He did some of his best (and worst) work while collaborating with Jon Anderson in my opinion. "Short Stories" was a great, quirky album in the late 70s. "Friends of Mr. Cairo" was dreck in the 80s.

Seriously, I can always tell a Hans Zimmer score without even having preknowledge that a film had hired him. Big, orchestral, boring score that repeats the same motifs he's been using for the last 50 years? Dude has one act.

That's more due to how movie scores are produced these days. Every Frame A Painting explains it really well in this video on why you can't remember any music from Marvel movies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vfqkvwW2fs

(well, up until they made that video, at least)

Thanks for posting this, I always wondered why I couldn't be bothered with the whole Marvel franchise and this whole playing it safe, cookie cutting of film scores between movies makes the whole thing massively less memorable than say Blade Runner etc. Though I did lol at the spiderman bit at the end.

It ties in with a running discussion I have with a mate of mine about the state of music, compare the top 40 nowadays with 40 years ago and the variety of genres and styles on display back then feels much more unique and varied than now or maybe I'm just being nostalgic or maybe that's the whole problem with the need to recoup massive budgetry outlays and post the highest grossing box office yadda yadda (tangential tie in with the recent conversation about OKRs)?

P.S. RIP I still have fond memories of listening to Albeido 0.39 whilst playing Elite on my BBC eons ago and going round to my mates and listening to Jon and Vangelis that we'd borrowed from the library.

No one does it like him though, or rather his team.

I thought his work on no time to die was pretty boring, but the work he did with Pfister on 2049 and on Dune are almost genre defining, I feel.

His ability to integrate the score into the sound design of the movie is something I don't think anyone can do. Maybe no one else has the budget for it.

I think Dune is probably his best work, it's the perfect blend of atmosphere, evocations of a strange new world, but also thematic and structural rigour that has let down previous adaptations.

I definitely get tired of him sometimes, but equally I never feel like I need more deliberate choices from his work. When I listened to Giacchino's mostly fairly good score to The Batman, I felt myself thinking "This motif's entropy is too low", I very very rarely feel that in Zimmer's more modern work.

That being said I think Zimmer gets more credit than he deserves because I think more than many other names he is the director of the music. There's genius in sitting back, too, but I doubt he composed all the trills and melodies in the dune soundtrack.

I’ve found the opposite with some of the soundtracks of his I’ve paid attention to:

- True Romance: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BA7WTbzqp2o

- Interstellar: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zE-qxNVoUSo

- Little Prince: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PKG_EVEs0Ck

- The Dark Night: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1zyhQjJ5UgY

- Dune: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BdtiYwSP9ko

He’s very prolific (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Zimmer_discography). Is it possible that you recognize just one style of soundtracks that he composes?

Well, he steals a lot I'd say. One example:

"True Romance" -> "Badlands" slash Carl Orff "Grassenhauer":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tEgzGnzojc

What other Zimmer track sounds like Time[1] (from his work on Inception)?

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxabLA7UQ9k

I wonder if Hans Zimmer was part of thinking of the musical inception in that movie. That said, isn't this a "Big, orchestral, [boring] score"?

Edit: It is one of my favorite pieces of music so not boring to me. I'm sure others have different opinion.

I'm basically with you but Interstellar stood out for me, I think he matched well with that film's themes.

On Interstellar he stole from Philip Glass' to an unthinkable point.

What a boring, nonsense take.

Try his soundtrack to The Thin Red Line.

Same to Chris Nolan actually, he should for once make a film that does not mess with the concept of time. At this point it has become a gimmick

The way he blends 3 separate timelines of 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week into Dunkirk is brilliant. This also sounds like someone critique Gene Rodenberry for only writing space themed stories. Nolan's use of time as a theme is been unique in each one.

I do not watch a film to be blown away by how brilliant another person is, I watch a film to experience a story. If the story is any good, he will not need all these convoluted technicalities. I like other films of his like Insomnia or The Prestige

The fun thing about Dunkirk is that the story doesn't need the viewer to understand that there is a bit of magic with the timeline. It's just a good story, but for those so inclined, it is fun/neat/impressive how the time was manipulated to tell the story.

We all like different things, but just because there's something you don't like doesn't mean that it is not impressive to others.

Batman trilogy?

Also Dunkirk and The Prestige.

Aside, he was accused of plagiarising Chariots of Fire from this Greek tv series theme (coming out a few years earlier):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Oti6lkzgH0

He did know and was friends with the composer (also very talented), my guess is Vangelis just heard it at some point and picked up the theme's feel and basic style, and subconsciously copied it. It happens. His version is better imho.