Apr 16, 2025
Main Titles/Opening
The Nominees:
Band of Brothers // Main Titles
The Pacific // Honor
Masters of the Air // Soar
Voting ended onApr 23, 2025
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Main Titles/Opening
The Nominees:
Band of Brothers // Main Titles
The Pacific // Honor
Masters of the Air // Soar
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
2025
my commentary of notable scores from the pacific soundtrack that literally nobody asked for but i don’t care
honor (main theme) - absolute cinema. THE STRINGS HELLO???? my favorite part is the key change at 1:32 ARGHHHH. WHEN THE TRUMPTS COME IN!!!! epic. that slow fade out always gives me chills.
with the old breed (end title) - major points for the name. best book ever. i stay for the end credits just cause of this theme. THE ORCHESTRA COMING IN AT 2:16 chills. THE TRUMPET!!!! also obsessed with the organ? i think at the end.
private first class robert leckie - DO NOT TALK TO ME ABOUT THIS THEME. it’s fucking beautiful. the sad strings!!!! OUGHHHH. poor sad weckie. he’s so damaged. i love that ringing they include sort of like as his sanity is at its lowest. :(
fallen friend - NOOOO LOOSIER THEME AAAAGGGHGDHSSGDHDJSB. this shit makes me so fucking emo. they way they incorporate leckie’s theme here as he’s seeing hoosier injured. nobody fucking speak to me. bill?… bill?…
we’ve gone respectable - UGHHHH LENA AND JOHN :((((( so beautiful and bittersweet.
memories of home - this genuinely made me cry once. gene’s theme AAAAUGHHHH *bleeds and cries* the way they reprise this in homecoming. i will talk about that later. nobody speak to me.
landing peleilu - YES my favorite score of this entire soundtrack. it’s so underrated genuinely. ok ok here i go. i’m obsessed with the urgency with the strings and the drums kick in as bombs or maybe your rapid heartbeat? chills. you get this adrenaline rush which is sooo effective cause you’re going along with gene in this moment and he’s in shock and terrified.
where do we go from here? - RUCKIE THEME. duck smoking gif. oh ruckie we’re really in it now. no but really this score is beautiful. it’s simultaneously hopeful and bittersweet. “let’s go home, cobber.”
sledge’s humanity - this is so uniquely gene. almost church-like with the organ and strings. he’s losing his faith like leckie and they try to weave in leckie’s theme at the very beginning ARGH. then the organ fades out and it’s hollow strings and a harp. so good.
war is hell - well yeah. god the way this fades directly into homecoming is soooooooo.
homecoming - idk if it’s the music or the scene that makes me cry every time. probably the music if we’re honest. if it hasn’t started by 3:36 that’s when the tears begin. i’m half in tears relistening to this UGHHHH. gene coming home makes me so emotional every time. :( <3
k done being emo bye
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017, Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg)
22/06/2024
I have beef with Geoff Zanelli (because of Pirates of the Caribbean)
Oh my god here we go. I decided to listen to the soundtracks to the later Pirates movies (4&5) because I hadn't in a while. I already knew I loved the 4th soundtrack, but I was reminded today that I hate the 5th with a burning passion. Listening to it is actively upsetting.
Why? For one, Hans Zimmer was nowhere to be seen. This score is credited to some dude named Geoff Zanelli. The music wasn't terrible enough to distract you from the trainwreck on screen -- it suited it enough that you weren't any worse offended by the score, and it did have its good moments! But then you hear it by itself, the withered, pale seedling growing in secret beneath a cracked pot you forgot out in the yard.
The soundtrack for On Stranger Tides (#4) slaps! It's new and different, particularly with the guitar solos, but also familiar enough to still feel like a Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack. (I don't actually hate the 4th movie, either, but that's a whole different can of worms I'm happy to detail elsewhere.)
The soundtrack for Dead Men Tell No Tales (#5) sounds like it's for an off-brand ripoff pirate thing, either a spoof episode of an ensemble show or a video game heavily based on the franchise but lacking the legal rights to make any direct reference to it, so it can sound 'similar' but never the same.
One of the things I adored about Zimmer's work throughout the series was his usage of theme and storytelling. Each character or particular event had a theme. Sometimes those themes went together nicely (Will & Elizabeth's theme and Davy Jones & Calypso's are incredible parallels!) Sometimes he would do some variations on a theme until something new would come out of it. You see the growth of the characters and the development of the story within the very notes! And because you have established a language in the music, you can reference it again later. Hey, remember the last time he was Being Really Cool™️? He's doing it again, listen! It is predictable, but in a very satisfying way.
It feels like DMTNT is just a mashup of theme samples and half phrases never followed to their resolution. The 'reference to previous themes' doesn't come through, because it follows one motif for a few notes, jumps to another without finishing the first, then devolves into a few others shoved together without adapting them to marry. It's never familiar enough to be familiar, and ends up feeling more incidental (reactive to the imagery on screen) than like it is a part of the storytelling itself, jerkily switching between bits and pieces of older music without joining them together or developing them into something unique. There's no sense of pacing. AND -- and this really ticks me off -- when he DOES follow through, the notes are wrong! A step up instead of down, or a sharp instead of a flat, or a rhythm change -- and it's consistently wrong EVERY TIME, so it never feels like 'ours!' You don't get the satisfaction or nostalgia of the callback because the guy can't get the frickin' notes right! But it also never feels like a big enough change to be an adaptation toward a new theme, it's just. Bad.
Additional things that also contribute: the sound mixing is terrible for some reason. No bass, no high tones. A lot of sound gets lost, and the middle notes are all busily competing with one another until it's hard to keep a sense of what you're even hearing. Also, the orchestra sounds like it's about a quarter the size of the one that Hans used, and the instrumentation is completely different, which affects the whole tone and voice. There's no strength in the notes so things sound thin and unimpactful, at least not to the degree of Hans's iconic beat drops. (I'm actually trying to figure out if the majority of this wasn't just on a keyboard or digital, because it sounds that way.)
That isn't to say instrumentation is everything; Hans came onto the scene with complex chords and countermelodies that give an incredibly full sound, compared to Klaus Badelt's absolute CLASSIC of a soundtrack for the first film which seemed to be a bit less busy, less full-bodied.
If we compared the three composers' works to trees, Klaus is a pine tree -- you can see the trunk, and though there may be space between each branch, it is a thing of perfection and beauty, stalwart on the mountaintop and offering a clear view to the horizon. Hans is a cedar or redwood, same more or less structure as the pine but dense with foliage, immersing you in a deep forest of sound. Zanelli is the radio tower by the highway badly disguised as a tree. (Rodrigo y Gabriela, who is also credited on OST's ost, is the river flowing through the redwood forest, if anyone cares.)
Actually, Hans also had a hand in the first movie's soundtrack to some degree.
The thing is. So did Geoff. He actually worked with Hans through all of the other movies. He was apparently Hans's protege from a young age, and is an emmy winner for something or other. And despite all of that, the Dead Men Tell No Tales soundtrack is complete horseshit. This man managed to have zero understanding of the scores or any musicality whatsoever.
So I have beef with Geoff Zanelli.
Rant over, have something DECENT as a palate cleanser:
No, seriously, the On Stranger Tides score is brilliant and honestly...the movie isn't actually that bad either.
Do yourselves a favor and just pretend 5 doesn't exist though. Take it from me.
Pirates of the Caribbean Soundtracks
Which movie has the best music?
The Curse of the Black Pearl
Dead Man's Chest
At World's End
On Stranger Tides
Dead Men Tell No Tales
None of them live up to the Parks banger "Yo, Ho! (A Pirate's Life for Me)"
Black Pearl Score Dead Man's Chest Score World's End Score Stranger Tides Score Dead Me Tell No Tales Score
Yo, Ho! (A Pirate's Life for Me) (all links are youtube)
And Sorry, Unless you love listening to music all the time and start sooner rather than later, you probably won't get to hear everything before making a choice...
Movie #61 of 2024: Hitman
I have a feeling this was the movie that prompted Olga Kurylenko to fight like hell to prevent her Bond girl character in Quantum of Solace from becoming a sex object.
Honor (Main Title Theme from "The Pacific") - Hans Zimmer, Blake Neely, and Geoff Zanelli, The Pacific