Obviously the two are in the best of all time discussion, but I often find myself enjoying Zimmer's music much more. I think Williams has more iconic music in the film industry, but I often find myself enjoying Zimmer's style. I sometimes feel like Zimmer's music overtakes the film itself or makes it so much more that what is happening on screen more often than William's.
I find John Williams to be quite overrated. His style is outdated and lacks versatility. Zimmer has done so many genres and styles and excelled in almost all of them. And like you said, his scores can sometimes be more interesting than the movie itself which takes some doing.
shareI find John Williams to be quite overrated. His style is outdated and lacks versatility.
No Williams is better.
shareZimmer's music is more derivative than John Williams.
JW also has a larger catalog of filmscores that are far more diverse.
When I think of Zimmer being diverse the only other film score that comes to mind is "The Thin Red Line".
Gladiator, PoTC, Inception, Interstellar, and Sherlock Holmes all sound the same to me far more than JW's score for Star Wars
I don't see how the themes in Gladiator sound anything like the themes and tones used in Inception or any of the others you listed. All of those are loud, booming, and quesi-techno where Gladiator in most tracks is nothing like that. Zimmer also did the Lion King soundtrack which is quite diverse and unique.
I do agree that the tones and styles of Holmes, Inception, Man of Steel, Interstellar, and Batman, do have lots of similarity. I would actually throw the Thin Red Line as sounding a lot like some of the themes of Inception without the fast pace and booming.
I agree that JW's has a larger catalogue of music is more diverse and is tied to more iconic films.
To be fair, John Williams' music is heavily influenced by classical, romantic and post-classical music composers and you can hear everyone from Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner to Ives, Holst, and Stravinsky in his film scores from the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
In the scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" with the large baskets in the marketplace, Williams out-Prokofieved Prokofiev himself.
shareHans Zimmer's music is more emotionally moving and John William's music is more legendary....but I would say both are equally the top 2 greatest movie soundtrack composers.
share"both are equally the top 2 greatest movie soundtrack composers"
Greatest of today, perhaps. If you place them in a group including guys like Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, Sergei Prokofiev, Aaron Copland, Jerome Moross, Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, and Ron Goodwin, Williams would probably hold his own, while Zimmer would be relegated to second-tier.
I was at a concert of John Williams, where he conducted all his classic scores. It wasn't just emotionally uplifting, it was also an eye-opener how detailed and sophisticated his orchestrations are. There is 10 times more happening in a Williams scored than one by Zimmer. I love a lot of Zimmer's work and some of it can be only describes as brilliant. But compared to the sophistication and skills displayed by Williams, Zimmer is still at the beginning of his craft.
shareHans Zimmer is a forgettable hack. There have been literally dozens of film composers superior in talent to Zimmer. Unless your talking about money, then yeah, Zimmer has been one of the more financially successful ones.
shareI love a lot of the music he has done: The Lion King, Crimson Tide, Gladiator, The Last Samurai, MOS, TDK, Interstellar, Inception. I don't think he has done anything particularly great in the last 5 years that I can think of, but he certainly has had a great career.
shareOh God. Please stop. Hans was great early on. But, his pounding, banging "film scores" have now been replicated by his replicants like Lorne Balfe and have effectively killed film scoring forever.
shareRidiculous. I wouldn't even consider Zimmer a composer. He's more like a sound designer who shoehorns 'ideas', like ticking clocks and preposterous arrangements into his scores. Musically there's not much more than bland and generic walls of sound. Williams is truly a composer in the likes of Gershwin, Stavinsky, Bernhard Herman. And first and foremost he serves the story he writes for.
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