Ragnarok 2012: The Movie (Part 2)

Question: You're given unlimited funds to produce a movie based on Ragnarok. Who do you hire to direct? Who do you cast as which gods? Where do you film? And how about a film score?

And we're back with part two of this question! This time, let's talk about music and scores; let's make this Ragnarok sound as epic as it needs to.

Just as with directors, we went through our personal lists of the film composers who really stick out in our memories. John Williams is the obvious first choice, having done such sweeping epics as the Star Wars series, but we weren't feeling his style; Hans Zimmer was closer, but we still felt like, even in similar movies or work of his we really enjoyed, he lacked that special something. We're both big fans of Danny Elfman, but we had to admit that while any score he wrote for this would undoubtedly be good, it probably wouldn't suit the epic scale and sense of the project we're envisioning. We had a good long talk about Howard Shore, but while we loved his scores for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, we haven't heard anything else of his that really stuck out for us, and as a result weren't sure if maybe Celt-inspired elf music isn't just his perfect milieu.

But that's all okay, because there is a dude out there who has done awesome scores for sweepingly epic movies that we always enjoy, and that dude is James Horner. He's done excellent work in a wide range of movies, from small, homey feels to legendary epics, and we think he's got the vision, style and range to pull it off. So he's our official pick, despite the competition being steep.

This is something additional that we couldn't quite agree on, but it's interesting to discuss: in addition to orchestrated film scores, is this movie a good place for more modern genre music as well? It's not everybody's cup of tea and John isn't sure he agrees with me, but I can't help but feel that the Ragnarok movie might be the opportunity that the viking metal genre has been waiting for all its life. Should we enlist some of the most badassest of the northern rockers for moments in this film, or trust that Mr. Horner can deliver the goods without the need for outside contractors?

Either way, I'm just going to leave this right here:

Crank that sucker up and envision a bunch of Norsemen charging into battle. Hell, yes.

In other news, we wanted to have an awesome selection of places to film this movie, but the more we talked about it, the more we realized that Ragnarok really couldn't be accurately filmed on location, even in the most badass of locations. While we would definitely love to include some atmospheric shots of the most badass portions of the Norse world, like Mount Thor, Skogafoss or Surtsey, the vast majority of this movie is taking place in more epic locales yet - Asgard, Jotunheim, Muspelheim, Vigrid and Yggdrasil itself. Unfortunately, while there are unbelievably awesome sights in the world that could be taken advantage of for many shots, the vast majority of this movie is going to have to be CGI, which means most of it will need to be shot on a set suitable for greenscreening, motion-capture and all that other stuff that people who are actually film artists know way more about than we do.

So, since we like warm weather, good food and beaches, we arbitrarily chose Hawaii, but anywhere with a state of the art studio and a completely cracked-out awesome group of digital artists will do.

What about you guys? Any totally awesome composers we overlooked, or opinions to weigh in on the metal versus orchestra debate? Photographs of awesome landmarks that beg to be shared? Hit us and then stay tuned, because next time we're going to talk about casting.