A theme with a darker edge
HANZ ZIMMER
NO TIME TO DIE ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK
Decca ★★★★✩
We remember individual Bond movies by their theme songs. The best are so memorable, so distinctive, they take on a life of their own. Yet when we actually watch the film, it’s the score that sets the tone, that guides how we experience the action.
The late John Barry is the definitive exponent of Bond music. In his absence, only David Arnold – with his firm grasp of the retro-modern – has held the chair with lasting distinction. But it was surely only a matter of time before the titan of contemporary film music, Hans Zimmer, was given a crack at it. No Time To Die proves this was an excellent idea.
It may sound stereotypical to say Zimmer has brought a Teutonic edge to the affair but it’s nonetheless true. His score, while respectfully nodding to the classic Barry style, has a dark and brooding quality somewhat reminiscent of his native Germany’s industrial and electronic scenes.
This is nicely suited to our era of Bond, which – reacting to the Bourne films that made the old psychopathic, wisecracking snob seem suddenly obsolete – recast Daniel Craig’s 007 as a psychologically, existentially tormented antihero.
Who better to provide a theme song for such a character than gloom’s own goth-adjacent princess, Billie Eilish? Yet she wasn’t the first to invoke such ambiguity. The finest Bond theme of them all – oh, yes it is – Nancy Sinatra’s You Only Live Twice, carried by Barry’s gorgeous soaring and swooping string motif, was suffused with dreamy melancholy, and the sense that beneath the character’s brutal, libidinous surface lay sorrows and longings of a much deeper nature.