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Comments
What bothers me is the same than with "Message from an Old Friend", and it took me some time to understand what is was exactly.
These long tracks contain good or great musical ideas, but they're only loosely connected to each other with "waiting music".
The score is like : here's a cool dynamic rendition of NTTD main theme for the plane taking off.
Now please enjoy these ambiant sounds for 2 minutes.
Now there is a fight : fight music!
Ambiant sounds for 2 minutes, again.
Felix is dying, death music! Which I like, by the way.
Maybe it has something to do with this movie being longer than usual and containing more music than ever...
But as a listening experience, it often falls flat.
I kind of feel the same about "Matera". It begins with a lovely lush theme, then it cuts to We Have All The Time in the World, then it cuts to No Time To Die. It's a great track, actually one of my favourite Bond music tracks ever, but it feels more like a mash up of themes rather than a music track with melodies weaving into each other. Barry wove the main song and/or the Bond theme into his tracks seamlessly. "Escape from Piz Gloria", "Battle at Piz Gloria", "Funny Voices" and "Hercules Take Off" are great examples of this.
Yes, you're probably right.
Well put. I love Matera too but the switch to "We Have All The Time in the World" is super distracting. The one that works very well for me is Vesper Theme, because it matches the emotion of the scene. The theme is not invoked to squeeze out an emotion from us, it's here to accompany it.
The Barry tracks you mentionned are so great. In most films he doesn't even use the Bond Theme that much, yet each second is so Bondian that it feels like it.
Even if we try to compare with more "modern" scores, I don't think Arnold ever "fills the void" between the ideas.
In an interview, he speaks about the dauting task of coming up with the 12 minutes tracks "Antonov" from DAD. One may not like the electronic or even musical choices, but I don't feel there is any dull moment here. It's all a great build-up to the final Bond Theme. And he did it again for "Miami International" and other long tracks.
You're absolutely right to mention this, but to me that's part of the problem :p
Barry never knew how much of his music would eventually be released, Arnold and the others neither, and I could be biased but I don't feel that tracks that were not on the original releases are any less good. IMO these composers didn't care about this, and I'm not sure the same can be said about Zimmer, as you point out.
On the other hand I completly agree that a soundtrack should be judged in the context of its movie (Goldeneye being a good example). And indeed, even in the context of the movie, it makes some of these scenes less interesting to me. Silence could have worked better.
It's all about personal taste of course. Most of the time I like Zimmer's work but this approach is not very bondian to me :)
I agree 💯 with this. It was very effective in layering that dangerous mood on top of the pictures of the film. It was certainly a “darker” soundtrack than most. Ominous .
Sorry I was unclear, I meant that for example Barry didn't know that 40 years later every track from OP would be released anyway.
The positive thing is that it has the same effect on me! Again, there are lot of moments that I love in this soundtrack. Square Escape, Cuba Chase... I just can't resist nitpicking about things that I love ;)
My order just shipped today. International, of course, but at least it's on the move.