Heart of Stone

Take the 5 1⁄2 minute 2022 smash hit “This is What I Mean” from Stormzy, one of the UK’s biggest hip-hop / grime artists, and remix it with some cinematic percussion and you have the soundtrack for the pulsating 2 1⁄2 minute trailer for the new secret agent action thriller Heart of Stone. In the opening moments the title character Rachel Stone (Gal Gadot) prepares for a mission with her agency known as “The Charter,” which would involve her protecting “The Heart”—her preparations are accompanied by gospel harmonies and a steady bass drum. We build to 0:23 when Stormzy’s vocals enter with the opening lines of his first verse “It’s a bigger operation. What’s with all the speculation?”

Stormzy is a London-based rapper. Heart of Stone was partially filmed in London, and the trailer features numerous characters with British accents. This trailer and this song fit each other hand in glove.

The opening expository monologue and song lyrics are clearly interwoven in a way that one seems to comment on the other. Lyrics align with visuals at 0:47 as Stormzy rhymes “They said you can’t slide you’re a treasure to the nation” while Stone slides down a mountainside, grabbing a parachute before diving off a cliff.

At the first fight sequence (0:52) the remixing of “This is What I Mean” becomes clear. In the original version of this song, the entire first verse has no instruments other than vocals. But here the trailer segues sonically from the middle of the first verse, via a moment of silence and a line of dialogue, to a few bars of classic cinematic reverberant large drums lining out a rapid succession of accented notes, aligned with five rapid-fire shots of hand-to-hand combat and gunfire.

Then we’re back into Stormzy’s grooves, by way of a clever clip of Stone beer bottle toasting with friends at 0:57 as the drum machine kicks in. The groove gets underway, with trap-style hi-hat rhythms that fit nicely with clips of advanced technology related to the prized object that sets the film’s plot in motion – an all-powerful hand-held device referred to as “the heart.”

But of course, the plot runs into trouble seconds later in the trailer when the heart is stolen by the film’s villain. At 1:22 we get a “power-down” sound that was popular in trailer music for a while—but at least this time, the sound is diegetic as the headquarters on screen actually loses power. At 1:27, while entire buildings are being shattered and demolished, we are met with an acute ringing sound, and nothing more. There are five cuts to silence in the space of 20 seconds from 1:10-1:30. But, rather than letting the silence take the wind out of the trailer’s sails, this sequence also features a remix of the song’s chorus line “This is What I Mean.” We get another shortened chorus at 1:45, which segues seamlessly into the middle of the song’s fifth verse.

But before that we have a pulsing sixteenth-note snare rhythm (an action-film staple) starting at 1:30, edited together with the gospel vocals from the intro. Rhythmically here there are some action trailer classic moves: tasteful rhythmic integration of drums along with sound design elements like breaking glass and guns cocking at 1:50, guns cocking and firing at 1:5, and an obligatory string of triplets ending in silence at 2.06, with just enough time for one last build.

Some trailers cut together multiple songs while others arrange and trailerize a soundtrack to give a sense of cohesion. This is perhaps especially true for films that aren’t based on a recognizable franchise. By interspersing the lyrics of “This is What I Mean” with the dialogue as well as leveraging a gospel harmony motif several times throughout the trailer, Heart of Stone achieves memorability and identifiability it might not have had otherwise.

Heart of Stone arrives on Netflix August 11th.

— Jack Hui Litster & Curtis Perry