The Dark Knight Rises: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack [Soundtrack]

Hans Zimmer | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (July 17, 2012)
• Original Release Date: 2012
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Soundtrack
• Label: WaterTower Music
• ASIN: B008645YEE
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Music
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (135 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,639 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

*** Enhanced CD - unlocks 3 additional tracks! 2 are exclusive to the CD:
Bombers Over Ibiza (JunkieXL remix)
No Stone Unturned (exclusive)
Risen From Darkness (exclusive)***

The Dark Knight Rises Score Composed by Oscar, Grammy, Golden Globe Award Winner Hans Zimmer

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

121 of 135 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Audiophile & HZ Fans: Please Read! - Needs a double disc release & remastering!! July 23, 2012

By Sebastian Moon

Format:Audio CD

Let me begin by stating, I'm a massive Zimmer fan, and this is not entirely his fault but the music from TDKR is in definite need of a deluxe complete score release.... and a proper studio remastering!! (Big time!)

This CD doesn't present the music nowhere near as good as it should - TDK is far superior in the arrangement and editing of tracks, mixing and producing etc... HZ has confirmed in an LA Times article (see below) that there are 4 suites totalling 21 tracks available for download, but only onto an IPHONE or IPAD, this is not acceptable!

I had to return this CD as it was that bad, I really wanted to switch it off mid way (the music was fine, but it was the presentation... and sound mix... that absoutely killed it for me)

This music HZ speaks of is confirmed by him stating - "This shows more of the process," Zimmer said. "I wanted to divide the two worlds up. It's a bad paradigm, but the suites are like the novel of this thing. The CD is like the screenplay. The CD follows the screenplay precisely. The suites are so much more based on all the more detailed conversations Chris and I were having."

[...]

LETS DEMAND THESE 4 SUITES 21 tracks and all the other DOWNLOADABLE music gets released on CD!

This is a shocking way to finish a classic trilogy like this! Zimmer's music is fine, but it's very obvious that the studio rushed to get this CD out. No care has been taken as how the music was arranged on the CD, it feels like it's been slapped together. As another reviewer stated, there are also excessive gain levels, compression and a loss of dynamics... on many tracks, especially 'Imagine the Fire' and 'Rise' etc... - The richness and depth (especially in the mid range are completely lacking. It sounds CHEAP!....... the sound mix is how they would treat a POP/DANCE album poorly!... - Just like a cheap MP3 compressed download! Yuck!

The FACTS are - they need to start from scratch and release a double disc edition - with a whole new mastering and sound mix on CD!! - This whole download trend is embarrasing! - Serious audiophile and music lovers have sound equipment that is very expensive and which most can only play CD or VINYL, not a USB stick!...

The record company released this CD just for kids... or the masses, basically for people who don't have a refined ear for good quality sounding music. The TDK soundtrack was the exact opposite!! - Audiophiles - compare the two and you'll notice a *massive* difference!

Please let me know your thoughts - We need Watertower Records and HZ to know that his fans and music lovers are not happy! Read more ›

145 of 164 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars CD was mastered with excessive gain levels July 22, 2012

By zilch0

Format:Audio CD|Amazon Verified Purchase

I love Hans Zimmer's work and although the music itself, in this album, is not his best, in my opinion, it's still enjoyable - at least in those tracks where the recordings were not mastered with excessive volume levels.

Unfortunately, several tracks suffer severe clipping - where the maximum possible gain (volume) that can be recorded in a 16-bit file is reached, causing a severe loss of detail and an overall loss of dynamics throughout the entire track.

The following tracks were mastered with excessive gain: 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, and 15.

That's 9 out of 15, or nearly two thirds of the CD, ruined by poor mastering.

So now we have to wait a couple of years (if ever) for someone to come along and remaster these recordings with reasonable gain levels.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars From the opening track, "A Storm Is Coming" it is apparent that this is no ordinary soundtrack. August 19, 2012

By Robert Carraher

Format:Audio CD

I don't go to many movies, after all I am legally blind so if I want to `hear' a movie, I usually wait for the DVD release. But after the Aurora shootings, I don't know. I think I wanted to reaffirm my right to go freely, anywhere in this country, and not fear for my life or safety. So, I made it a point to take a cab and walk into that theater in Lake Oswego. It felt good, and I actually got a seat about five rows back from the screen, so I could actually see most of the film. I also felt somehow proud to, at least in my mind, confront the stigma this film had and has for a lot of people all because of one deranged monster in Aurora. Another good thing that came out of this is I was reviewing a catalog of books being offered for review and one of those books was published by The University Of Colorado Press, so I made it a point to write the editor and offer to review the book (you'll have to wait for the book review) and it was good to talk to someone who could still keep the beautiful things in the front of their mind after the tragic event.

First thing that I noticed, almost naturally given my limited vision and my back ground as a musician and eclectic fan of many forms and genre of music was the sweep and drama in the sound track. Like the previous Dark Knight film, this one was scored by the Academy- Award® winning composer Hans Zimmer. He teamed writer/director Christopher Nolan to create the music for the final installment of his Dark Knight Trilogy.

From the opening track, "A Storm Is Coming" it is apparent that this is no ordinary soundtrack. This isn't just pretty, sanitized sound to fill in the silent or transitory spaces in the action. As a musician, I could hear that Zimmer wasn't playing it safe.... The music was daring and at the same time beautiful and masterfully composed as a "whole and necessary" part of the film. Nolan had this lesson he says he learned from working with Zimmer, "the real risk is in playing it safe," and that is the beauty to be found in this album.

Besides some breath taking music, and to aurally remember this fantastic film, I think owning this sound track is an effective way to honor the victims and survivors of the murders that happened in Aurora. A way stand up to the fear that monsters like this generate. By overcoming that fear, we defeat the monsters and display the hero in all of us.

The Dirty Lowdown Read more ›

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars He Rises August 27, 2012

By Jon Broxton

Format:MP3 Music

The Dark Knight Rises is director Christopher Nolan's eagerly-awaited final installment in the Batman trilogy he initiated with Batman Begins in 2005, and continued with The Dark Knight in 2008. Set seven years after the conclusion of the second film, The Dark Knight Rises finds the billionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) living in seclusion, having allowed his crime-fighting alter-ego Batman to take the blame for the crimes committed by the former DA Harvey Dent, including the murder of Wayne's soul-mate, Rachel. However, Wayne's self-imposed isolation is threatened by two very different interlopers into Gotham City: the formidable masked terrorist Bane (Tom Hardy), who seems to be masterminding a plan to undermine the very fabric of contemporary society, and sophisticated cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), who breaks into Wayne Manor to steal a necklace, but comes away with much more. To combat the rising threat, Wayne is forced to become Batman once more, but is he strong enough - mentally, and physically - to face the challenge? The film has an all-star supporting cast, including Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Marion Cotillard, and has become one of the most popular and successful box-office hits of 2012, ending Nolan's vision on an undisputed high note, but cleverly paving the way for future installments by different directors.

Returning for the third time is composer Hans Zimmer, now having firmly supplanted David Julyan as Nolan's composer-of-choice.... James Newton Howard is no longer credited as co-composer, but there is additional music by Lorne Balfe, Tom Holkenborg, Andrew Kawczynski, Jasha Klebe, Steve Mazzaro and Ramin Djawadi, as well as a whole cadre of conductors and orchestrators that take the numbers in the creative team to well over a dozen. I have been pretty tough on Zimmer of late, giving fairly short shrift to his work on the last Batman film, as well as the most recent entries into the Sherlock Holmes and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises. I'm not going to launch into a diatribe about Zimmer and what he and his multitude of underlings have done to the film music industry, because it's all been said before, and I'd be as guilty of repeating myself as Zimmer seems to be these days. Zimmer is Zimmer and he's never going to be anything else, and there's enough astonishingly good film music being written for smaller independent projects that it's just about possible to overlook his almost total dominance of the mainstream. However, the thing a lot of people tend to forget - and I have been guilty of this myself - is that Zimmer is more than capable of writing truly terrific music, and it is with that in mind that I find myself somewhat shocked to be writing the following statement: parts of The Dark Knight Rises are actually pretty darn good.

Of course, it follows the style and tone of the previous two films, restating the now-familiar two-note Batman motif, as well as several of the familiar action motifs heard throughout this film's predecessors. The orchestral makeup of the score barely deviates from the pattern, with the endless churning cello ostinati, thunderous percussion hits, low-register brass calls, and multitude of industrial-sounding electronic textures overlaying everything, as we have come to expect. Where The Dark Knight Rises surprises is in its intelligence in the application of its thematic elements, which add an unexpectedly fulfilling layer of sophisticated subtext to Nolan's already intellectually murky world.

Zimmer's main new element is what is popularly known as `Bane's Chant', an unpolished male voice choir intoning the words "deshi basara" over an unusually-metered percussion loop. The chant, which translates from the original Moroccan Arabic as "he rises", is an amalgamation of many different voices which were recorded by members of the public and sent to Zimmer over the internet, and forms the cornerstone of many cues, ranging from the portentous "Gotham's Reckoning", parts of "The Fire Rises", the middle section of the wonderfully chaotic "Fear Will Find You", and during the dramatic and relentless "Imagine the Fire". At first, the theme clearly appears to be a recurring leitmotif for Bane; however (and here be spoilers), the application of the theme is actually much cleverer than that. Yes, the theme regularly accompanies Bane and his dastardly antics, and it provides a menacing herald for his appearances on-screen. However, the theme also plays when Wayne - cast down into a prison of despair in a remote part of India - makes his dangerous ascent out of the "pit", conquering both the physical and mental barriers facing him. Later, it plays against scenes featuring the child of Batman's nemesis Ra's Al Ghul, who was forced to make a similar climb to freedom, and during the conclusive battle between Batman and Bane, it underscores their flying fists of fury. Considering the previous scenes it played against, you are never quite sure whose side it's on during this conclusive mano-a-mano. Ultimately, the theme doesn't really herald one particular character - instead, it's an all encompassing theme for people who have overcome massive adversity, who have `risen up' both figuratively and literally, as Wayne, Bane, the child of Ra's Al Ghul all had to do. Although their life trajectories ultimately diverged greatly, they all had to conquer enormous obstacles to get to where they were.

The other major new thematic element is the theme for Selina Kyle, a sly, mysterious, slightly mischievous tinkling piano motif that, more often than not, is accompanied by the sound of a gently rattling metal chain in the percussion section. Following its initial, forthright appearance in "Mind If I Cut In?", the theme takes a back seat for most of the rest of the score, only making fleeting guest appearances thereafter. In "Nothing Out There", for example, the chain sound appears both on its own, and as a prelude to a restatement of the piano motif, and the same chain effect can be heard towards the end of the bonus track `All Out War". Actually, Selina's theme is much more prominent in the film mix than it is on the soundtrack album, and one can only surmise that the CD producers took an editorial decision to limit its appearances here. Selina's theme, while perfectly serviceable, doesn't quite have the same instant memorability as Bane's Chant, and it is in these quieter moments that James Newton Howard's creative touch is missed the most; the alluring, slightly twisted sexual chemistry between Wayne and Kyle is prime real estate for a composer of Howard's deftness, and could have been something great as opposed to something just `OK'.

The rest of the score, where these new elements are not present, follows the formula set down in previous Batman films, almost to the point where it seems that certain cues have been lifted wholesale from earlier Batman scores. The large-scale action sequences, of which there are many, repeat almost verbatim the thrusting, propulsive Batman action motifs from the earlier scores, with large sections of cues such as "The Fire Rises", "Fear Will Find You" and "Imagine the Fire" mirroring the likes of "Molossus" and "Like a Dog Chasing Cars" almost perfectly. "Despair" contains the score's most front-and-center performance of the 2-note Batman theme, accompanied by the now-familiar synthesized `wing-flapping" effect. Both the introspective "Born in Darkness" and the score's emotional finale in "Rise" reprise the grandiose string performances first heard in the "Macrotus" and "Corynorhinus" cues from the original Batman Begins, the latter augmented by a boy soprano solo, consolidating the theme as a pseudo-love theme for the Wayne family, Bruce's relationship with Alfred, and the memory of his parents.

These cues are certainly appealing enough in context, are undeniably imposing, and they do give the trilogy of scores a pleasing continuity, but it would have been nice to hear Zimmer step up with a new action riff here and there, rather than simply making his cellists churn their arms off for the 20th time. Really, the only new twist in the tale is the unusual ethereal synth performance of the 2-note Batman theme in "On Thin Ice", but this is one of the few moments where Zimmer actually plays around with variations on his original thematic core. This is the same problem Zimmer faced on the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie, where he seemed content simply to restate note-for-note whole chunks of score from previous films, and he has fallen into the same disappointing trap here too.

The five bonus cues can be found via various different sources, either via the physical CD, by purchasing them online separately, or by downloading it from a special website on movietickets.com. Although it's a pain to have to go to multiple sources to gain access to the full scope of the score (much like the Tron Legacy situation the other year), it's worth tracking them all down as, in sum, they do give a much more comprehensive overview of everything the score has to offer. Cues such as "No Stone Unturned" and "The Shadows Betray You", for example, contain several exciting variations on Bane's Chant (the latter containing an especially dark, unrelenting electronic pulse and a brooding flipped variation on the 2-note Batman motif), while "Risen From Darkness" has a very cool moment where Batman's heroic action theme and Bane's Chant play in powerful counterpoint to one another.

In many ways, The Dark Knight Rises showcases both the best and the worst of Hans Zimmer's musical personality in one all-encompassing score. On the one hand, the intellectual design and intelligent use of Bane's Chant shows Zimmer at his creative best, taking a simple idea and working it around to suggest complex concepts and subtle changes in context. The three or four recurring themes from across the entire trilogy give the Batman persona a definitive musical identity, and it's impossible to deny the sheer emotional thrill of feeling your seat rumble and your hair vibrate to this music when the theme kicks in during the film itself. On the other hand, you have the same old arguments: the Zimmer sound permeating the Hollywood mainstream to such a degree that composers as talented as Alan Silvestri and Patrick Doyle are being asked to ape the style; the fact that Zimmer himself seems to be stuck in a rut, writing what in effect are little more than variations of the same score on almost every action film he tackles; the over-reliance on electronic enhancements, ghostwriters, arrangers, and so on and so on. The bottom line is this: fans of the Zimmer style will love it, fans and of the current Batman style will love it, whereas anyone whose musical tastes tend to veer towards the predominantly orchestral will find a great deal of it boring, or unpalatable, or both. The exception to that rule, of course, is me: having been thoroughly underwhelmed with The Dark Knight, I fully expected to thoroughly hate The Dark Knight Rises, and I am as surprised as anyone to find that - despite the caveats and asterisks - I enjoy it as much as I do. Read more ›