Hans Zimmer: The Dark Knight Rises

After co-writing the themes to the first two Batman films, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, with James Newton Howard, Hans Zimmer took this film score on as a solo project.

For The Dark Knight Rises, Hans Zimmer wanted to create a sound that nobody had heard before – the sound of hundreds of thousands of voices. Sourcing those voices involved tweeting to fans and asking them to upload their recordings to a website. The result was ‘Gotham’s Reckoning’, the main theme for the film’s villain, Bane. The voices are heard chanting ‘Deshi basara’, which means ‘Rise up’ in a language that Zimmer says exists, but that he doesn’t want to reveal.

As for the rest of the movie, Zimmer manages to keep the intensity without resorting to theatrics. In keeping with the film's relentlessly dark tone, Zimmer doesn't deal too heavily in declamatory, heroic themes. Instead, he keeps things noisy but somehow low-key, something akin to the rapid sense of a city falling apart beyond Batman's control.