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The rest of the score – in fact, I would estimate fully 75%-80% of the album – is action music. The bad news here is the fact that, if you dislike Hans Zimmer’s scores for Inception and The Dark Knight Rises, then a significant amount of Fallout is going to annoy you intensely, because Balfe’s score is ‘inspired’ by the action ostinatos from those works to an almost comical degree. Every action cue in the score, from the first to the last, is basically a variation on the action music from those two films. Without a word of hyperbole, if you were to play a few selections from The Dark Knight Rises, and intersperse them with a few selections from Fallout, I would not be able to tell the difference. And I’m really listening.
There are chugging cellos, enormous explosions of brass playing very loud whole notes, heavily manipulated electronic sound design elements, and layers upon layers of both live and processed percussion. Cues like “Change of Plan,” “A Terrible Choice,” “And the Warrior Whispers Back,” and many others, could have been lifted directly from the mean streets of Gotham, and as much as I appreciated those ideas when Hans Zimmer first wrote them, I feel that Balfe should have done more with the music to make it unique to this film. Bruce Wayne is not in the IMF and Ethan Hunt is not fighting The Joker. I hesitate to use the word ‘lazy’ to describe this writing, because no film composer is ever lazy, but Balfe’s music for these scenes never rises much above being ‘generically appropriate’. He never goes the extra mile to make his rhythmic ideas vivid, he never does clever or stylish things with the brass to make it truly memorable. It’s technically accomplished, and gets the job done, but once you’ve heard the same percussion pattern or the same cello ostinato for the umpteenth time, it all starts to feel a bit bland and predictable. It’s like Balfe stopped at a point when it was ‘good enough,’ and he never went on to make it actually ‘good’.
Fortunately, amongst all this interminable temp-trackery, Balfe does occasionally provide some music that is genuinely entertaining. One of the most important things I must stress is the fact that, in the film itself, Balfe’s score is very good indeed. Just like Zimmer’s music gave The Dark Knight a tremendous sense of forward momentum, so too does Balfe’s music here. His frantic, relentless, propulsive, rhythmic writing adds an undercurrent of breathless energy to the numerous fight and chase sequences, giving Tom Cruise a burst of power as he sprints along the banks of the Thames in “Stairs and Rooftops,” or weaves his motorcycle headlong into oncoming traffic down the Champs-Élysées in “Escape Through Paris”.
Once in a while Balfe also injects a choral element into the score, which adds an interesting textural variance. The choral version of ‘The Plot’ in “Change of Plan” is especially fun, while in “Free Fall” Balfe uses voices, electronic boinging noises, weirdly manipulated low-end cellos, and a howling echoing brass idea to give a slightly chaotic edge to the now famous HALO jump sequence. Perhaps the best use of chorus comes in the aforementioned “Stairs and Rooftops,” which includes a Latinate choral outburst of Agnus Dei amid the banks of bongos, the overlapping rhythmic collisions between strings and synths, and various statements of Schifrin’s Mission Impossible theme.
Speaking of Schifrin’s themes, as I mentioned earlier, Balfe’s use of the two main ones is mostly impressive. “Fallout” features a clever gradual introduction of the main theme surrounded by gravelly brass, ridiculously fast bongo playing, and electronic tones which give it a contemporary edge. Later, cues like “The Exchange”, “Steps Ahead,” and the aforementioned “Escape Through Paris” feature one or more of Schifrin’s themes prominently, and in these moments the score bursts into life. It’s almost as if having a strong, memorable, identifiable thematic idea somehow gives the music a lift and something tangible for the audience to connect with. I wonder if the idea will ever catch on? The final version of Schifrin’s theme comes in the end credits cue “Mission: Accomplished,” where it is arranged in a new way featuring even more bongos, and a chanting choir, but to be honest I found the arrangement to be a bit over-the-top.
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Re: Misión: Imposible - Fallout (Mission: Impossible – Fallout, 2018, Christopher McQuarrie)
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