I agree... Predator, Back To The Future, and The Mummy Returns are all awesome action scores by Silvestri. My First Bus Ride from The Mummy Returns is intense, it just doesn't let up.
I own Inception, it was a bit of an impulse buy. I was ordering a few other CDs, the movie was still fresh in my mind, and it was cheap. I've barely listened to it though.
One other composer that no one has mentioned yet is Danny Elfman. I never got into much of his music, but his work with Tim Burton is really popular.
I like Elfman, and I think that he and Burton are a far more desirable consistent collaboration than Burton and Johnny Depp, who lost his quirky edge probably after
Sleepy Hollow. And I tend to like Elfman better when he uses brass. Lately, he's overused electronic instruments, which are effective sometimes (like in
Mars Attacks and
Spider-Man), but other times, we get a mess like
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
A prime example of this is the upcoming Man of Steel. I listened to snippets from Zimmer's soundtrack.
Nowhere near the level of Williams circa 1978; wasn't expecting it to be, really.
But this was embarrassingly bad. No triumph, no heroism, no soul, no identity. Just minimalist droning.
Sounds like the Nolan
Batman soundtrack. But at least
Batman Begins didn't piss all over a franchise's past with its reboot the way
Man of Steel is going to. At least the
Batman series genuinely needed a reboot (though I would've loved to see Joel Schumacher get more creative control over the cancelled fifth
Batman movie in the Burton/Schumacher continuity -- this is the guy who directed
The Lost Boys and
Flatliners -- much of what happened with
Batman & Robin was because of the studio), and I suppose after
Superman III and
IV, that series could've used a reboot, but
Superman Returns was a very solid addition to the continuity.
Superman was a franchise that fell down and then picked itself up, and now they're rebooting it for absolutely no reason.