Cinco Ranch Aggie said:
I do love Zimmer's work. Truly, with scores to Interstellar, Man of Steel, Dune, The Dark Knight trilogy, No Time to Die, and Gladiator among my favorites. But even as great as he is, he cannot hold a candle to John Williams. JW's work is often a strong complement to the movie, in that he tells the story through his notes that you could identify with even if you didn't have the visuals to accompany the music. I have never gotten that from any other composer, including Zimmer.
Just going off instant recall and not looking anything up, I had a hard time coming up with a decent list of Zimmer's work, but for Williams I can easily list more than I did for Zimmer.
I think they are too different for me to say that Williams is that much greater than Zimmer. Williams is more classical in his compositions, while Zimmer is more contemporary. I think the results from both are excellent and tell wildly different stories. I would not want a Zimmer score over an Indiana Jones movie, and I would not want a Williams score over something like Inception. Just two different soundscapes needed for those films. I do think Williams is the better composer, though. Just that it's much closer for me.
One of the things that I think is kind of cool about both of these guys is that someone might try and belittle their work because they make movie scores; however, that's essentially what some of the greatest composers ever did. It's just that the movies of that day were operas. Wagner, Mozart, Handel, all those dudes were essentially scoring movies. Granted, Williams isn't writing arias for the actors to sing, but you know what I mean.
