5 Excellent Movie Scores Not By Hans Zimmer
Everyone loves the German maestro’s work — but here’s some other movie music you’ll love as well.
His name is known all around the globe. Women fall merely at his glance, men quiver at the sound of his tremulous voice and his far-beyond-them fashion sense, and every year, audience members across America and beyond leave their seats in explosive, uncontrollable weeping as they recover from the gifts he has bestowed upon them: beautiful, symphonic music, the sound of the higher spheres themselves…
No, we’re not talking about Harry Styles. We’re talking about the other big ‘H’.
Hans Zimmer.
I first learned of the man after watching Angels & Demons, sometime between 2009 and 2011 when I was a wee lad, which quickly became my favorite movie of that time. I bought the soundtrack and listened to it on repeat on my iPod Classic — for I was a privileged wee lad — on countless road trips and grocery excursions.
I even asked my piano teacher to let me play the soundtrack’s unequivocally best song, “160 bpm”, for a recital. I did. And it was awesome. Mistaken sharps and flats notwithstanding.
So don’t think I don’t love the man and his work. “Time” from Inception is a classic, “Detach” from Interstellar is a masterclass in tension building, “Now We Are Free (Maximus Mix)” from the Gladiator: 20th Anniversary Edition soundtrack is the only blend of Enya and early 2000s chill EDM that I think the world will ever need.
His style of musical storytelling and legendary partnership with Christopher Nolan has, in my view, done much to engender a generation of movie fans that may not have existed otherwise — myself included.
But there’s more to movie scores than the big H. And these days, I worry that we forget that.
So, in the interest of spreading art and culture as only a pretentious movie person can, here are a few lesser known fantastic scores that can pull your heartstrings and truly thrill you — that show just how well a score can, when implemented correctly, elevate a film from good to great, and from great to extraordinary.
If you haven’t seen these movies, watch them (with eyes and ears open) immediately. And if you have seen them already, go ahead and add the OST album of your choosing to your streaming library and run that bad boy on repeat. I know it isn’t in there yet. And I know you won’t regret it.
1. Cloud Atlas — Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek & Reinhold Heil
This way-too-big-for-its-britches sci-fi movie is one of my favorites. The film tackled a best-selling book by David Mitchell, centered on a sort of cosmic-humanist narrative spanning across several time periods, and plenty of critics claim that it failed in most regards. Crazy long runtime, not a crazy big payoff, a bit too jumbled for mass audiences and not deep enough for critical audiences — many feel that the movie just didn’t work in a few key ways. But in my eyes, it did a pretty bang up job with such a massive story. And it did a stellar job with the score.
Had the score for this movie been any less than what it is — superb — the movie would have been that much harder to love. With a story where a central character is a misanthropic 20th century composer, a superb score was absolutely necessary. It’s not that the score alone saved the work, but it went a long, long way toward making this film a serviceable, and dare I say, quality, work of art.
The whole score is excellent, but if you only have 15 minutes or so, check out the film’s final (and best) two tracks: “The Cloud Atlas Sextet for Orchestra” (the culmination of the on-screen work put forward by our misanthropic composer character), and the drivingly beautiful and unexpectedly enigmatic “Cloud Atlas End Title”. Elsewhere on the album, you’ll still find much more to love — unexpected instrumentation, intense tracks, and a healthy dose of mischief.
2. Phantom Thread — Jonny Greenwood
Paul Thomas Anderson is to Jonny Greenwood as Christopher Nolan is to Hans Zimmer.
Both Anderson and Nolan, the directors, are auteurs, to be sure, with dedicated followings and movies that can please both the box office and the stautest critics, in the right circumstances.
But Anderson is also to Nolan as camembert cheese is to a refined cheddar. It’s not at all to say that Nolan is bland or lacking quality — heck, he’s sharp, bold, always demanding your attention. It’s just to say that Anderson is way weirder and more pretentious. And the exact same thing goes for their respective musical counterparts: Greenwood, as compared to Zimmer.
Greenwood, I’ll add, is the lead guitarist of Radiohead (and not the last alt-rock instrumentalist we’ll see on this list), and has scored three of PTA’s most beloved films: There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Phantom Thread. All of these are wonderfully successful scores for their respective films, but when it comes to music alone, the last of the three is my favorite by far.
Featuring cascading keys and swelling, decadent strings, this score uses every moment to evoke the refined silks, threads, and porcelain accoutrements on screen in Phantom Thread. But it’s almost always discordant, strange, even jarring, representing in a truly masterful manner the interpersonal tensions and vices at the film’s core. And when the music resolves? When the music rests from its discordance, finally reaching climactic, undeniable satiety? It’s symphonic bliss.
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The best two tracks to capture that dissonance and resolution, for my money, are “Phantom Thread II” and “House of Woodcock”, respectively. But you really ought to give this one a listen all the way through.
3. The Social Network — Atticus Ross & Trent Reznor
I told you we had another musician from the alternative rock world on the way. In this case, it’s two: Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, a duo who’ve famously collaborated on Reznor’s industrial rock project Nine Inch Nails, and who came together to produce one of the best scores of the early 2010s. That of The Social Network.
In truth, I hesitated to put this entry in this spot on the list for a while, not because it isn’t an excellent movie score not by Hans Zimmer, but because I have a soft spot for another score by Atticus Ross: that for The Book of Eli. That score, though it is completely serviceable in its own right and for the movie in question, is a bit propped up by its opening track, “Panoramic,” which is a truly wonderful work.
After listening to both film’s scores back to back, I can’t ignore the inevitable reality that The Social Network’s music is far superior, track for track — a little more refined, less universally intense, more multi-faceted. Rather than sink into The Book of Eli’s monolothically dark and occasionally action-heavy setpiece music, The Social Network’s music runs you through a whole gamut of emotional possibility.
“Hand Covers Bruise” constructs a brilliant soundscape behind simple, haunting melodies (a technique which Ross’s “Panoramic” also exemplifies, to a similar degree). At the same time, the industrialized, synth-heavy, crushed and compressed sounds across the album’s paddy backgrounds and lo-fi refrains also showcase Reznor’s fortified background in industrial rock, and provide the perfect technological edge for this movie’s Shakespearean story of aspiration and woe. All the while, though, tracks that could serve as ‘fillers’ instead provide refreshing, enjoyable, subtly innovative instrumentation that make the album a quality experience all the way through: “Pieces Form the Whole,” “Complication With Optimistic Outcome,” “In Motion”, excellent all the way.
There’s not much else I can say about this one. The Social Network is one of the best films of the past two and a half decades, and the score is built to match. Best tracks? I’ve taken a liking to the first two. “Hand Covers Bruise (reprise)”, which is the one with the piano melody you’re probably still trying to get out of your head from your first viewing, and Reznor’s glitch-strewn rendition of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” can’t be missed.
4. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters — Philip Glass
Out of all the scores on this list, Glass’s music for Paul Schrader’s Mishima might be the best. As in, the highest quality. As in, the ‘greatest’ music. As in, the sort of music you’d send to aliens to tell them ‘hey, this is what we sound like when we’ve really got it together, you don’t even have to know what you’re listening to to enjoy it, please just listen to it, we promise we’re not all climate destruction and politics’…you know the type.
Philip Glass has created some of my all time favorite music — modernist, minimalist compositions that select a central framework of arpeggios and chord progressions and then iterate on it for minutes on end. A simple structure of majors and minors that doesn’t stop, because why should it? If you’ve never listened to minimalist music before, let this be your introduction.
Despite his fame and frequent collaboration with great directors for great movies (see his work on Errol Morris’s A Brief History of Time, on Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, but maybe not on the new Fantastic Four…), I’ve always felt that his music gets sidelined in most of the movies he scores. It’s rare for his music to drive a film forward, which is something I believe might need to occur for a score to be truly excellent. Sure, a great score can accomplish its goal by staying in the sidelines, letting action drive itself…but an excellent score? The one we send to aliens? Bring that thing front and center, I say!
In Mishima, Glass’s work is presented as loudly and courageously as the set pieces that showcase Yukio Mishima’s theatrical plays in the film. Or as the performance of Ken Ogata, around which the whole story resolves. Or as the direction of Paul Schrader, whose careful restraint and refined handling of incredible climaxes allows this movie to truly floor you.
This movie is the one that gives Glass’s music plenty of space to work, and then benefits from every inch of the space given. This is the one that uses the work of one of this century’s greatest composers to truly elevate a story. This is the film that shines above and beneath the shadowing glory of its sound.
Only have time for one track? It may be nearly 10 minutes long, but listen to “Runaway Horses (“poetry written with a splash of blood”)”. That is all.
5. Swiss Army Man — Andy Hull & Robert McDowell
Didn’t see this one coming, did you? Our last entry for this list is hardly a score. It’s also the film soundtrack that I’ve listened to most out of all of these entries.
Swiss Army Man (by the directing duo known as Daniels) is a great little ‘dramedy,’ but it’s very nearly a straight musical. Its accompanying soundtrack is a strange, difficult to define, almost a capella singer-songwriter album that uses the actual voices of its two actors — the incredible Paul Dano and the then-newly-resurrected Daniel Radcliffe, corpse pun intended — to convey through hypodermic needle the tone, tenor, and themes of its story.
It’s bombastic. It’s loud, and weird, and utterly joyful, filled to the brim with the inexplicable glory of relationship and outsiderhood that the movie tackles so well visually and thematically. Swiss Army Man carved an unfillable hole in my heart and then filled it, and the film’s music is most of what fills that strange cavity to this day.
The music isn’t “great” in the sense that I’d say Glass’s Mishima, or even Tykwer’s “Cloud Atlas Sextet” and Greenwood’s “House of Woodcock” are great. It isn’t playing with or building off of the most refined traditions in Western music, and it isn’t particularly dissonant or jazzy or difficult to swallow. But it’s good. And it conveys human emotion through word and voice with an honesty that I think is only possible through the sort of vivacious, singer-songwriter style the movie is actually playing with and building off of.
Only have time for one or two songs? “Montage” is the clear winner. That, and “A Better Way”. And “Finale”. And Daniel Radcliffe’s version of the Jurassic Park theme in “Jurassic Park”. And the rest of it. Who are we kidding, you have time for more than one or two songs.
Honorable Mentions
There are so many scores out there that are incredible for so many reasons. Looking for more excellent listens? I highly recommend checking these out, if you haven’t already:
- Everything, Everywhere, All at Once — Son Lux. So, I was a bit of a Son Lux superfan far before this film came out. They did excellent work on this movie, but the only thing that kept it from being an all-time favorite score for me was that the score wasn’t quite as “forward” as I expected it would be after seeing Daniels’ previous Swiss Army Man, if that makes sense. In a way, superfandom for both the directors and the composer brought just a touch too much expectation on my end. Still, an incredible watch, and an incredible listen.
- The Incredibles — Michael Giacchino. This movie has the best big band bossa nova-influenced score that I can think of. No other movie in memory quite captures elegant, hyper-idealized mid-century class like this one.
- The Book of Eli — Atticus Ross. As mentioned above, the opening track is a personal favorite of mine, with another haunting theme reminiscent of The Social Network’s minimal piano. The rest of the album is much more intense, but perhaps in a way you’ll enjoy if you’re itching for something reminiscent of Zimmer’s more action-heavy scores.
- Lord of the Rings — Howard Shore. It’s hard to pinpoint any central reason why this collection of scores is as good as it is. Perhaps it’s the way that musical themes are carried over across hours of screen time, always with a new, heart-rending effect….perhaps it’s just incredible music for incredible movies. Definitely an all-time classic.
- The 400 Blows — Jean Constantin. Listen to this.
