Hans Zimmer & Benjamin Wallfisch - Blade Runner 2049 [Original Film Score] (2017):
01
2049
02 Sapper's Tree
03 Flight to LAPD
04
Rain
05 Wallace
06 Memory
07
Mesa
08 Orphanage
09 Furnace
10 Someone Lived This
11
Joi
12 Pilot
13
Hijack
14 That's Why We Believe
15 Her Eyes Were Green
16
Sea Wall
17
All the Best Memories are Hers
18
Tears in the Rain
19 Blade Runner
Genre(s): Film score, ambient, noise, electronica
I wasn't aware we were doing a bonus round until I logged into KF.com today. What a pleasant surprise!
I didn't really have much of an organizing principle while compiling my previous twenty picks. I knew I wanted to confine my draft to releases from the last twenty years, especially since decades like the 60's and 70's were overwhelmingly represented here. The 80's and 90's were pretty well accounted for, too.
But a couple other patterns started to emerge as I made my selections. A lot of the music I love and picked for this draft has a futurist bent (or a "retro-futurist" bent). And much of it could be categorized as "cinematic." What I steered away from this time around, however, were film scores, despite the fact that if I'm listening to music in 2020, there's a good chance I'm listening to either a film score or music that sounds like it belongs to a film score.
So the bonus round seems like a great opportunity to highlight my favorite film scores from this side of the millennium. I'll begin with a selection that is very "on brand" for me, but is no less powerful for it.
One cannot overstate how revolutionary Ridley Scott's
Blade Runner was from an aesthetic standpoint. But, for my money, its atmosphere was as indebted to its influential score as it was to its striking production design. And its sequel, directed by Denis Villeneuve, needed to approach its music just as intentionally. A frequent Villeneuve collaborator was initially tapped for the score, but as work on the music of
Blade Runner 2049 progressed, Villeneuve thought he "needed to go back to something closer to the soundtrack [from the first film]."
Seeking a pivot away from where the score was headed, and with a tight production schedule in front of him, Villeneuve reached out to German composer Hans Zimmer, one of the most in-demand composers in Hollywood. If you have spent any time in the theater at all across the last thirty years, you know his work. He has scored everything from
Rain Man to
Thelma & Louise to
The Lion King to
The Thin Red Line to
Gladiator to
Pirates of the Caribbean to
The Dark Knight trilogy.
Reluctant to solely take on the challenges presented by
2049 in the compressed time frame available to him, Zimmer contacted fellow composer Benjamin Wallfisch, who had previously worked with Zimmer on the score to 2016's
Hidden Figures. Together, and in collaboration with Villeneuve, they quickly developed a clear aesthetic direction for the score. On working with Villeneuve, Zimmer has said, "He has an incredible way of inviting you into his genius. He asks really potent questions that are designed to make you invest in your next move and consider the deeper meaning of what he’s trying to create. He encourages you to go beyond intellectualizing and it's about emotional truth. When he likes it, you absolutely know it because it's an emotional response."
For
2049, Zimmer made the conscious decision to revive the Yamaha CS-80, the monstrous analog synthesizer that was famously employed in the creation of the score for the original
Blade Runner. However, the score to
2049, just like the film it belongs to, is not simply pastiche. It does not attempt to be a carbon copy that trades on nostalgia. Nor is it strictly a loving homage. Where
Blade Runner's composer approached the score to the original film with a variety of textures and moods in mind, swaying from futurist to ambient to bluesy to downright kitschy, Zimmer and Wallfisch crafted something stark and towering and monolithic for
2049 that perfectly complements the film's immense and suffocating production design.
Yet there is also a strange beauty to the buzzing, bass-laden brutalism of the score, something deeply emotional and tender that locates the humanity at the film's center. It is an exceptionally powerful and unique score, and while it is no doubt indebted to the work accomplished on the first film, it actually manages to outshine it occasionally, as well.