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Hans Zimmer's "Journey to the Line" from his score for The Thin Red Line. Starts as a weird repetitive pinging sound in the background; builds to a heart-rending climax.
Probably his most unified orchestral work,[1] the album flows seamlessly with the visuals from beginning to end. But that is easily the most famous snippet from the film and can be heard in other film trailers.
Black Hawk Down has a great score from start to finish, but the climax is with the last two pieces. The first is a beautiful song sung in Gaelic, and you can tell that it's a song of grief and loss even without understanding the lyrics (and they play it as they show the flag-draped coffins of the dead soldiers, the epilogue appears on screen, and an unknown soldier tells his wife to "be strong, tuck the girls in bed, and give them a kiss from daddy"). The second is "The Minstrel Boy", which runs as the credits begin. It has to be heard to be appreciated.
Gladiator's musical finale is also extremely touching, climaxing with the track Now We Are Free, which is sung in a language that no one can understand but conveys the exact message as the title.
"Budget Meeting" qualifies. Face it - that sheerly epic instrumentation is the sole reason (aside from scrumptious donuts) that people would even bother to attend budget meetings in real life.
Pirates of the Caribbean (2 & 3) - Absolutely fantastic. It's epic beyond epic... ness. And hey, Klaus Badelt, who wrote the first POTC score, was Zimmer's protege.
Other notable tracks include the Bach-esque "The Kraken", particularly the moment where the leviathan smashes the Edinburgh Trader clean in two; and the love/adventure theme from At World's End, presented up-tempo in "Up Is Down, and more sedately in "One Day."
(Captain!) Jack Sparrow has an especially fitting theme in part 2: alternatively tense and sedate, somewhat ambiguous, and slightly drunk.
Finally, a small but beautiful motif from the "parasail" scene in At World's End: Here at 2:37 from the "Marry Me" suite which sadly hasn't seen nearly enough of the light of day. It was a crime to leave it off the soundtrack...
Also heard in the above track (and elsewhere in the soundtrack; it essentially makes up the backbone of the score) is Will and Elizabeth's theme. Just... God damn, Will and Elizabeth's theme is just heart-swelling. Anakin and Padmé have got nothing on these two. That theme alone could play on loop for several hours and the soundtrack would still be awesome.
Also in the grand finale of "One Day". First heard on the voyage to World's End, and then completed with the Big Damn Kiss, it's basically the unifying song of the third movie.
Sadly the music from the climactic scene mentioned above ("Part of the Ship"/"Hold On") is only used once in World's End, and not in any other track. Zimmer said he had come up with a musical cue so good, he kicked himself for using it in an existing work.
Don't forget the wonderful Morricone hommage "Parley" from the Worlds End Soundtrack.
And the background score for the Battle of the Maelstrom (track listing; 'I Don't Think Now Is the Best Time') is a Crowning Moment of Awesome all by itself.
Agreed. Say what you will about the rest of the movie; the last scene WINS.
Mission Impossible 2 had a pretty fantastic score, and not only because of Zimmer's badass reworking of the main theme. "Mano-A-Mano" is pure epic, and the track "Injection" made the scene it was used in surprisingly moving - especially considering the silliness of the plot.
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron is an animated movie about a horse. The horse, amazingly, never speaks more than a bit of narration. It doesn't matter, because Hans Zimmer wrote the soundtrack, and it is AWESOMELY expressive: "Run Free" and "Homeland". Bryan Adams wrote the lyrics, and while they don't work for some, "You Can't Take Me" is a rousing anthem for freedom.
For an action movie example, The Rock. The first half of Hummell Gets The Rockets (from the opening scene) is an emotionally powerful piece.
Iron Man. He always does electronic, industrial-sounding music, so it fitted perfectly with the Man Of Iron.
Technically, he only produced the score of Iron Man. Ramin Djawadi got primary credit, but with Zimmer's studio, it's so incestuous that everyone basically composes everything.
On the other hand, you couldn't get a much better choice of rock song to finish the movie off than Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" ... for sheer power chords, and not to mention it's right after Tony Stark has revealed to the world that I...AM...I-RUN MAN!
The sequel follows the same lead, though it includes a ridiculously campy (though fitting) Stark Expo tune reminiscent of Walt Disney's Tomorrowland.
They specifically hired Richard Sherman (half of the brotherly duo who composed "It's A Small World" and "There's A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow", among many) to create an Ear Worm worthy of EPCOT for the Stark Expo. They got it.
Zimmer definitely deserves a mention for composing the incidental music for The Lion King. "This Land", especially, is simply breathtaking.
It's one of the few scores to use heroic marches and victorious music performed exclusively by traditional African choirs. Simba's King Theme, known unofficially as "Busa Simba" bookends the movie during the end credits.
From The Last Samurai, "A Way of Life", "Red Warrior", and "A Small Measure of Peace"
The first track from his score for Angels & Demons, 160 BPM, also known as the Illuminati theme, is something diabolically epic and yet again entirely different from Zimmer.
Most of those songs were not by Hans Zimmer, they were by Stephen Schwartz. Hans Zimmer only did the instrumental pieces.
Many of those deserve to be on this list - Red Sea's masterful use of tempo and instrumentation make the listener feel every emotion present in the film, and while Cry isn't particularly famous, Zimmer's use of motif and vocals accentuates the pain felt by the slaves.
Tai Lung's Theme, which appears at various points throughout "Tai Lung Escapes", "The Bridge", and "Shifu vs. Tai Lung" (Not to mention all the cool kung fu fighting music!).
The Sherlock Holmes soundtrack, especially "Psychological Recovery...6 Months", which gets bonus points for being more than eighteen minutes long. If you haven't got that kind of time, Discombobulate manages to encapsulate pretty much everything you need to know about the Downey Jr.'s portrayal of Holmes, the setting, and the music for the rest of the film in one quirkily awesome two and a half minute package. And while it's more sedate at the beginning, the last three minutes of "Catatonic" build up to an absolutely furiously paced climax that must have set a more than a couple violins on fire.
From Rango, "Bats." Pretty interesting use of public domain music.
The music in Backdraft was awesome enough that it got re-used as the background score to the original Japanese Iron Chef. (Sadly, the rights expired for the use of Zimmer's score, and the old episodes of Iron Chef shown in reruns now use different music.)
↑thanks in part to the contributions of John Powell
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