Hold onto your hats, folks, this one is going to be long! And I'm just going to say spoilers, spoilers, spoilers: do not read this if you don't know and don't want to know what happens, especially at the end of the film.
There has been a fair amount of negativity about this film: others are entitled to their opinions and I to mine, and I enjoyed this film. OK, I'm coming at it more from what I think of the score and I am not for a second going to claim this it is perfect or even great. Yes, it has problems, not least some weird gaps in its logic and the fact that Wonder Woman needed about ten times the amount of screen time she got. On the other hand, I like the central idea of exploring what happens when you get two superheroes fundamentally distrusting the other's methods and motives, and although the movie's biggest problem is that it does not offer a remotely convincing explanation of how that problem is resolved, I thought the problem itself was well set up in the first part of the film. Also, I would happily watch Ben Affleck bagging groceries, so I have no issue with watching him being Batman; and even though I think Henry Cavill is funny looking, I continue to like his Superman.
Anyway, I enjoyed it and found it entertaining: I did not go to watch it to have my world view either confirmed or denied, and that is just as well, but I liked it enough to watch it twice in order to start getting to grips with the music. Alas, twice is clearly not enough as there is loads going on and I already know, despite having sworn I was done writing about superhero movies, that I am going to have to sit down with both Man of Steel and this one when it comes out on DVD and write something a bit more formal. And even longer.
Why do I like it? Because I'm an old fashioned girl and I like a nice theme, and this has bucketloads of them, intertwined and inventive and oh my goodness, just occasionally (and perhaps significantly, especially when he shares the composer credit with someone else as he did on Batman Begins) Hans Zimmer writes a good score. BB, he co-wrote with James Newton Howard, this one with someone bearing the improbable name Junkie XL. Says the woman called Steve Halfyard.
So, themes. Well, actually, let's start with a joke because another thing I like are musical jokes. When Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent meet for the first time at Lex Luthor's party, the music playing and being sung in the background is Cole Porter's "Night and Day". Cute, huh?
Other fun stuff: Bruce Wayne, especially his nightmarish visions/dreams (oh, we are so being set up for a sequel!) is haunted by the sound of the World Engine that nearly destroyed Metropolis in the climax of Man of Steel. It reverberates through the sound design and score (again, I like the way that Zimmer and his team often make it difficult to tell which is which) at the edges of the visions, reminding us of why he hates Superman so violently. and considers him such a threat. Nice touch, gentlemen.
So, themes. Superman retains his themes from Man of Steel, or rather his theme group: several themes that all start with a rising perfect fifth, the interval of the (Super) hero as defined by - well, I was going to say John Williams but actually Beethoven got in there long before him. The group includes his emotional theme (used for his parents and for Lois) which starts with the fifth, almost always on a soft piano, and then falls back downward, a gentle little musical sigh; and his big hero theme, where the fifth is then expanded with a series of wider leaps to major sixth and seventh and finally, when he is particularly successful, to a rather beautiful octave in different harmonizations.The sense of striving and the way 'arrival' at the final musical goal is emotionally transformative as we shift into a new harmony (hurrah for the mediant shift is all I can say, and if that makes no sense to you, buy my book and read the section on Dexter in the penultimate chapter!) is my favourite part of this theme, but it also plays to the thing that many of this film's detractors do not like and which they seem to have noticed less in Man of Steel: the theme makes it clear that everything is hard for Superman. It takes effort to haul that note ever upwards, like Sisyphus and his rock, striving and yearning for the goal. Williams's Superman theme positively bounced up to its goal notes, effortless and optimistic: this one makes it hard, and the goal uncertain, especially as another theme in this group does not rise at all, but sinks from a rising fifth to a rising fourth, and does not make it to the top of the musical mountain poor old Clark is always having to climb.
There is also a member of his theme group that involves a high, aching series of minor seconds/ falling and rising semitones, usually heard on brass and high strings, heard at moments of particular stress and conflict. This is one of the ones I have not yet fully got to grips with and need to track its use through both films in more detail; but it is important because this is the interval that connects him to the themes of his allies in the film, Batman (eventually) and Wonder Woman (oh, hurrah, again) both of whom have themes involving prominent rising and or falling semitones.
Wonder Woman gets the most kick-ass theme of the film that then provides the bedrock of the final battle scene with the Zod-beast, or whatever it is officially called. So, she is an ancient Amazon warrior woman, and part of her theme is a 'primitive' driving drum riff of epic proportions in its volume and ferocity. You go girl, so to speak. But she is also able to present herself as thoroughly modern woman and hero, so over the top of this is a contrastingly modern but no less ferocious electric guitar riff that combines elements from Batman's group (rising minor key broken chord - tonic, minor third, perfect fifth) and Superman's semitone motif, as the broken chord is followed by a big, loud, long lean onto the tritone (so a fall of a semitone from the perfect fifth) and back up again. The timbre of the drums and guitar make this theme absolutely and unmistakably hers, but the melodic elements place her as a bridge between Batman and Superman (something that made me laugh, second time round, at the exchange at the start of the battle when Supe asks Bat "is she with you?" and Batty replies "I thought she was with you". The answer the music gives is simultaneously "yes, she is", and "no, she's with her").
So, to the Batman. He, too, has a group of themes, although his are distinct rather than interlinked the way Superman's are.This an old Batman; and this is not entirely the Christopher Nolan Batman, either so, even though Zimmer wrote the music for those films, it does not reappear here and instead Bruce/ Batman's music almost literally takes it cue from an old Batman score. At the start of the film, which turns out to be a combination of memory and dream, young Bruce is seen being lifted out of the well into which he fell by the flight of hundreds of bats around him; and as he is lifted into the light, we hear a theme so close to Danny Elfman's Bat-theme from 1989 that I refuse to believe for one second that the allusion is not intentional. One of the things that Elfman did with his five note motif was to create multiple variations of it, and the theme used in this new film is the version we hear in the 1989 film a) when Batman terrifies poor Vicki Vale in the Batcave after rescuing her from the Joker and b) in the triumphant finale. This is the version with a rising minor broken chord (see WW above), ending with a semitone rise to a minor sixth (so a semitone in the opposite direction to WW). But to anyone who knows the 1989 film well, it is unmistakably an allusion to the oldest of our film Batmans. Batmen. Hmm.
So, this is his 'character' theme; but he has two others. Firstly we have his agency theme, a three note motif (the tonic/ root in the bass, with the melody over this as minor sixth falling to minor third, rising to perfect fifth) that takes key intervals from the character theme and reorders them - but note, the minor sixth/ perfect fifth combo in both character and agency theme give us that prominent semitone interval that connects his music Superman and Wonder Woman. The agency theme is, as my name for it suggests, the theme we hear when Batman is actually doing stuff: and for most of the film, that is plotting to kill Superman, so it initially presents more as a "Batman's vendetta" theme. However, after his change of heart (of which more in a second) it continues for his participation in the battle to defeat the Zod-beast, so its meaning shifts to a more encompassing idea of Batman as man of action.
Batman's third theme is actually some of the first music we hear, a theme for the loss of his parents that has a fair amount in common with Zimmer's music for Batman Begins, especially in the use of a high voice (soprano rather than boy treble this time, I think) as a marker of innocence, loss and longing. We only hear it twice, once at the start of the film and then it is recalled at the crucial moment when Batman has the opportunity to kill Superman, but is deflected from this by Superman's revelation that if he dies, Martha will die too. This is the most problematic moment of the film, in that up to this point, both superheroes have been convinced that the other is a danger that needs to be contained and/or destroyed; and Batman's sudden decision to come over to Superman's side seems rushed and unconvincing, relying on the fact that both of them have mother's called Martha and that by inadvertently invoking Batman's mother, suddenly Batman decides Superman is a good guy after all. Huh? How does his mother's name stop him and his god-like powers from being a potential totalitarian threat? Interestingly, on my second watching, when I was listening to the music much more actively, the sequence worked far better and more convincingly, as this theme that was first used as young Bruce watched his parents die is revisited at length alongside shots from that earlier scene; but that, alas, is not really good enough. Whilst I am all for films where you get more out of them on rewatching, that is not quite the same as a film where a gap in the logic seems less pronounced second time through - we perhaps needed some revelatory moment where they both realise that they are being manipulated by Luther and can therefore unite behind the idea that he is the true enemy, and that simple does not happen. Nonetheless, being more aware of the music second time did genuinely help this seem more logical than the first time. Alas, the same cannot be said for the process by which Lex makes the Zod-beast, but that's another story.
So, we have all out heroes' themes set up and the final battle is a marvellous melange of Wonder Woman, Batman and Superman motifs dancing around each other as the three bring down the Zod-beast together.
Superman is apparently dead at the end (didn't buy it for a second, and the final coffin shot supports that thesis) but this gives us a fabulous cue for his death at the hands of the Zod-monster, which also dies in the process. Because, of course, we have been here before: Superman is killing Zod for the second time. The cue revisits the music from Man of Steel for when Superman battles and eventually kills Zod the first time round (if you are interested, it's the cue "If you love these people" on the OST for Man of Steel and "This is my world" on Batman v. Superman). Both times, killing Zod is tragic: the first time because Superman has to kill the only other remaining member of his race, the second time because he has to kill himself too, both times to save humankind.
It is also the music that links him most strongly to previous filmic versions of Batman. There are several motifs and melodies in this cue: one harks back to the "big theme", almost never heard, from Batman Begins, with huge, almost unsingable leaps over a strangely baroque ground bass (read all about that here, if you wish: Link to Cue the Big theme). Another is a five note motif that is note-for-note identical to Elfman's principal Bat-theme from 1989 (if you want to recall that, just sing the first five notes of Irving Berlins's "Let's face the music and dance" specifically the ones to the words "There may be trouble [ahead]" - there is something about these five notes which seemed to speak of troubled times in darkness). It's differently harmonised and places its emphasis on the final note, where Elfman places it on the fourth one, but I just throw it out there as perhaps the archetypal motif - the museme, if you will - of the tragic, troubled (in this case, dying) superhero being superheroic nonetheless. Connecting Superman to Batman this way (not as a specific gesture of this film but revisiting one from the previous film) humanises him: he suffers, he feels pain, he sacrifices. All of which puts him a long way from the infallible and endlessly optimistic figure of John Willams' Superman but hey, we of the 21st century live in apocalyptic times (as several people, not least the endlessly brilliant Stacey Abbott, pointed out at a conference on the 21st century horror Film at Sheffield Hallam this weekend) and our superheroes reflect that.
So: to my surprise, a rather good score. Way too much of it, of course: the ears were profoundly grateful for the relatively rare moments of musical silence, but that is the price you pay for films obsessed with spectacle over plot and character development. But that, again, is another story.
