HowardB wrote:I'm not looking for originality or genius, just the composer who does the best variation on the Barry style which IMO is the Bond style and makes for a better Bond film. Arnold fits that mold and did a fine job with CR and QOS (although in QOS he was a bit hampered by not being involved in the theme song; which wasn't very good). Giacchino would probably be a good choice also.
That's the thing, though -- Barry works so well because he was rather original at the time. He basically took pop and jazz concepts to orchestration, relying heavily on repeating chords and percussion. You can immediately tell a Barry score from it. He wasn't the first to do it, of course. Henry Mancini was doing much the same, for example, especially with Peter Gunn's theme. But each had their own style.
Today's composers all sound pretty much the same, like the anonymous composers to video games. Any of them could imitate Barry if they chose to. For instance, Steve Jablonsky lifts some of Barry's deep chords and percussion for "Scorponok" in Transformers, though as people have noted, he also borrows from John Carpenter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDFns0LA7O0
Arnold is not a bad composer, though I think his action music often sounds discordant (the opposite of Barry's) and more like he's doing riffs on Michael Kamen. The exception is the soundtrack for Tomorrow Never Dies, which is smoother and at times imitates Barry's later work on films like The Living Daylights. Arnold's strength is his themes more than his incidental music. His most Barry-esque moments are bits like Bond's arrival in the Bahamas in Casino Royale, but that's helped because he's essentially woven in the Bond baseline.