Hacker Cinema
The Ghost and the Darkness
1996 · Film · 109 min
Directed by Stephen Hopkins
Sir Robert Beaumont is behind schedule on a railroad in Africa. Enlisting noted engineer John Henry Patterson to right the ship, Beaumont expects results. Everything seems great until the crew discovers the mutilated corpse of the project's foreman, seemingly killed by a lion. After several more attacks, Patterson calls in famed hunter Charles Remington, who has finally met his match in the bloodthirsty lions.
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2 comments on Hacker News
Maybe my single least favorite thing about modern cinema is that movies across the cost spectrum have stopped giving a shit about original soundtracks. That’s how we can have 30+ damn Marvel movies and nobody remembers anything about the original music except one run of like seven or eight notes. It’s why the ones with the most style and most-effective soundtracks just used existing friggin’ pop rock songs.
It has to do with modern very-flexible digital editing (don’t want to lock in a Final Cut early enough to allow for production of a quality score timed to the edit) and editors/directors extensively using placeholder music, editing to that exactly, then just asking for a clone of whatever lame tune that was, as I understand it. Basically, having a shitty soundtrack just lets them get done with post-production faster, and keeps them more flexible until closer to release
Middling 90s movies like Twister and The Ghost and the Darkness punch way above their weight thanks to the soundtrack. You almost never see that any more.
This historic story has even inspired a movie with Michael Douglas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_and_the_Darkness