He's not a bad composer. He's just a bland, boring, totally generic one whose stuff sounds like every other modern composer out there.
I have to say, I could not believe Winter Soldier score was composed by a professional composer. I know it sounds harsh and no disrespect to anybody involved but...
First off, if you like that score, ok, nothing wrong with that.
...but, I think it's horrendous. Maybe I was listening to some old Williams, Goldsmith and Horner stuff too much but after that it's so painful to listen to TWS OST. The harmonies are totally basic or even missing. There's literally zero horizontal development, can this composer even modulate? The evolution through orchestration is nonexistent. It's all so generic. Some uninspired spiccati patterns we've heard a bazillion times with some ever repeating electronic loops put through a stutter-effect while the structural arc of the pieces goes nowhere, he just layers things or replace them to develop the piece, puts them in the octaves to make it sound it's moving to finale. No outstanding melody. Nothing. Freshman students after their first year can *compose* better music.
Again, if someone likes it, ok. Some samples and loops sound really cool, but speaking of composition, it's... not even basic to put it mildly compared to the whole history of the film scoring. Even the s**ttiest TV shows from 60's and 70's had way superior music to this.
Maybe they wanted to be very minimalistic and stuff but that does not prevent composer from coming up with cool ideas and themes, nor that lowers his composing skill set.
In the end, it's a combination of things. A lot of modern composers (quite frankly like all of them) are far from the level of Herrmann, Korngold, Steiner, Williams, Goldsmith, etc. The movies are more haphazardly cut with way faster editing so there's not much room for the music to breathe or be fluent. Directors are not musically educated either so they don't have any points of reference when it comes to music other than "make it sound like Batman and Inception".
I'm making some generalizations and exaggerations here, but you get the point.
But just look at the original Predator score, to be more in-topic. That score is not overly complicated, the structure is very simple actually, far from Williams' pieces, but the themes are fantastic, memorable, and that Silvestri's beloved tritone chord progression sounds so badass here. The melody lines are haunting and flavorful. Majority of non-orchestral sounds are some old synth patches yet it sounds so good. It's all quite simple, but far from bland, boring and generic, all the stuff the Winter Soldier soundtrack is.
