The release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League offers both the director and soundtrack composer Tom Holkenborg the chance to indulge their every whim. The resulting movie and score are both aggressively long, ambitiously overstuffed, and deeply polarizing.
Depending on who you follow on Twitter, the release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League means entirely different things. To some, the so-called “#SnyderCut,” the allegedly authentic and uncut original vision of the underperforming 2017 superhero movie, is the product of a fan-driven harassment campaign. To others, it's an act of restorative justice, erasing the changes of an abusive collaborator and giving a grieving director a legitimate space to make peace with the personal pain that hijacked a high-profile project. Whether you view it as desperate cash grab or the last stand of authorship in an industry intent on suppressing original voices, it’s quite obviously a commodity, like every “Final Cut” or “Unrated Edition'' designed to make viewers purchase new copies of movies they already own. Zack Snyder’s Justice League is the cinematic equivalent of overstuffed streaming re-releases like Taylor Swift’s folklore: the long pond studio sessions (from the Disney+ special) (deluxe edition) or Trippie Redd’s Pegasus: Neon Shark vs Pegasus Presented By Travis Barker (Deluxe), a product that probably would not exist if it did not have a recently launched platform to promote. Split into DVD menu-like chapters, an artistic choice that also aids aimless shuffling, the Snyder Cut ends with an epilogue that stitches together scenes of set-up for sequels that will never happen, much like an assortment of bonus tracks and remixes, feat. Martian Manhunter and the Joker.
When Snyder left Justice League due to his daughter’s death and was controversially replaced by Joss Whedon, its original score was mostly scrapped in favor of replacement work by Danny Elfman. The Snyder Cut is advertised as the director’s unaltered vision, but if he had never left the movie in the first place, this take would have been subject to reshoots, and would probably still be shorter and lighter. Junkie XL’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is also different from what he might have composed originally, as it was produced entirely during quarantine. In both cases, this re-release offers Snyder and Tom Holkenborg the chance to indulge their every whim, and the resulting movie and score are each aggressively long, ambitiously overstuffed, and deeply polarizing. Either you will be moved by the intensity, sincerity, and sheer ballsiness of the film and its music, or you will be alienated by their runtime, dreariness, and ponderous seriousness. At a mammoth 54 tracks and 3 hours and 54 minutes, the soundtrack album runs just a few minutes shorter than the Snyder Cut itself.
Tom Holkenborg lies squarely at the intersection of superstar DJ and superstar composer. After years of pop-oriented work, as well as scoring for high-octane game franchises like Need for Speed and SSX, Junkie began collaborating with Hans Zimmer on the soundtracks to Christopher Nolan films like Inception and The Dark Knight Rises, and was enlisted into Zimmer’s cacophonous supergroup the Sinister Six—along with Pharrell, Johnny Marr, and Incubus’ Mike Einziger—for Marc Webb’s misbegotten The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Now, the apprentice has overtaken the master, or at the very least they’ve swapped places: Hans Zimmer plays festival stages and is worshipped like an EDM DJ, while Junkie dutifully churns out scores to Sonic the Hedgehog and Godzilla vs. Kong under his real name. The once-prolific Zimmer has become increasingly sparse in his scoring, superseded by a new generation of creative multitaskers, as fluent in popular musical production as they are at adapting to the conventions of the blockbuster soundtracks: artists like Trent Reznor, and Childish Gambino compatriot Ludwig Goransson, who replaced Nolan’s right-hand music man Zimmer with the driving techno score for Tenet.
Junkie’s most-played track on Spotify is still 2002’s Elvis Vs. JXL remix of “A Little Less Conversation,” best-known for its association with Ocean’s 11, a Bush-era reboot of the Rat Pack. Drawing on a self-consciously “vintage” sound and the often cornball textures of commercialized “world music,” Junkie XL rode one of the first waves of real superstar DJs, who cashed checks from Woodstock 1999 headlining slots and soundtrack gigs alike: Moby, Paul Oakenfold, the Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx, and trance producer BT. The multicultural melange perfected by these omnipresent producers was like the Mod Jams to ESPN’s Jock Jams—upper-middle-class, ready-to-wear electronica for tasteful commercial spaces. Some of Junkie’s biggest paydays have come from spots for coveted brands like Nike and Cadillac, so it’s only natural he and Snyder have become creative bosom brothers; Snyder was also weaned on advertising gigs.
Like Snyder’s movies, Junkie’s music is heavy on pastiche, often schmaltzy, and blatantly commercial. Snyder is an unapologetic dweeb: a guy who writes at a desk surrounded by human skulls and owns an axe collection, someone who thinks the height of coolness is Jason Momoa walking into the ocean while a Nick Cave song plays, while Henry Cavill walking out of the ocean as a Chris Cornell song plays comes in a close second. His use of pop music has always been subtlety-allergic: in his remake of Dawn of the Dead, we hear Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” as a viral plague spreads during the opening credits, and “Down with the Sickness” twice, both the big-band cover by Richard Cheese and Disturbed’s original; Cave singing “There is a king” as the camera stares into the face of the King of the Sea; multiple renditions and versions of “Hallelujah,” even decades after Shrek made that now-cliched music cue the butt of a joke. The much-derided jukebox mecha musical Sucker Punch, released at the height of mash-up culture, even features a Queen remix medley with a guest verse from former Terror Squad member Armageddon. Snyder’s films are an entire universe of cliches, but he exalts each one, lending them the portent of religious rituals. The intensity of Snyder’s Christian Scientist upbringing carries over into this spiritual take on the medium—if comic books are his myths, superheroes his new gods, then pop songs are Snyder’s hymns.
The Justice League soundtrack opens with a cover of “Song to the Siren” by coffee-shop playlist singer Rose Betts—most famously performed by This Mortal Coil but originally written by Tim Buckley, the kind of mythologized songwriter Snyder seems most attracted to (in addition to the aforementioned Cave, Cash, and Cohen, Bob Dylan also figures heavily in Watchmen, and the director is a noted Morrissey fan). But the movie and its soundtrack embrace moody abstraction more than pop clarity. JXL’s score is the kind of orchestral music that is easier to imagine from a synthesizer than an ensemble: one finger on the strings, another on the choral voices, a pinky sliding over to trigger the mournful military brass. The hand of Zimmer always feels present, in the influence of that inescapable Inception BWAH, and in the mingling of symphonic portent with afour-on-the-floor pulse.
Junkie’s stylistic trademark as a composer is relentless drumming, a hold-over from his DJ days. “The Path Chooses You” begins with dark, dubby textures and a light hip-hop sway before pivoting to intense minimal techno and then once again into full-fledged trap EDM. Though there’s a rumbling consistency to the score, its tenor varies based on each hero: Junkie’s versatility allows him to create distinct worlds for each character. Wonder Woman is often accompanied by an absurd banshee wail, presumably the voice of Amazon past — what the closed captioning describes as [ANCIENT LAMENTATION MUSIC PLAYING]. For better or worse, the blazing guitar solo signaling Gal Gadot’s on-screen appearance is one of the few iconic blockbuster themes of the past decade — peaking into the red, a little annoying, imminently recognizable. Aquaman music cues like “We Do This Together,” appropriate for a character always chugging Jack Daniel’s and draped in wet denim, are full of car-commercial butt rock, though Junkie still smothers every instrument in walls of crackle and distortion. The sparse piano keys of “A Splinter from the Thorn that Pricked You” and the metronomic beat of “Cyborg Becoming / Human All Too Human” feel suited to a horror film, fitting for Cyborg’s narrative arc about the terror of a changed body. And the euphoric strings of Zimmer’s score for Snyder’s almost-Malickian 2013 film Man of Steel are still intact on cues like “I Teach You, the Overman.”
It’s those unsettling elements that often make Junkie’s score distinctive: metallic shrieks, jagged strings, and THX-like deep notes are as central as “real” instruments. That emphasis on texture makes the Justice League score surprisingly listenable as a background piece, at times almost bordering on the algorithm-driven sonic creepypasta known as dark ambient, though there are often the kind of repeating, frenetic musical cues you hear over and over again during a final boss battle. Junkie’s score and Snyder’s film are both ultimately about feeling and sensation: this take on Justice League is about the existential awe puny humans feel when confronted with mythical titans rather than a straight-forward superhero story. Appropriately, its soundtrack is more often an extended vibes playlist than a clear suite. These products may not have been made with streaming in mind, but lend themselves to a state of endless flow, like scrubbing through an Adobe After Effects timeline or Ableton project instead of experiencing a full work. Streaming makes the work of remixing endless; a black-and-white edition of the Snyder Cut, Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Justice is Gray, drops on HBO Max soon.
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