The Gorge, which debuted on AppleTV+ Friday and which I watched last night, marks their third score for a major motion picture in the past calendar year.
I haven't landed yet on how much I like The Gorge, but let's just say the star ratings I'm deciding between are 2.5 and 3. And I'm starting to question how "major" the major potion pictures to which they're giving away their talents really are these days.
Of course they are not actually "giving them away." Writing a score for a movie is a gig that pays you money. Like anyone else, Trent and Atticus like to get paid for doing the thing they are good at doing.
But it may just be my love for Nine Inch Nails, whom I have considered my favorite band for more than 30 years, that makes me think it's also nice if the movies they score have a certain artistic validity to them beyond that paycheck. The same way you would call out Christopher Nolan if he directed, I don't know, Sonic the Hedgehog 4.
This hasn't been a problem for Ross and Reznor before now. In fact, let's use this moment in time to give a quick overview of this period when the two have been working regularly on movie scores, given that it is almost the 15th anniversary of their first and what remains their best score: The Social Network.
Next came two more collaborations with David Fincher, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl, both of which continued the "event movie" status of their work. Two of their next three are documentaries I haven't seen, Before the Flood and The Vietnam War, which, if not "event movies," certainly carry with them a seriousness of purpose. Sandwiched in between those was maybe our first sign of them branching out into less significant subject matter, though I suppose a movie about a bomb set off at the Boston Marathon (Patriots Day) still meets the description of a "serious" movie.
In 2018 we see them starting to shift down into a bit more of a minor key, scoring Jonah Hill's Mid-90s and their first Netflix collaboration, Bird Box. So as long as seven years ago, you could say they're already making movies just for money, though I loved the novel on which Bird Box was based and I probably liked the movie just a smidge better than some people. I'd argue that at this point, we don't yet feel inundated by their work.
Their first TV work came in 2019 for Watchmen, which I have not seen (no HBO), before scoring an excellent movie for director Trey Edward Shults, Waves. This is a prelude to what I might call their breakout years as household names among casual cinephiles, when in 2020 they scored the best picture nominee Mank and the best animated feature nominee Soul, their first work in a movie designed to be viewed by people of all ages. If we are indeed saying they became household names that year, it could be because they were nominated for Oscars for both scores, the first time since they won for The Social Network, and won for Soul.
Perhaps exhausted by all the accolades, they did not produce a movie score in 2021. However, their foot has been on the pedal ever since. Strangely 2022 brought two more movies I have yet to see, Bones and All and Empire of Light, the latter of which seems particularly out of step with what I would have once thought of as a prototypical Ross/Reznor score. And while no artist wants to be thought of as making prototypical versions of themselves, I'd argue you could also say it's an indication that they're willing to work for anyone who approaches them.
In 2023 it was back to working with Fincher for The Killer, and their second animated movie, Teenage Mutant Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which I loved. Then last year it was Challengers and Queer, the latter of which I also have yet to see, both of which are collaborations with Luca Guadagnino, with whom they worked on Bones and All. Which also describes the next project Wikipedia has listed for them, Guadagnino's After the Hunt, which is due in theaters in October. (Incidentally, Wikipedia failed to list The Gorge, so it's possible there is another project in there that I didn't get.)
So why this moment in time to slut shame them?
I don't know. I suppose on some level it's not warranted. Even though Challengers, Queer and The Gorge have all been released in one 12-month period, if you go back to looking at the release years only, they're averaging two per year. They had two in 2024 and now it looks like they will have two in 2025, just as they had two in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022 and 2023 -- every year except 2021, when they had zero. (I'd have liked to think that meant they made a new Nine Inch Nails album that year, but they didn't, and haven't made one since 2018. Maybe now we're getting at the source of my frustration, since I don't want them to pack away Nine Inch Nails for good, especially as Reznor turns 60 this year.)
Perhaps two scores per year is what they've determined is the maximum they can make while still giving their full attention to each score. And I have no doubt that's exactly what they're doing. As I had the stirrings in my mind about the idea for this post even from hearing they were associated with the movie, I gave a special ear to the Gorge score as I was watching, and found it to contain thought and purpose -- maybe more so than some of the past efforts I've listened to. (I bought every score up to Gone Girl, but then stopped buying them, in part because I stopped buying much music in general.)
So I'm not saying Reznor and Ross have started phoning it in. I think they put as much into their scores as they ever have. Although I did not always love how Guadagnino employed their score in Challengers -- one of my complaints was how he would bring it up and down in the same scene without any apparent motivation for this, when it would have seemed to make more sense just to let it play through -- I did think it was a good score, and maybe was as surprised as anyone else when they didn't get their fourth Oscar nomination for it. (That's right, even making as many scores as they do, they have only been nominated those three times.)
Really I think it's that I would hope they would look at the script of each movie they're scoring, when they're approached to score it, and make some qualitative analysis before they accept the gig. I'm not saying The Gorge looks like a failure on paper, or that it even was a failure, though I might think it's a mild failure. I'm saying that the basic narrative components don't seem quite Reznor-Ross-worthy. That no matter how good Scott Derrickson made it -- and it's at least fine in that regard -- it might never have been Reznor-Ross-worthy.
And that's another thing about their standards seeming to lower imperceptibly. They don't even have the argument of working with a visionary director here. Although Derrickson has made some pretty good films (The Black Phone, Doctor Strange, Sinister), for some reason I always think of him as the man behind the Day the Earth Stood Still remake, which I thought was pretty terrible.
Maybe again I just wonder: Are we going to get any more Nine Inch Nails? Probably not at this pace of making movie scores, especially as they continue to hike up their skirts for unworthy suitors. (The slut shaming metaphor lost a little of its usefulness just now.)
Then again, the last period of NIN fertility saw the guys release Not the Actual Events, Add Violence and Bad Witch in consecutive years from 2016 to 2018. And though I don't love any of those albums (some of them are EPs), they were legitimate, vocals-based Nine Inch Nails albums, unlike the two instrumental Ghosts albums released in 2020. During those same years, they also scored five films.
So it is possible for Trent and Atticus to have it all, even if they accept gigs to write music for films that might be beneath them. They just have to decide they want it all. And though I think they will never get too old to score movies, the days of them composing new angst-ridden industrial-edged popular music, and simulating the related emotions as they play it on stage, are limited. Give me a little more Nine Inch Nails now, because you can always score Sonic the Hedgehog 4 later.
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