@Gregoshi
Here's an article I came across that may shed light on your feelings toward the score. The article isn't about Dunkirk, but it does take on "the new Hollywood sound" and how the pairing of Chris Nolan and Hans Zimmer have helped develop it.
As it's quite a long article, I'll convey the highlights:
The key event in the timeline is Inception and BRAAAM
Film doesn’t usually ask us to be as good at listening as at looking. In fact, film sound tends to be at its most effective when it hovers at the very edge of our awareness. We are meant to register BRAAAM as new and different, but we aren’t well-equipped to say what, exactly, makes it different. Six years after its release, Inception invites us to think about our relationship to film music and how it has transformed over the last generation — from a moment when the average blockbuster soundtrack sounded like Richard Wagner, to a moment when the average blockbuster soundtrack sounds like, well, BRAAAM.
The new sound of Inception, and many other action-y or super-serious blockbusters since, is a minimalist sound designed to break the old boundary that existed between movie score, and movie sound design. It is a dissonant, punctuated sound, typically assembled into several-note motifs that shun typical instrumentation and melody. The sounds used are often sampled, resampled, and modulated like in modern electronic, dance, trance, or house music, utilizing one or a few persons with a computer rather than an orchestra band as in the past.
In the past then, as typified by the summer blockbuster and John Williams (my personal suggestion for a reference), movie music was dominated by neo-romantic/classical orchestral scores that looked back at 19th-century Europe and its aesthetics, but as noted modern movies of the past decade or less - that is, largely the same ones that would have in the past have exemplified the classical-romantic idiom - have started to experiment with mixed sound design and score, and in a self-referential or co-referential (especially of modern classical composers) way that leads to the same spare, brooding sound across movies. However, while the past era of music could stand alone from its accompanying film, the new music is heavily integrated into its own specific film, creating a unique yet unmemorable sound that doesn't transfer well out of the context of that one movie it permeates and its content and editing. The article describes the sound as "both massive and curiously thin".
So now we recognize the music as being "movie" music. Its "massive and curiously thin" sounds are designed to intertwine visual and aural in a nervewracking way, sounds and tempos that are meant to disturb and disorient the viewer, "freak you out".
Obviously not all movies have come to sound like this. The point is about those genres that have, particularly action movies, and how it directly replaces the old orchestral melodies. There's plenty of other information in the article, but if you like here's some of the critique of the new style toward the end of the piece:
Soundtrack minimalism is an aesthetic ostentatious in its restraint: see what we’re not doing, it says. Please notice what we don’t sound like. Much of modern prestige TV aims to sidestep all the hallmarks of now-maligned ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s television-making — episodic storytelling, lesson-learning, uplift, the reset button technique — and recognizably thematic soundtracks are among them. Unusual orchestration, like counterscore (the practice of pairing a massive set piece with a highly reduced sound, like a climactic battle using just a piano or a single voice), wants us to notice the distance from an established, perhaps even clichéd, filmic soundscape, even as that soundscape itself is making rarer and rarer appearances.
TLDR: It's all about BRAAAM
Originally Posted by Montmorency
Re: Movie Review Thread
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