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| 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.
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.
|
The insert includes a list of performers and a note from
Giacchino to his team, but it contains no extra information about the
score or film.
