The Sound of 007

John Barry wrote the most iconic music score in film history. Film and music have had an important integration that predates "talkies" when the only sound that came out were the musical scores played to fill the silence. Music sets the tone of films and amplifies the emotion of the scene, and has done so forever in movies. Try watching a film where the music score is eliminated and the difference is often startling.

No score is more identifiable than that composed and orchestrated by John Barry, who penned the immediately identifiable James Bond 007 theme. All one has to hear are the first handful of bass string electric guitar notes played to recognize it's the James Bond 007 movie theme. No other song is more connected to film.

'The Sound of 007" is the story behind how it all happened, and the amazing journey of artists and other composers, songs and performances involved over 60 YEARS!

Truly a worthwhile film to see, this is by a wide margin the best documentary on the subject, and a must-see for everyone interested in film and music arts.

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Whilst I found the Sound of 007 to be fascinating, insightful and compelling as a James Bond fan, and as a fan of all the music scores and theme songs from the past 60 years, it didn't completely satisfy my thirst for wanting to know about the musical origins of all the Bond films.

The works of John Barry and David Arnold are quite rightly covered in detail and celebrated as being most influential on the franchise but it didn't cover the lesser contributions of Bill Conti, Michael Kamen and Eric Serra. These were ominously overlooked and I really wanted to know more about these scores, or maybe that is just the completist coming out in me, but either way I felt it was a missed opportunity to make this a definitive documentary about the Bond music film by film. They could easily have stretched out the running time to 2 hours instead of 88 minutes by giving more even coverage to every film.

The Timothy Dalton era is almost completed omitted. Why were there no contributions from A-Ha or Gladys Knight? Even John Barry doesn't mention his score for The Living Daylights. Apart from that shortfall it is still worth a watch as there were many stories and facts I hadn't heard before from the many talented writers, performers and producers who created them.

The documentary "The Sound of 007" enriches us with details about the construction and choices of songs/writers and performers for each of the James Bond films. Composer John Barry created the sound of James Bond, he mastered 11 of Bond's music scores. He invented the style and it was the basis of all other subsequent Bond movies.

Any of the 007 movies without the well-known opening theme doesn't sound like a James Bond movie. The theme became one of the main characters of the film, without it the film would be incomplete.

Aside from the opening theme, each Bond film brings the trademark of a song originally written to embrace the plot, this is for all 25 Bonds films.

The documentary focuses a bit more on the soundtracks from the 60s to the 90s and touches on the 2000s onwards. But the film manages to give a good view of how important a soundtrack is for the construction and identification of one character: BOND...James Bond!!!

It touches upon the songs and the themes and covers a lot of the franchise, but it does give too much attention to No Time To Die and skips over some of the more interesting things. Credit to John Barry and David Arnold is definitely given, but entire bits dedicated to Amy Winehouse who almost wrote a theme and not a word about Chris Cornell's brilliant work on Casino Royale other than Rami Malek mentioning him as a favorite. I would have also loved some mention about John Barry's swan song score, Living Daylights where his orchestral and brass arrangements of aHa's theme are some of the best music of the entire franchise. The Dalton era is basically skipped over entirely. Amusing bit of Sam Smith saying he wrote his song in 20 mins and recorded it 20 mins later and given how crappy that song was, you could really believe him. Def worth a watch. Interviews with Shirley Bassey are a treat.

This is an interesting watch as it tells you much of the inside story of the music of James Bond, but I am disappointed that the two songs of the franchise that have stayed with me the most are hardly mentioned.

1: "Tomorrow never dies" by Sheryl Crow. Being the wife/girlfriend of a government assassin would not be a comfortable place to be, and nothing captures the pathos of this situation more than this song. So it would relate to the plight of the Teri Hatcher character, and does so eloquently.

2: "You know my name" by Chris Cornell. Unmistakably Bond, but, also unmistakably new, like the film itself. Sets up the first appearance of Daniel Craig very nicely.