Tony Scott’s ridiculously enjoyable Crimson Tide sits at the top of my list of Simpson/Bruckheimer action movies, bolstered considerably by the fine performances of Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington playing captain and first officer of a submarine which suffers communication difficulties and is therefore unable to confirm whether an order to launch a nuclear strike still holds.
Nobody could have predicted at the time just what an influence its score would go on to have. Hans Zimmer had already established himself as a major figure in his relatively short career as a solo film composer by that point – and not just muscular action movies, either (The Lion King came shortly before this movie). At the time it was the action genre with which he was most associated – and here he came and changed it, really.
Yes, it’s possible to point to Basil Poledouris’s The Hunt for Red October as an influence here – the Russian choir, even some of the use of electronics – but also easy to see this as the culmination of an increasingly-confident composer on the journey from Black Rain through Backdraft and perhaps even Beyond Rangoon to get to this.
The power anthem main theme is absolutely fantastic. It’s got two parts – the action anthem itself, and a more noble theme for the submarine and its crew’s heroism – and while Zimmer uses it surprisingly sparingly through the score, that means its power when it does appear is all the greater. Unashamedly masculine and adrenaline-soaked, it essentially set the template for what action movie scores would sound like from that point forward for quite a long time – and while the style has evolved (some may say devolved) over the years to generally become less melodic, and others have come along (like John Powell with his Bourne scores) and thrown new ideas into the mix, there’s no denying what an important landmark this score was.
Much of the action music actually is made up of these little cells – ideas which can essentially be joined together in various ways, speaking crudely can be copied and pasted and slightly modified and then become another cue – the instrumental elements being the choir, all sorts of keyboards, an orchestra buried under there somewhere, and some soloists (a set of trumpet solos by the legendary Malcolm McNab are a real highlight), and then a load of motivic elements to add the other dimension to that equation. And really, that’s what was such a key part of the influence – not so much “development” as such any more going on through the score, more the careful definition of a set of ideas which could be cut up and reassembled into a full-length film score. This wasn’t itself completely revolutionary (it’s easy to make a case for a lot of European film music always having been like that – when Ennio Morricone was scoring 20+ movies a year during his creative peak, that’s how he was doing it) but I think it was for Hollywood.
Other elements on show include an interesting suspense device where a (synthetic?) shakuhachi flute is used as a kind of staccato rhythmic device – straight from the James Horner playback – and several uses of the seafarers’ hymn “Eternal Father, Strong to Save”, which sounds great with its very Media Ventures deep male chorus.
While I am a big advocate for properly “produced” film score albums to maximise the listening experience rather than slavishly reproduce the score as heard in the film, the original release of Crimson Tide (30 years ago!) never felt entirely satisfying, splitting an hour of the score into just five cues, leaving several highlights somewhat buried. Intrada’s new release actually provides a much more satisfying listening experience, I think – while some of those long cues are preserved (where that was the intended assembly), others are not and there’s plenty of good music which wasn’t previously released which adds to the score’s depth.
I very rarely ever listen to anything in the “bonus cue” section of these albums but there’s a great big exception here, a terrific concert suite assembled by Zimmer and Steve Mazzaro in 2014 which presents the single best standalone version of the main theme that’s ever been released anywhere and is the perfect addition to any Zimmer playlist.
There continues to be debate in the watering holes and libraries around the world from the Arctic Tundra to the outback of Australia as to whether this score or The Rock is the superior one – for me it’s not even a discussion, Crimson Tide is by far the best pure action score of Zimmer’s career, and its influence simply cannot be overstated.
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