This is, in retrospect, probably kinda a stupid effort. Dark Phoenix, for all of my personal love for it, still isn't a great movie, and in terms of metrics like "plot holes to run time" falls significantly behind even versions of this story told by the mid-90's X-Men cartoon.
Even still, I feel like the cast and effects artists in particular put in enough solid effort to deserve a better score than they got. If you need some context, go look over my release review of Dark Phoenix. No, it's not a great movie, but there's a key thing here to understand; with this project I'm not comparing it to good X-Men movies like First Class or X-Men United. I'm comparing it to The Last Stand, and if for no other reason than the fact that they actually focused on the Dark Phoenix saga instead of shoving it to the sideline, Dark Phoenix tells a better story than The Last Stand.
It's an incredibly low bar, I know.
But the point is that The Last Stand was abysmal, and utterly failed the soundtrack that John Powell wrote for it, which was excellent. Dark Phoenix wasn't amazing, but it was still failed by the soundtrack Hans Zimmer wrote for it, which kinda wasn't even music. So this project is an effort to hopefully bring together the two movies in a way that makes at least one of them better.
Currently we're at what I would call a version 0 draft stage. The whole thing is, in fact, complete! You can download and watch it right here.
Version 0 Issues:
Even still, I feel like the cast and effects artists in particular put in enough solid effort to deserve a better score than they got. If you need some context, go look over my release review of Dark Phoenix. No, it's not a great movie, but there's a key thing here to understand; with this project I'm not comparing it to good X-Men movies like First Class or X-Men United. I'm comparing it to The Last Stand, and if for no other reason than the fact that they actually focused on the Dark Phoenix saga instead of shoving it to the sideline, Dark Phoenix tells a better story than The Last Stand.
It's an incredibly low bar, I know.
But the point is that The Last Stand was abysmal, and utterly failed the soundtrack that John Powell wrote for it, which was excellent. Dark Phoenix wasn't amazing, but it was still failed by the soundtrack Hans Zimmer wrote for it, which kinda wasn't even music. So this project is an effort to hopefully bring together the two movies in a way that makes at least one of them better.
Currently we're at what I would call a version 0 draft stage. The whole thing is, in fact, complete! You can download and watch it right here.
Version 0 Issues:
- The dialogue track is rough. It was cut together by taking a stereo rip of the movie's audio and using Audacity's vocal isolation feature to cut out everything but the center track. This is a stupid way to do this, and while it technically "worked" the resulting audio lacks clarity, depth, volume, and a frankly unacceptable amount of foley.
- I tried to combat this where possible by using the movie's native audio when there was no music, but that is a shockingly tiny portion of the 2-hour run time.
- The track transitions are sometimes a little ridiculous. I am in fact just using the soundtrack for The Last Stand, which means that where songs begin and end frequently do not line up with the scenes. So sometimes they just randomly fade in to or out of nowhere.
- The music quality isn't great. It comes from a fairly low bit-rate digital rip of The Last Stand soundtrack, and could definitely be improved. But I didn't really stress over that given that the dialogue track was so bad.
- It's in 720p. Again, because of the lack of quality on the dialogue track I decided not to care.
- The Angel theme from The Last Stand is too flipping triumphant and pure to actually fit into Dark Phoenix anywhere. I included it anyway, but the place where it sits is stupid and will sound weird. I don't care, that theme is gold.
- I didn't score the entire end credits. I ran out of relevant music and got bored.
- The end credits still say Hans Zimmer wrote the music.
Next steps:
- Before I do anything else I need to get a surround-sound rip and try to pull the dialogue and sfx out of that. With the audio mixed into 5-point surround I'm hoping I'll be able to just pull the native center track without any modification and not get any music in the bargain so I can have just the dialogue and sfx without digital tampering.
- Given how Zimmer tends to be involved with sound mixing and the way his scores tend to function more as sfx than actual score these days, the center track in a surround mix may still be contaminated. Which means I need to just get better at stripping bits out without utterly destroying the audio quality.
- Once I've got a cleaner dialogue track, I'll drop it right in to the current project and make sure everything is still lining up. If that all works, that'll be version 0.5.
This is purely a passion project, fueled mainly by the fact that I just wish John Powell's score had been paired with a better movie, because it deserves it. To my ear, the music as I've included it thus far does actually elevate Dark Phoenix, making the emotional high-points of the film actually hit the way they were supposed to. Maybe I'm alone in this, but meh, who cares. If you've got some feedback or tips on how to extract a clean dialogue track from a movie, leave them in the comments below! And don't forget to check back to see future versions!
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