The strange connection between Jack Sparrow and ‘Gladiator’s’ Maximus
Occasionally, everyone tends to cut corners – whether it’s the hurried driver on the road or the baker already hard at work before the rest of the world stirs from slumber. This tendency for less-than-wholehearted effort pervades all professions and aspects of life, as even the master movie maestro Hans Zimmer has been known to replicate and reuse scores.
Though he’s very much championed in modern cinema, the German film score composer has been around for decades, providing some of the industry’s best movies with invigorating soundtracks. As early as the 1980s, Zimmer was earning Oscar nominations for his work on the likes of 1988’s Rain Man. In the following decade, he worked on everything from Terrence Malick’s dark WWII drama The Thin Red Line to Disney’s Cool Runnings, a lesser-spotted bobsled flick.
But, indeed, it was in the 21st century that he would truly thrive, signing up to score Ridley Scott’s Roman epic Gladiator, where he gifted frat boys across America the perfect backing song to use for their motivational speeches, ‘The Battle’. Audiences were given one of the most rousing scores in cinema history, and you can be sure that ever since, countless chests have been bumped, beers have been chugged, and press-ups have been pumped to its orchestral majesty. For three years, life was bliss.
But then, it all went wrong. In 2003, the equilibrium of the world was tilted off course, spiritual mediums began picking up strange signals, dogs barked at thin air, and a waft of deception began to fill the nostrils of film lovers across the globe. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl had hit cinemas, and after people had eventually gotten over Johnny Depp’s new look, no doubt inspired by a few too many trips to Blue Banana, audiences began to notice the rollicking soundtrack.
Undoubtedly suited to Sparrow’s bombastic voyages upon the seven seas, the main theme of Pirates of the Caribbean, which would be repeated in sequel after sequel, sounded an awful lot like ‘The Battle’ used in Gladiator, and things get even worse when you realise that Zimmer was the man behind both tunes.
Although Zimmer doesn’t get the full credit for the Pirates soundtrack, he does appear as the music editor, music programmer, and score producer. The story goes that he sat down with director Gore Verbinski and planned out how the movie should sound, allegedly writing the main melody for the project in just over two nights. After Zimmer penned an early version of the score, Klaus Badelt, a close colleague of his, took up the responsibility of creating the full score.
A simple answer for the similarity is that Zimmer simply re-used the chords from Gladiator, but where’s the Hollywood magic in such a conclusion?
Why not instead believe that Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is a sequel to Gladiator, with Sparrow being a long, distant descendant of Maximus Decimus Meridius? Carrying the same dogged determination, the pair share the same soulful yearning for adventure and liberty from tyranny above all who will have their vengeance in this life or the next.
