Der Klang von 007

It's a nice summary of the history of the music in the James Bond films. Surprisingly, they left out the John Barry instrumental theme to On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I always found that to be a compelling piece of music.

To me, that intro was much better than the James Bond theme used through the films of the franchise. It was used throughout the action segments of the film and aligned so well with the character. You'll know it when you hear it.

Otherwise, this is a nice walk through the films of the franchise and touch upon almost all of the instantly recognizable musical pieces and motifs of the series.

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.

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!!!

This was a great way to commemorate 60 years of Bond. Besides mostly being about the music, it really ties the plot and deeper meaning of the Bond films. Really thoughtful. For better or for worse, but it was interesting that they would talk about one movie's music, than immediately jump back to No Time To Die. It felt like they were just covering the movies they had the cast from and just skipping over some pretty big parts if they didn't have the singer of the song. However, it told the story of Bond in a more poetic. I just feel like they just waved the cast in your face and you are like "ya, I get it".