyeur With Me" and fragmented over the Riddler theme in "Gannika Girl." It does build to a slightly Barry-like romantic moment in "Meow and You and Everyone We Know" but never approaches that suite formation again. Its slight interaction with the Batman rhythm in "An Im-purr-fect Murder" is followed by a reduction to evocative but whimpering defeat in the middle of "A Bat in the Rafters, Pt. 2." The Riddler theme is the more memorable of the villain identities, eerie and repetitively hypnotic when minimal and outright crazy when performed in full. A female soprano vocalist makes it sound like the Scream scores at times, and Giacchino seemingly adds some throat-singing effects to its creepiness, as in "Collar ID." Like the Wayne and Kyle themes, this one also utilizes three-note progressions, completing the triangle. It opens "The Riddler" on solo voice and percussion, cycling in mystery for two minutes. But the joke is up at 2:06 when melody shifts to full ensemble menace while still maintaining cyclical form. The wavering string performances give the idea a touch of insanity before returning to the common solo vocal and string versions later in the suite. In the film, the Ridder theme does suspense duties with solo voice in "Mayoral Ducting" and "Moving In for the Gil," the latter cue simply amplifying the volume for more effect. More dissonance is added over the voice in "World's Worst Translator," and that effect is taken to extremes in "The Great Pumpkin Pie." The theme defines the middle of "A Flood of Terrors" but really shines once it matures into almost an Elfman-like, organ-aided waltz to open "A Bat in the Rafters, Pt. 1." This performance is impressive in size, but the evolution of the theme in the cue takes too long to pick up the pace.

Aside from these three core themes and primary rhythmic motif in The Batman, Giacchino doesn't explore much else in anticipation of sequels. One possible exception is a two-note ascent of violin slurs in "Mayoral Ducting" and "Penguin of Guilt" that may foreshadow a Penguin identity. Otherwise, this score remains loyal to the main motifs or dwells in the shadows without achieving more than basic ambience. The lengthy album release is a laborious experience but not one without some appeal. It concludes with the three suites and a long piano solo in "Sonata in Darkness" that pivots through some of the score's themes. The Wayne melody is explored at 0:13, though even here, the pounding of minor thirds in the bass cannot be avoided. The performer moves to higher octaves for both the theme and rhythm through three minutes and then shifts to the Catwoman theme at 3:06, by which time the track sounds like something you would hear performed live in the atrium of a Nordstrom department store. The meandering nature of the theme yields a good improvised style, and the Kyle material eventually mingles with Wayne's at 4:45 in diminishing disappointment, overlaying the Batman rhythm at 5:34 on very high notes. The track becomes extremely sparse and repetitive as these themes mingle in the 6th and 7th minutes, though the Wayne theme returns over the rhythm at 6:34 with more stylish performances of its own. They die off unceremoniously at end of the track, but at least it resolves on key. It's difficult to figure how much demand this track will receive; the album is better summarized by the three suites. In fact, this music will be the perfect extent of representation from the score for The Batman when combined with "A Bat in the Rafters, Pt. 1" for a touch of action. Anything more than these twenty minutes will underwhelm with repetitiveness and the annoyingly frequent dissonant crescendos. The album badly needs culled of a cue like "The Great Pumpkin Pie" that has no business being in the presentation. In the end, Giacchino tried to straddle that precarious line between Elfman and Zimmer and only marginally succeeded. The allusions to Elfman's classic score in the finale here are appreciated, but Giacchino still cannot manage to find that "it" factor in his major blockbuster franchise work. Elfman's original remains as the enduring classic for this concept, no other composer able to achieve the same sense of duality by shifting between the minor and major keys within the same distinct melody. Giacchino instead hammers you with mindless reiteration of a simplistic rhythm that will function well for some listeners in the right mood. For others, it'll be dull, dull, dull, dull... begging for a sequel titled The Batman Repeats. @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Music as Written for the Film: ***
Music as Heard on Album: **
Overall: **

Bias Check:

For Michael Giacchino reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.46 (in 43 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.21 (in 23,476 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.

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