i know we all rag on MCU movies for being the most soulless pieces of garbage to grace theaters in the past few evers, but i think the music in those movies really doesnt get enough credit for being the least memorable or emotional music ever heard
every single piece sounds like placeholder music to give an idea of what someone might want for a scene but then they accidentally sent it off without ever actually getting a score composed
i do not know what this is supposed to mean
Frist off, that video was a damn revelation. But I have to wonder if Marvel’s spoilerphobia doesn’t also come in. Because I can’t believe that not a single Marvel executive has never thought “hey, where’s our Imperial March?” If nothing else, to be able to make shorter trailers that will get people talking (as any hint to the Imperial March in a 20sec SW trailer will do).
But if the conversation with the composer goes
“We need a theme tune for this character.” “Great! What can you tell me about their personality, role and narrative development?” “Nothing.”
The composer is probably going to murder you in your sleep.
My band has the Avengers theme as a pre-game piece and I could not for the life of me remember how it went without grabbing my book and looking at the music.
Character themes (technically known as leitmotifs) are so important to filmmaking because they help your audience form connections between characters, which helps them engage with the story better. A viewer watching, say, a Harry Potter movie, who has never read one of the books before, might still be able to predict Voldemort coming into the scene by recognizing his motif, even if they don’t consciously associate with him. In fact, Voldemort’s motif directly paints him as Harry’s greatest enemy; it’s melody is just Harry’s theme backwards and in minor.
Meanwhile, Marvel relies on well known songs to carry their largest scenes. Take Thor: Ragnarok. The large fight scene at the end is put over Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song, and it’s the most memorable scene in the film. In fact, it’s the only scene I can picture directly. The rest? Disengaging and not memorable at all, because the music is meaningless background noise meant to just fill space instead of connecting us to the film.
Tl;dr: leitmotifs are really cool and Marvel’s refusal to use them probably lends a lot to why their movies are so disengaging.
I remember getting so angry when the first overhead birds-eye-view shot of Wakanda in the Black Panther movie used banal orchestral music to first introduce the audience to the glory of Wakanda. It seemed to me a betrayal of Afrofuturism to use pretentious swelling western strings to symbolize what is supposed to be an advanced African culture. As if western classical music is the only music that can signify cultural splendor. And then the composer had the GALL to use "tribal drums” in all the hand-to-hand combat scenes.
I say this as a composer who genuinely loves writing and listening to classical orchestral score -- it was the completely wrong choice for that film.
I don’t think relying on well known songs is necessarily a bad thing. I really enjoy the Westworld “score,” which is almost entirely made up of old-timey sounding instrumental covers of 90s/00s grunge/alternative rock songs.
I don’t think Marvel’s spoilerphobia is the issue. Then again, the spoilerphobia is part of Marvel’s larger issue of prioritizing marketing over story, and I do think the lack of leitmotifs is part of a bigger problem of a lack of emotional and plot coherence between movies within the same franchise.
Marvel is constantly swapping in different writers/directors who disagree on how the characters should be written and where their story arcs should lead. The whole point of a good score is help the viewer identify the overarching themes of the larger narrative.
Which is to say, a good score works on the assumption that the larger narrative actually *has* overarching themes -- that Steve Rogers isn’t just gonna turn into a completely different person in the next movie, and Iron Man isn’t just gonna do a complete emotional regression from all the progress he made in Iron Man 3 back to back to being a playboy egomanic.
Music is supposed to help the viewer see deeper meaning in the story, and the deeper meaning just isn’t there in a lot Marvel movies -- particularly the big ensemble movies. So there’s nothing for the music to bring out.
