The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (Hans Zimmer)

The powers-that-be behind The Amazing Spider-Man had a problem. While their remake/reboot had done well overseas, its paltry $200 million gross in the US was by far the lowest of any film featuring the web-slinger to date. With a sequel already greenlit, the producers and director Marc Webb needed to lure back fans who had felt, correctly, that their previous film had been unnecessary even in reboot-happy Hollywood. To that end, they stuffed The Amazing Spider-Man 2 to the gills: three villains, multiple subplots, hooks upon hooks upon hooks to tie into projected Sinister Six and Venom films, and an adaptation of a legendarily dark story twist from the comics–all in a package only six minutes longer than The Amazing Spider-Man. If that film had felt like a remake of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, its sequel was a remake of the (relatively) disastrous Spider-Man 3. Once again, international audiences flocked to see their friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, but the domestic grosses were extremely disappointing (less then the contemporary Captain America 2) and critical reviews were savage.

Danny Elfman, Christopher Young, and James Horner had provided generally outstanding music for the previous Spider-Man films, combining a firm orchestral presence with strong themes and hefty helpings of electronics where appropriate. For The Amazing Spider-Man 2, though, the producers turned directly to the current superhero kings of Hollywood: Hans Zimmer and his Remote Control studio. Since Batman Begins in 2005, Zimmer had been attached to most of the successful superhero adaptations cranked out by Hollywood, from 2008’s The Dark Knight to 2012’s Man of Steel. His philosophy of acting as a producer for a vast and disparate group of collaborators and his mastery of the media had made his textural scores, largely driven by simple ostinatos and motifs rather than traditional themes, discussed and debated to an extent unrivaled by any other composer in the 2010s.

In addition to being a music production studio, Zimmer’s Remote Control studio is also a PR outfit, and in the months before The Amazing Spider-Man 2‘s release, it was in full swing. With essentially a blank check from the filmmakers to produce something hip and popular, Zimmer reached out to the upper ranks of the pop music world for collaborators, and headline after headline followed their announcement: seven-time Grammy-winning R&B artist Pharrell Williams, straight from providing songs for the Despicable Me series; Incubus guitarist and frontman Mike Einziger; English recording artist and The Smiths mastermind Johnny Marr; Dutch electronica whiz Tom Holkenborg AKA Junkie XL; and, from Zimmer’s own stable of co-composers at Remote Control, Andrew Kawczynski and Steve Mazzaro. Dubbed “The Magnificent Six” on album covers and movie posters, those collaborators joined a further five Remote Control co-composers and five Remote Control orchestrators. Even for the collaboration-minded Zimmer, it was an unprecedented number of cooks in the kitchen, with every dollar of The Amazing Spider-Man 2‘s massive music budget on glittering display.

The part of the score that seems to have elicited the most reaction, positive or negative, is Zimmer’s use of dubstep and vocals for the film’s “main” villain Electro. As heard in “I’m Electro” and expanded upon in “My Enemy,” the Electro material is, like the composer breakdown, a bizarre gumbo of influences that mixes electronics that are far harsher and more contemporary than anything attempted by Elfman or Horner with vocals spelling out the character’s emotions (“He lied to me/He shot at me/He hates on me”) combined with Zimmer’s usual string runs. It’s a bit ironic that at a time when old-fashioned scores are being derided for being manipulative and telling the audience what they should feel, that Zimmer’s Electro theme tells the audience exactly what they should feel in so many words. Your response to the theme will depend on your tolerance for the unhinged and harsh, if creative, soundscape. Putting dubstep and vocals into a film score is an unusual nod to current musical trends, but it seems a little bit like putting disco into film scores in the 1970s: it seems hip and contemporary now, but will only serve to horribly date the movie once the dubstep craze of the 2010s fades. The Electro material is better as a villain theme than James Horner’s non-theme for the Lizard, but it pales in comparison to Danny Elfman’s solid Green Goblin and Doc Ock themes, as well as Christopher Young’s mournful Sandman music from Spider-Man 3.

Spider-Man himself does get a theme, his fourth in twelve years, first heard in “I’m Spider-Man.” Commentators have compared it to Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” though Zimmer’s music is far obviously more grounded in electronics, which are far more present than even Elfman’s most contemporary music, to the extent that the theme sounds like a nightly-news fanfare, an Olympic torch relay, or Vangelis (often to the point of sounding almost laughably cheesy). There’s also a love theme of sorts as in “Ground Rules,” “You Need Me,” or “I’m Moving to England,” and it’s there that Zimmer’s approach is closest to that of Elfman and Horner, with soft piano colors over ambient electronics and soothing orchestral washes, though the electric guitar is often given by far the most prominent role and the electronics, whether as atmospheric synths or intrusive pulses, are ever-present. The mix is such that even in the cues with a heavy orchestral presence, it’s all but overwhelmed by electronics, guitars, or both.

The less said about the material for the Goblin character the better – it’s essentially warmed-over leftovers from Man of Steel and a half-dozen other Zimmer scores, relying on the usual heavy ostinatos rather than the snarling menace of Danny Elfman’s original theme (or Christopher Young’s variations thereof). The most interesting thing about Zimmer’s themes, though, is that they are not utilized nearly to the extent or with the deep integration of Elfman, Horner, or Young. Whatever your feeling on the overall quality of his Electro, Goblin, Spider-Man, and love themes, Zimmer and his collaborators do not weave them into the musical DNA of the film, and there are none of the titanic hero theme vs. villain theme struggles which characterized Elfman and Young’s work. The balance of the work is electronic and guitar music that is strongly in the Zimmer mold, sometimes highly enjoyable, sometimes not, but with only the veteran overproducer’s sound to tie it all together. And there are many times when he fails to do even that, leaving the music to degenerate into a series of sometimes attractive but often disjointed pieces, each vying with the others to sound the most important.

Ultimately, Hans Zimmer and his sixteen credited collaborators did what they were asked to do: infuse popular names in contemporary pop music into the current dominant superhero soundscape, and market them aggressively as a musical experience alongside the film. As is so often the case, listeners’ feelings about the Zimmer sound will strongly influence their reactions (much as those same fans may have reacted to all the Hornerisms in The Amazing Spider-Man). But even taking that into consideration, Zimmer’s employment of his themes leaves much to be desired independent of the themes’ quality, and the effort often feels disjointed and piecemeal despite the composer’s attempts at using his overbearing style as musical glue. Whatever their flaws, Elfman and Horner produced cohesive scores, and even Christopher Young’s patchwork combination of his own themes and Elfman’s felt more organic. The music produced by Zimmer & co. is serviceable, perhaps even crowdpleasing, but ultimately feels more like a concept album than a fully fleshed-out score. At the time of the film’s release, it was available both as a standard CD and a “deluxe” product with a second disc and flimsier packaging that doesn’t play nice with CD racks. With The Amazing Spider-Man 2‘s middling box office returns the direction for the already-scheduled third and forth movies in the series is murky, but it’s a good bet that, given the amount of media attention he was able to command as part of his scoring process, that Hans Zimmer and his collaborators will unfortunately be the musical voice of the series for some time to come.

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The Amazing Spider-Man (James Horner)

2007’s Spider-Man 3 was an overstuffed disappointment of a feature, cramming 2-3 movies’ worth of material into a single film. Faced with creative burnout on all levels, director Sam Raimi (who had been doing nothing but Spider-Man for seven years) and his crew were unable to come to terms with Columbia for a Spider-Man 4. So, following the “remake, reboot, reimagine” formula, Columbia opted to start an entirely new series of Spider-Man films less than 5 years after the last Raimi picture. While the studio lavished cash on new director Marc Webb and a cast of young stars, it was difficult to overlook the feeling that pervaded what became The Amazing Spider-Man: that it was a soulless and unnecessary corporate product designed solely to keep a merchandising engine chugging, a toxic stew of Raimi leftovers and nearly shot-for-shot remakes of the 2002 Spider-Man with greedy corporate fingerprints all over everything down to Andrew Garfield’s Edward Cullen hairdo. Domestic audiences greeted the film with a bemused shrug and the lowest grosses of the entire franchise in summer 2012, but robust overseas box-office numbers and the ever-present, overriding need for franchise maintenance made 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 a foregone conclusion.

To Marc Webb’s credit, he did attempt to assemble the best cast and crew he could under the shadow of the product’s utter crassness. As The Amazing Spider-Man was only his sophomore effort after the delightfully engaging 500 Days of Summer, there was some speculation that 500 composer Mychael Danna might finally get a crack at a superhero film after being rejected from 2003’s Hulk. Instead of Danna, and instead of attempting to lure back Danny Elfman (who was as tired as Raimi of the web-slinger), Webb made the surprising choice of James Horner to score his remake/reboot. Horner needs no introduction to fans of resounding orchestral sci-fi/fantasy pictures, with a proven record of genre success from 1982’s Star Trek II to 2009’s Avatar. He had dabbled in superhero scoring of a sort with 1991’s The Rocketeer, which had produced one of the composer’s most popular scores, but he had never been called upon for a full superhero score before, and certainly not one with a desperate desire to be contemporary and hip. Webb reportedly needed to persuade Horner to accept the assignment, but the veteran composer eventually acquiesced.

Horner essentially adopts a fusion of his typical style and the contemporary electronic approach that Danny Elfman took with the original Spider-Man which the film essentially remakes. He debuts his main theme in “Main Title – Young Peter” and it’s a classic Horner melody that’s both soaring and innocent and often (as in “Main Title”) enhanced by surprisingly Elfman-like flourishes and occasional choral flourishes. You’d never confuse the two, though: while Elfman’s theme was designed to be easily deconstructed and referenced, Horner’s music is long-lined and almost always at the forefront when it appears rather than being quickly alluded to. In its most triumphant outings, as in “Saving New York” and “Spider-Man End Titles,” Horner’s new theme stands alongside the best of his fantasy-adventure work from the 1980s that won him much of his current fanbase. The composer also exhibits an uncharacteristic playfulness with the theme in “Playing Basketball” and “Becoming Spider-Man,” adapting it in a style not unlike “Foraging for Food” in The Land Before Time.

Again like Elfman, Horner also created a tender love theme, though Horner’s is primarily piano-diven and often performed with the composer himself at the keyboard. From its first appearance in “Rooftop Kiss” to its lengthy airing in “I Can’t See You Anymore,” and “Promises,” the theme is vintage romantic Horner. It’s neither more or less effective than Elfman’s more fully orchestral construct, but very soft and moving in its support of the romance angle (which reviewers agreed was the film’s strongest aspect). Its airtime is limited in comparison to Horner’s main Spider-Man theme, but it was effective enough for Hans Zimmer to adopt a similar piano-centric approach (albeit with added electric guitars) in the sequel. With the combination of his love theme and his rousing main theme, the best parts of The Amazing Spider-Man are like modernized and updated versions of Horner’s lush sci-fi/fantasy sound of the 1980s.

The score is not perfect, though. There is a complete lack of a thematic identity for the villainous Lizard, or at least one that is so subtle as to be almost beneath notice. This is a major omission; while Horner creates some attractive stand-alone Lizard material in “Metamorphosis” and the action-packed “Lizard at School!” the lack of a consistent theme for the villain prevents the kind of thrilling thematic duels present in the best parts of Elfman’s scores. The inclusion of vocalist Dhafer Youssef in some cues, who worked on Black Gold with Horner earlier in 2012, is mystifying. His wailing doesn’t seem to serve any purpose for the film or its setting, save to serve as an example of a film scoring trend from the 2000s best forgotten today. And, of course, as with any James Horner score, the issue of self-referencing and musical recycling rears its head: parts of “Becoming Spider-Man” strongly resemble Horner’s magnum opus Star Trek II, and influences from the aforementioned The Land Before Time and particularly The Rocketeer are there for keen listeners. The music is less guilty of this than much of Horner’s recent output, though, and his distinctive but derided four-note danger motif thankfully makes no appearance.

The middling domestic success of The Amazing Spider-Man sent the producers scrambling to up the ante for the sequel they had already greenlit, and in addition to packing the subsequent The Amazing Spider-Man 2 to the gills with big names on the marquee, they dumped Horner in favor of the superhero flavor du jour of the 2010s, Hans Zimmer. The Amazing Spider-Man would also be the beginning of a particularly dark period for Horner: in addition to his replacement by Zimmer, his music was rejected from Romeo and Juliet and Ender’s Game in 2013. Increasingly frustrated with the current Hollywood scoring climate, and the domination of Zimmer’s methodology within it, Horner was left without any scoring assignments of any sort during 2013 and 2014. Even so, The Amazing Spider-Man score is the one part of an otherwise wretched film to emerge unscathed, and as James Horner’s first true superhero score and last major blockbuster assignment before his tragic 2015 death, it has a wealth of beautiful music to offer in the spirit of his scoring achievements in the 1980s. As long as one is prepared for the Hornerisms which inevitably accompany the composer’s work and strong echoes of Danny Elfman’s approach to the web-slinger, listeners will find much to enjoy.

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Spider-Man 2 (Danny Elfman)

After the stunning success of 2002’s Spider-Man, the question confronting director Sam Raimi wasn’t if but when a sequel would be made. Spider-Man 2 duly followed in 2004, and it broke the mold of many contemporary superhero sequels by refusing to add additional superfluous villains to the mix, instead focusing on a single adversary for the web-slinger while painting a stark portrait of how difficult the life of a superhero could be. The mood of the country had changed somewhat since 2002, and Spider-Man 2 didn’t meet or exceed its predecessor’s box-office take, but it remains the best-reviewed Spider-Man movie to date, even earning an admirer in as unlikely a figure as Roger Ebert.

As most of the behind-the-scenes talent from Spider-Man returned for the sequel, here was no reason to expect that Danny Elfman would not return as well. His score for the first movie had been an exhilarating and highly thematic merger of the two different styles in which the composer had been dabbling for years, expertly balancing acoustic and electronic elements. All was not smooth sailing, though: Spider-Man 2 somewhat notoriously became the subject of a rift between Elfman and Raimi after the director insisted on an unusually close following of the film’s temporary music (a melange of cues from the original Spider-Man and Hellraiser II, among others). Calling Raimi a “pod person,” Elfman bitterly split from the director and saw substantial portions of his music removed from the film, with contributions from John Debney and Christopher Young (who had written Hellraiser II and collaborated with Raimi on The Gift) replacing them.

The Spider-Man 2 album contains only Danny Elfman’s material originally composed for the film. Debney’s contributions, most notably for the pizza-delivery scene, and Young’s substantial rewrites, for the Doc Ock origin scene and the climactic train battle, have never been released despite featuring prominently in the film. It’s also quite evident that Raimi clashed with Elfman early on in the production, as substantial parts of Spider-Man are re-used, almost verbatim, by Elfman in his sequel score (“I couldn’t even adapt my own music,” the composer said at the time. “I couldn’t get close enough to me”). So, while Elfman’s powerful theme for Spider-Man, his love theme, and a host of smaller motifs return for the sequel, they are often sapped of their power by being essentially rerecords of earlier material.

And that is the most glaring weakness of Elfman’s Spider-Man 2: its note-for-note repetition of passages of music from the original film. “Spider-Man 2 Main Title” is, aside from a few additional electronic swooshes, identical to the main title from the original film. The menacing Green Goblin theme from the prequel is inelegantly replaced with the pounding Doc Ock motif, but the change is awkward and the seams are almost literally visible (a similar problem would beset Christopher Young in transitioning between adapted Elfman material and his own music in Spider-Man 3). “At Long Last, Love,” the final score cue, also cribs heavily from Spider-Man‘s “Finale,” and smaller fragments of regurgitation are scattered throughout the album. While Elfman was under intense pressure to do this, obviously, that can’t alter the fact that this reuse is extremely noticeable and distracting when it appears. Also missing from most of Elfman’s new score material is the contemporary electronic mix that helped make the original Spider-Man such a fun melding of Elfman old and new.

That said, Elfman does provide a major and highly satisfying new theme for the Doc Ock character, an eight-note (naturally) melody that slashes violently up and down the scale in a way that perfectly encapsulates the villain’s powerful, herky-jerky movement. Its awkward shoehorning into “Spider-Man 2 Main Title” aside, the theme is tremendous fun and, when Elfman gives it interplay with his existing theme for Spidey in action set-pieces like “The Bank” or “Armageddon.” It’s especially effective in the unused “Train,” which was replaced wholesale by a Christopher Young piece of comparable complexity and quality but which featured only a muted reference to the Ock theme; the piece as Elfman intended is a first-rate piece of action scoring much like “Final Confrontation” from the first album, the composer letting his themes battle even as the characters on screen do the same.

The composer is able to do some interesting things with his themes in places. Elfman’s love theme has plenty of mileage and development throughout cues like the first part of “Spidus Interruptus” and “A Really Big Web!” and it is, if anything, more lovely when it’s allowed to breathe away from the director’s influence. Also, somewhat surprisingly, the menacing Green Goblin villain theme from the first movie is given a dark reprise in “The Goblin Returns,” foreshadowing Christopher Young’s extensive use and adaptation of that theme in the third and final film of the Raimi trilogy.

Raimi and Elfman’s acrimonious split, with the composer declaring that he’d rather wait tables than have another Spider-Man 2 experience, meant that Spider-Man 3 was composed entirely by Christopher Young with substantial adaptations of Elfman’s themes. Young himself saw much of his work tinkered with or replaced by material written by Deborah Lurie or tracked in from the first two films, and it was never released in any form. The (relative) disaster of Spider-Man 3 in 2007 soured virtually the entire cast and crew on the series, leading to a risible series of remakes a few years later. Elfman and Raimi, much like Elfman and Burton in the mid-90s, eventually made amends and would work together again on Oz the Great and Powerful in 2013. As for Elfman’s Spider-Man 2, the strong original material and some clever adaptations of material from the previous film are enough to recommend it on album, but it’s hard to escape the feeling of repetition and needledropping that so frustrated the composer during the scoring process. One can sense the score Elfman wanted to write struggling to escape from the one he was allowed to write.

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Spider-Man (Danny Elfman)

Few comic book properties went though as tortuous a route from pulp to screen as Spider-Man. Dozens of directors, screenwriters, and stars were attached to various cinematic incarnations of the popular superhero following his 1962 debut, including such industry luminaries as Roger Corman and James Cameron, before cult director Sam Raimi was given the reins and a substantial budget for a 2002 release. Raimi’s slick direction, some clever scripting, and an appealing cast turned out to be the perfect recipe for audiences looking for a feel-good hero in the wake of 9/11, and his Spider-Man was a smash hit with both moviegoers and critics. Its $400 million haul at the US box office ($500 million adjusted for inflation) set the benchmark for cinematic superheroes until overturned by The Dark Knight, and it remains the highest-grossing Spider-Man film by any metric.

In 2002, Danny Elfman was at the undisputed pinnacle of the superhero genre. His toweringly gothic Batman (1989) had redefined the expected sound for comic book films, shattering the John Williams mode of major-key heroics that had previously prevailed, and Elfman had followed it up with a string of comic book/superhero successes from Batman Returns to Dick Tracy to Men in Black. Elfman also enjoyed a previous relationship with Raimi, having scored the director’s indie faux-comic-book hit Darkman in 1990, portions of the riotous undead caper Army of Darkness, and the grim A Simple Plan. With his past pulpy success on the big screen and a solid foundation with the director, it was no surprise that Elfman was attached to the 2002 Spider-Man almost from its inception.

Since Mission Impossible in 1996, Elfman’s style and his choice of scoring assignments had been undergoing an evolution of sorts. He had sharply turned away from grand symphonic works like Batman or Edward Scissorhands and begun experimenting with a much more contemporary, electronic, and fragmented sound. Projects like A Civil Action, Proof of Life, or Planet of the Apes were innovative but alienated many of the composer’s fans with their distinctly different sound. Though Elfman occasionally returned to his melodic or hugely orchestral roots with projects like The Family Man or Sleepy Hollow, the tension between the two styles was palpable. It wasn’t until Spider-Man that the composer was able to merge his experiments with hip, contemporary electronics and his older style of immense orchestral power, and it was the resulting fusion that would define his style for the next decade.

Elfman’s “Main Title” opens the film with a propulsive, electronics-enhanced performance of his primary thematic idea. As with the earlier Batman, Elfman constructs a malleable theme for the hero, one that can play out at length or be quickly referenced by a few notes. Listeners at the time complained that they couldn’t hear a theme, which is a testament to how skillfully Elfman works it into his overall musical tapestry and the fact that the theme isn’t presented as a grand gothic march as it was for the Caped Crusader. Nevertheless, it’s a bold and clever idea, one that is at home among the quirky contemporary stylings of “Costume Montage” as it is in the desperate “Final Confrontation” or rousing “Finale.”

Elfman introduces a strong villain theme as a counterpoint to his Spider-Man theme by cutting it in as an interlude in “Main Title,” and his growling idea for the Green Goblin is likewise easily deconstructed so that it can be referenced in full or with just a few notes and often includes synths and other modern effects for emphasis. The Goblin theme is given full outings in “Something’s Different” and “Specter of the Goblin,” but it is at its most effective when doing sonic battle with Elfman’s theme for the hero. Both “Parade Attack” and “Final Confrontation” intermingle the Spidey and Goblin themes to great effect, the latter especially being a masterclass in setting two very distinct but equally malleable themes against one another (with a few bars of “Itsy Bitsy Spider” mixed in for laughs).

The score’s tender side for the nerdy Peter Parker’s interactions with his impossible flame-headed dream girl provide the basis for Elfman’s third and theme, a tender love melody informed by Edward Scissorhands and, to an extent, Batman. “Revelation” and the penultimate “Farewell” both feature the theme extensively, the latter beginning with a particularly lovely and tragic rendition led by woodwinds before segueing into a powerful statement of the main Spider-Man theme. The love theme is often intertwined with a troubled brass motif that often serves as a sort of transition between Spider-Man’s heroics and Peter Parker’s human concerns or vice versa.

Spider-Man stands as one of Danny Elfman’s most accomplished scores because it creatively combines all the best parts of a big thematic superhero score–multiple themes that are developed and woven throughout the music–with the composer’s expertise in electronics, rhythm, and other elements from his other career as a band leader. Perfectly supporting the spectacle of the film, it remains the best and most satisfying score of the entire series. As was the practice at the time, Spider-Man‘s score was released on a separate album with 45 minutes of highlights some time after the “music from and inspired by” disc which contained only two tracks of score. Elfman would return for the first sequel, but a sour experience led him to abandon the franchise; later installments would be scored by Christopher Young, James Horner, and Hans Zimmer, who differed greatly in how much of Elfman’s approach they emulated.

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24: Redemption (Sean Callery)

Due to the Writer’s Guild strike of 2007-08, the popular Fox drama 24 was left with a gap in its timeline. Once the strike ended, the producers and star Keifer Sutherland filmed 24: Redemption as a telemovie. Departing from the previous seasons of the show, which had unfolded over a 24-hour period, the film covered just two hours in near-real-time and introduced an authentic African setting (filmed in South Africa). It was popular with audiences and critics, with several Emmy nominations, and as a series 24 continued through 2010 and a 2014 revival.

Composer Sean Callery had been a fixture of all six seasons of 24 before 24: Redemption, and the producers retained his services for the telemovie as well. A veteran sound effects designer on series like Deep Space Nine and composer for La Femme Nikita‘s television incarnation, Callery was ultimately involved with every incarnation of the 24 series from episodes to telemovies to video games.

24: Redemption was tightly budgeted, however, and Callery was not given a budget for a live orchestra. Instead, he was forced to come up with a modern political thriller sound with African overtones using only synthesizers and sounds that could be created in the studio. The only luxury afforded the project was vocalist Lisbeth Scott, a veteran film score vocalist, who lent her haunting vocals to a number of tracks.

For his evocation of Africa, Callery relies primary on percussive sounds, including some uniquely African instruments like the finger piano. This is a smart move, as percussion instruments are often easier to sample and (with the days of cheesy drum machines long since past) often sound more realistic than synthesized orchestra. When combined with the standard post-Bourne Identity techno-thriller electronics, Callery is able to build an impressive soundscape despite his limited budget as in the opening “Prologue – Sangala,” “Across the Plains,” or “Willie.” The music is often on the ambient side, and though there are moments of tonality that again work well despite the constraints, it is often difficult to stomach on its own divorced from the screen images due to that ambient personality.

Callery doesn’t dial back on his action music despite the score’s reliance on synth. In some cues, the composer is able to make smart choices in utilizing his synths and samples to maximize their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses. Parts of the volcanic “Don’t Let Them Take My Kids” are prime example of this, using percussion and synths in an excellent mix and often using the former to cover the inadequacies of the latter. However, there are many parts of the action music where Callery’s reach exceeds his grasp: the brass in particular often seems embarrassingly cheap, especially when set against the very real-sounding percussion and Bourne synths. “Open the Gate” is particularly unfortunate in this regard, as it combines Scott’s authentic vocals with Casio-like brass hits.

Where it appears, Lisbeth Scott’s wordless vocals are often very evocative, whether as an accent to brutality as in “Prologue – Sangala” or in a more mournful mode as in “A New President in a Troubled World.” But just as often, Scott is undercut by the fact that Callery’s orchestral synths are simply not up to the music he wrote for them, with the resulting melange often feeling very cheap (especially apart from the film). If the composer had been able to play up the strengths of Scott’s vocals with his own synth and sampled percussion while minimizing the often embarrassingly poor synth orchestra, 24: Redemption could have been a fascinating study of low-budget scoring. Writing music to suit the synth and tools at hand is something that has enabled composers like Nobuo Uematsu to consistently churn out classic music despite dreadful synths, and one gets the feeling that Callery is headed in the right direction but not quite there yet.

So, separated from its telefilm, 24: Redemption has to be regarded as an interesting failure. The sampled African instruments and percussion are terrific, as is Scott’s voice, but they are often undercut in the same cue by music that is let down by its attempts at a full orchestral sound with synths that are simply not up to the task, and even the best parts often have an ambient feel that simply means they don’t work as well without a picture to support. For those willing to give the music a chance, though, 24: Redemption is often available at a budget price of $3-4 after being remaindered to Family Dollar stores.

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