Wonder Woman: The Impossible Task

0:00 if I asked you to write a theme for Wonder Woman how would you do it well if you're a longtime viewer of the channel then you know that in order to write a good superhero theme you need to musically Express what that hero represents so with that in mind what does Wonder Woman represent easy she tells us it's about why do you believe [Music] all right wrap it up someone get Celine Dion on the phone no that doesn't work because Wonder Woman doesn't represent love at least she doesn't represent romantic love so what does she represent well if you think about it she actually spends almost the entire film wanting to find and kill Ares and stuffing the gut of

0:46 war is ours for ordnance as Amazon this is our duty if no one else will defend the world from Ares then I must the god of war is our responsibility only an Amazon condition is until she kills the general gets a pep talk from Steve Trevor finds out that Ares is the werewolf from Harry Potter watches Steve sacrifice himself and then almost crushes doctor does nothing when she finally realizes what she wants to fight for and becomes Wonder Woman see the whole idea behind Wonder Woman is that she sees the potential for good within everyone she meets which is the whole point of this line but then I glimpsed the darkness that lives within their light and

1:33 learned that inside every one of them there will always be both which is what she realizes when Steve sacrifices himself he admits to doing shady things and not necessarily being an all-around Boy Scout another covering pretend to be somebody else shot people on the beach smuggle a notebook liar murder smuggler he's still coming but when he sacrifices himself he forced his her to realize that even though he's done some sucky things in the past that doesn't necessarily make him a bad person you don't think I get it after what I've seen out there you don't think I wish I could tell you that it was one bad guy to blame that's what makes this line so important [Music] it's not about deserve it isn't about

2:19 what people deserve it's about what they're capable of that was Ryan she said the world of men did not deserve you they don't deserve her how could see if it's deserve it's not baby maybe we don't maybe get what we want but for a massive portion of this film Wonder Woman isn't really Wonder Woman she's just Princess Diana famous Kyra off to go and perform her divine duty as an Amazon and kill Ares this is in direct contrast to what you see in a lot of superhero films in most superhero films the hero will have what they represent in fight for established early on in the film or the director will just assume that the audience has some idea of what the hero is all about before the film even begins a great example is like in Superman in Superman we see him tell

3:05 Lois about the whole truth and justice in the American Way before we get any conflict with Lex Luthor in spider-man we see Uncle Ben drop though with great power comes great responsibility line right after Peter gets bitten but then with something like Batman they just assume that you already know what bats is all about that's why the film opens with the old bait-and-switch you think it's Bruce Wayne about to have his parents murdered but instead it's Batman preventing that from happening and in turn showing you what he's all about I want you to tell all your friends about me so when it comes to scoring these kinds of films you know you could just write a theme defining what the superhero represents and you're pretty much done but for Wonder Woman it's not like that for the majority of the film diana is just an Amazon and doesn't really ascend and become Wonder Woman until the very end so instead of scoring this like a

3:50 superhero film with just one theme that expresses what the hero represents they needed to score Wonder Woman more like Star Wars see one of the biggest accomplishments of the Star Wars soundtrack is how Williams didn't necessarily score characters instead he scored ideas and when we hear those theme attic ideas being played for a specific character we get a better understanding of what that character represents like obi-wan doesn't have a theme but the force has a theme so when we first see obi-wan we hear that force theme come yeah my little friend don't be afraid I'll run one in he'll be all right and we hear it again when he dies [Applause] [Music]

4:36 and we hear it again when he tells Luke to give up on technology and go vegan use the false [Music] but what that means is that when we hear the force theme playing when Luke is looking at the binary sunset and is frustrated about being stuck on a farm we know that it's the force that's encouraging him to leave and go in his adventure furthermore when we hear it at the end of Return of the Jedi when Luke is fighting Vader and Luke says that he can sense the goodness in Vader we can hear that Luke is tapping into the force putting him on par with obi-wan there is [Music] you couldn't bring yourself to kill me before and I don't believe you'll destroy me now and there's a significant amount of flexibility in nuance that can

5:22 come from a system like this think about it we always hear the Imperial March whenever Vader's on screen Vader doesn't get his own theme the Empire does but playing the Imperial March whatever Vader's on-screen reminds us that Vader is an agent of the Empire when the group gets ambushed and Han and Luke we're dealing with TIE fighters we hear the rebel fanfare because they're acting in the interest of the Rebel Alliance and saving the princess when Leia goes to Jabba's hut to save Han and she reveals herself we don't hear her theme from the first film instead we hear the love theme titled han Solo in the princess from that we know that Leia isn't being sent on a mission by the Rebel Alliance to go save Han or like the force isn't guiding her to his location we know that she's saving him out of love so by scoring ideas instead of just characters you can have your characters be affected by the world around them and

6:08 become agents that represent those specific aspects of your given world that's exactly what needed to happen in Wonder Woman at first Diana's just acting as an Amazon performing her divine Amazonian duty so have there be an Amazon theme that plays whenever Diana's just being an Amazon like when we hear that story about Zeus and during her training and whenever she's just blindly running after Ares then you can have another theme for the selfish destructive evil side of humanity and have it represent dr. poisoned the general and Ares that way instead of feeling like three separate characters with separate motivations you can musically unify them to represent one antagonistic force and finally you can have a third theme that represents Steve Trevor and his band of merry men the whole point of these characters is that even though they're all critically flawed in some way they're still capable

6:53 of being good and you can have that theme explore their struggles without branding them as defective people so when we get that mini flashback where Steve convinces Diana that can save people and she then goes on to say that it's not about what people deserve we could get the Amazon theme and the Steve Trevor group theme played together symbolizing that Wonder Woman is an Amazon that fights for the goodness that she believes all people are capable of just like how Luke goes from not really knowing who he is to the last Jedi the last Herald of the force but we didn't get that and it's all Batman V Superman's fault no seriously it actually is think about it we just put in all this effort to come up with a theme for the Wonder Woman film how on earth are you supposed to thematically represent a character that does next to nothing aside from showing up at the end of the film and fighting a monster like kudos to Zimmer and junkie XL for taking

7:39 it on I have no idea how stressful it must have been when Snyder told them that he wanted a Wonder Woman theme in an interview with cinema blend discussing the creation of water woman's theme Zimmer starts talking about how superhero movies are like they're so masculine and male generated and how we need to have more women in the whole process more women composers succeeding and more women filmmakers succeeding and when he talks about the specific idea behind Wonder Woman's theme he mentions that he wanted Wonder Woman's theme to sound like a banshees wail which I thought was a really interesting insight as to why we ended up with what we did for the BVS Wonder Woman theme see if you see my video on superhero themes then you know that brass instruments have always represented some sort of power so if you want your hero to sound powerful then you want your hero to be represented by that loud powerful brass but on the other hand if you want someone to sound powerless say a damsel

8:25 in distress then you want the polar opposite of that loud brassy sound which is why so many love themes and damsel-in-distress themes are written heavily for Strings and lighter woodwinds but if your hero is always played by a man and the damsel in distress is always played by well a damsel then culturally we're gonna start associating that brass with masculinity and those strings with femininity Zimmy must have been worried that if he scored Wonder Woman like classic Superman or Batman that people would have started criticizing him for making Wonder Woman sound powerful by masculinizing her so he compromised by writing Wonder Woman's theme for electric cello all the culturally programmed feminine sentimentality of a string instrument but all the power of an electric guitar I thought it was a really great solution to a problem that might have otherwise blown up in his face and it clearly worked because the theme became hugely

9:11 popular but this ultimately created a problem when they wanted to write an entire film Wonder Woman now Rupert gregson-williams and his team have to take the theme for Wonder Woman from BVS a theme that was written for a character with almost no lines personality or backstory and somehow fit that theme for an entire film about that one character basically this could have gone two ways one let's assume that simmer got lucky and somehow managed to write a theme for Wonder Woman in Batman vs Superman that somehow perfectly expressed what Wonder Woman represents and the gregson-williams team would have just been able to copy that theme and paste it in the new film well in order to fit our model gregson-williams would have then had to chop up that theme give half to the Amazons and the other half to Steve Trevor because Wonder Woman as she appears in Batman vs Superman doesn't really show up until the end of this film or the

9:58 other way this could have gone is we can assume that Zimmer wrote a theme that perfectly fit the character on the screen which is to say not very deep because let's be honest here to some extent all Zimmer had to go off of was the fact that Wonder Woman is a strong woman and if that was the case Howard gregson-williams compensate for a theme that expresses such a simple character and expand on that to last an entire film you could see that the gregson-williams team struggled with this problem they realized that they couldn't just play the BVS theme during every single action scene because well it would sound like this but at the same time that piece of music wouldn't work for the scenes that were

10:43 mostly character-driven if the BVS theme is the one theme that everyone associates with Wonder Woman but it doesn't work as the main theme for the main character of this film what do you do well they decided to introduce new music knowing full well that it wasn't gonna be remembered as Wonder Woman's theme while at the same time trying to include the BVS theme whenever they could without it becoming too jarring so like the film opens with some electric cello and you hear that rhythmic ostinato all over the place [Music] so when the BVS theme eventually arrives it doesn't show up completely out of

11:29 nowhere but check out this new piece of music that they used when they wanted to represent Wonder Woman but the BVS theme wouldn't fit [Music] please so important thank you very much this has been such an outfit me taking and this little light motif is really cool because it's actually a part of the BBS Wonder Woman theme [Music]

12:16 but these are effectively two different themes for the same character so when it comes to a central conflict of the film which do you use and why well when it came to fighting the general they went with a BBS theme but then they mixed in some of the new music we hear when we first seat the mascara [Music] and considering how at this moment Diana believes she's killing Ares I thought it was an interesting statement on Diana's last action as just an Amazon it's sort of acts as an intersection between the Diana that we see in that mascara at the beginning of the film and the Wonder Woman that we see in BBS but then when

13:02 it comes to the fight with Ares and we see Diana become Wonder Woman what do you do there are no themes that completely represent Wonder Woman we have a theme for that mascara and we have a theme for when she fights we even have a piece of a theme that tries to complement that fighting theme and make her more of a complete character but they're all bits and pieces of who she is she doesn't have a complete theme that represents her desire to fight for everyone's potential to do good she doesn't have parents to avenge she doesn't have truth justice and the American Way she doesn't have the force we see her become a hero but we don't hear her become a hero and then the credits roll you