Batman Begins
It's rare to see two marquee-name composers credited for a score, but perhaps two people were needed to come up with something that would stand up to the memory of Danny Elfman's work on the 1989Batman.Just as director Christopher Nolan's back-in-black approach is quite different from Tim Burton's phantasmagorical one, Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard's take doesn't bear much kinship to Elfman's. (You'd be hard-pressed to find any recognizable theme here, for instance.) Mostly the composers remain conservatively subtle, though coming up with the expected pounding on grandiose, action-y selections such as "Myotis" and "Antrozous" (no, the poetic-sounding track names aren't lifted from oldCocteau Twinsrecords but refer to various types of bats). Stand-out track "Tadarida" incorporates some of the distorted vocal effects associated with the Scarecrow's drug-induced nightmarish visions. Atmospheric to the point of evanescence sometime, the individual tracks tend to meld into each other after a while. The sense of stylistic continuity helps establish an overall mood, but sometimes it's hard to distinguish between shades of black.--Elisabeth VincentelliMore from the Batcave:Tim Burton'sBatmanon DVDBatman: Year One Deluxe EditionBy Frank MillerBatman - The Animated Series, Volume OneBatman BeginsBatman Begins : The Official Movie GuideBatmanOriginal Motion Picture Score