Because I can't stand most contemporary action scores.
Then I'm sorry. For someone who's clearly as big a fan of film score as you are, it must be hellish listening to these things. I won't disagree that they've
generally trended in a direction that I'm not entirely comfortable with, but to say there aren't numerous contemporary examples I love would be a lie.
Powell's work on the
Bourne films was amazing to me. Zimmer's Batman stuff was terrific if only because I wasn't sure a definitive franchise sound like Elfman's could be re-interpreted with any substance or relevance (see: Goldenthal's lame-
attempts on the late 90's Batmans). And I've loved both Arnold's Craig film scores as much as anything non-Barry.
We're on pretty foggy grounds here. A lot of it comes down to what one considers emulating as opposed to aping/imitating. For the record I'm not asking for any composer to dot every 'i' and cross every 't' of Barry's inimitable style, rather bring their own. I wouldn't mind an interesting new take on Barry's musical signatures for Bond (the melodic minor scale, plunger mutes etc. ) in moderation, as long as the composer offered a new angle. That's the difference between pastiche and re-interpretation.
Agreed, it's very foggy. And our point of difference seems to be that I'm entirely satisfied with recent emulation attempts, and you're not. And yet I, personally, would be exceedingly fine with pastiche. I don't want to unfairly assign a significant value of nostalgia to your position - indeed, you seem very open to the progressive - but it's kind of ironic to me that I'm arguing in favour of the recent emulations when nostalgia is, truthfully, my primary factor in evaluating Bond music.
I resent bad attempts at emulating, broad strokes, or copying Barry's (or Arnold's) sound ad verbatim. The nods to the past should be more than icing on the cake.
But how does one define that line, even technically? Is it not purely subjective? What advantage do we have going beyond "it sounds like the Bond sound?" Is that not the final objective?