8/11/2023 0 Comments Skyscraper movie songsA couple of the action cues, especially “The Crane” and “Skyscraper,” include a memorable action motif that moves between cellos and deep horns, chugging and grinding away in a manner that sounds like a more masculine version of Hans Zimmer’s Wonder Woman theme as originally heard in Batman v Superman. To be fair, one or two cues are quite interesting. Instead of painting Johnson’s character as a down-to-earth family man, he just makes him bland, with very little musical color whatsoever to make him accessible to the audience. That’s all well and good, and I can certainly see the logic in toning things down a little to make something a touch more intimate, but the character is still heroic and does things no other human being could logically do, amputated leg or no. Jablonsky has said in interviews that his idea was to paint Johnson’s character as a relatable everyman: a wounded vet with a prosthetic amputated leg and a deep love for his wife and kids not a super hero. And we do get that – sort of – because all the raw ingredients are there, but the final end product just feels so underwhelming, so by-the-numbers, and so devoid of any real sense of individuality or uniqueness. This music should almost write itself, right? A huge heroic power anthem for the main character, a pretty emotional theme for his relationship with his wife and kids, a massive amount of balls-to-the-wall action material that uses the orchestra and electronics in fun and creative ways, maybe a darker theme for the villains. The film is the very definition of big dumb fun in it there is a scene in which The Rock leaps from a helicopter, defies every known law of physics, and lands on the side of a burning building, before saving his daughter from a bad guy. Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Skyscraper is its terrible lack of ambition. The nadir remains 2012’s Battleship – the memories of the sampled MRI machine will never go away – but Skyscraper comes close to it in terms of sheer dissatisfaction. There have been a few other enjoyable entries along the way – parts of The Island, D-War, Your Highness, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, a couple of others – but beyond these minor diversions, Jablonsky’s career has mostly been littered with enormous missed opportunities to show what he’s really capable of. It’s been well over a decade now since his stunningly brilliant solo debut score Steamboy, and in the intervening period Jablonsky has achieved massive commercial success via the Transformers franchise, but has never truly ever re-captured that essence of initial brilliance. Because, from my entirely subjective point of view, and based on my personal musical taste, Skyscraper is an abject failure. You see, this is exactly why there needs to be a clear delineation between what a score sounds like in the context of the film, and how enjoyable and effective that score is as an actual piece of music when experienced on its commercial soundtrack album. Congratulations, Steve – a rousing success all round! Five stars! The score for Skyscraper is by Steve Jablonsky, whose loud and pulsating music works perfectly adequately in the film and is exactly the sort of music the director and the producers asked for. The reviews and box office returns for the film have not been great, especially compared to the director’s previous efforts Dodgeball and Central Intelligence, and despite the star-heavy power of The Rock in the leading role, serviceable support from Neve Campbell, and a decent amount of vertiginous thrills and spills. And they say originality is dead in Hollywood. Now, in 2018, director Rawson Marshall Thurber has made a film called Skyscraper, in which a group of terrorists takes over a Hong Kong skyscraper, and a hard nosed ex-FBI agent played by Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson must defeat them to protect his family. In 1988 director John McTiernan made a film called Die Hard, in which a group of terrorists take over a Los Angeles skyscraper, and a hard nosed cop played by Bruce Willis must defeat them to protect his family.
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