Megamind - Hans Zimmer & Lorne Balfe

Hurrah, it's the quarterly mildly disappointing Dreamworks CGI film. Now in 3D! Actually, Megamind isn't at all bad, indeed most of their 2010 efforts have been decent, particularly the wonderful How to Train Your Dragon. OK, I didn't see Shrek 11 (or whatever it is) but presumably that was fair to middling like the other Shrek sequels. Megamind gets the Hans Zimmer and "insert name of random composer here" treatment; this time it's Lorne Balfe who appears to be a regular Zimmer "additional music by", but who has now "made it" and gets his name on the album cover, like reaching the pinnacle of some unambitious film composer initiation ceremony. However, it seems he has had some reasonable level of impact on Megamind  since it sounds notably un-Zimmer like a lot of the time.

One striking thing about Megamind is that it's not really all that heroic (at least if you benchmark anything vaguely superheroic against Superman). True, it's about the "villain" but even when one imagines it should be heroic (the action), this doesn't really happen and it's all rather charmingly plinky plunky, seemingly driven by the characters rather than the action sequences. It has more in common with a pleasingly above average family comedy score (think Randy Edelman on a good day). This is most in evidence for Hal's Theme, which is delightfully perky and memorable enough, if not brain achingly catchy. Ditto for the Roxanne Love Theme, which sounds like Michel Legrand. That and a dash of Bondian brass in Ollo makes one wish they had perhaps gone all out on the retro aspect, but alas that doesn't quite happen. This isn't quite The Incredible, but Michael Giacchino is in another league.

Again, one must assume that Zimmer's usual tropes were slightly subsumed by Balfe in the action since it doesn't sound like Con Air (did Zimmer even write that? Probably not, but he might as well have done) or Crimson Tide or Gladiator. Spots like Stars and Tights or Crab Nuggets are predictably upbeat and not exactly complex stuff, but aren't heavy with Remote Control percussion or that weird synth brass sound that makes a hefty live brass section sound like Hans has done keyboard karaoke and drizzled the artificial sound over the recording like an over zealous mayonnaise dispenser. Megamind isn't amazing, but it could have been so much more generic and it's nice that it isn't. The old fashioned mix of pop tunes are clearly for artistic reasons rather than money given their age (unless the kids really are listening to Glibert O'Sullivan and Minnie Riperton these days and I haven't noticed).


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