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20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: (Mark Snow) In 1997,
there was not just one television adaptation of Jules Verne's classic
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but two within a short span of each
other. Neither could compete with Disney's original from the 1950's, and
both were considered monumental failures amongst the crowded field of
classic literary adaptations reaching television in the late 1990's. The
second of the two adaptations that year was B-rate director Ron Hardy's
version of
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for ABC, starring Michael
Caine as Captain Nemo. It's hard to list all the problems with this
production, but let's start with an absolute mutilation of the original
story. In fact, very little remains unscathed. Not only is Nemo a cyborg
in this version --that's right, he's got super-mechanical hand
strength-- but he has a lovely daughter on board for the young,
shipwrecked professor to toy with and, in the process of killing off the
major characters at the end, the Nautilus explodes. That all sounds like
it would be loads of fun if not for the fact that every single aspect of
the production was cheap. This was
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
on a college film budget, and it's amazing that a rather bored-looking
Michael Caine even agreed to be a part of it. The special effects were
the doom of the film, which labored through three hours over several
nights without one spectacular effects shot to salvage the whole
viewing. Terrible acting, nonsensical lulls in the action, and an MTV
style of haphazard cuts in the shooting were all laughable, and the film
was so bad that Warner Brothers, the unfortunate distributor of the
miniseries, took almost ten years to eventually crank it out
unceremoniously on DVD. Commonly considered to be the only redeeming
aspect of the production was the exemplary score by veteran television
series and miniseries composer Mark Snow. Snow had already won six Emmy
awards for his orchestral work on television, and his separate solo work
for
The X-Files kept him extremely busy for much of each year
during its run.
Snow's music for
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
would blend the symphonic and synthetic together, creating the kind of
score that fans of
The X-Files have often pondered in the famous
series. As conceived, the score is massive in scope and sound. Snow
obviously was one of the few members of the production who received the
memo about the film's intended spectacle. Pipe organs, chorus, and a
rich orchestra are merged with Snow's typical electronic sound of the
era with a unique style. In the process of using the synthesizers to
provide resonance on top of a small Utah studio recording group, Snow's
music here does not rely on cliches and will not distract you with temp
track adaptations. This style, for much of the running time of the
score, does really sound like a romantic and harmonious expansion of
that of
The X-Files, even down to the keyboarded solos. To
represent the sea, Snow stays from conventional Hollywood wisdom (there
are no moments of Korngold swashbuckle to be heard here) and instead
pulls at all the strings of great science fiction and fantasy, including
an abundance of extremely satisfying harmonic progressions. He adds the
swishing noises of water and bubbling of air in great depths at times to
serve as built-in sound effects. The strings, sometimes backed by
synthetic counterparts, sway as if lost at sea, and the choral
accompaniment adds a majestic touch of beauty and awe. Brass cues
accentuate the darker, urgent moments of peril when the Nautilus is
attacked by giant monsters of the deep sea, and while these cues sound
like the work of Alan DerMarderosian and dozens of other composers
rendering similar scores on their equipment, Snow succeeds beyond all
others in this endeavor. Thematically, the score has several motifs that
seemingly represent characters and situations, though with the running
time of the score trimmed to 45 minutes on album, it's difficult to
narrow down some of their meanings. No catchy, specific theme exists to
carry the series over between commercial breaks and overnight waits in
the broadcast.
The score does have singular moments that will remind
of other composers. In the gorgeous "Sitting Down to Dinner," the
delicate balance of piano and choral effects will pull at the same
emotions as an early Danny Elfman score. Some of the more adventurous
cues, such as "Train Station," will remind of Lee Holdridge's Westerns
of the same era. A few of the underwater exploration scenes are reborn
from John Barry's
Raise the Titanic. The climax of "Shooting the
Captain" resembles the progressions of David Arnold's
Stargate.
The score's weaknesses are clearly evident in the action music. The loud
sea monster and shipside attack cues simply cannot muster the energy
necessary from the orchestral ensemble, and Snow's electronics cannot
provide a frenetic enough environment to compensate. Perhaps a wetter
mix, with some of those choppy movements blurred into a haze, would have
sufficed. Where Snow works his magic is in the pure fantasy element. The
fluid movement with full ensemble and choral effects in "Main Title,"
"Sitting Down to Dinner," "Midnight Arctic Walk," "Exploring New
Worlds," "Shooting the Captain," and "Finale" make for a suite that
alone merits five stars for a television production with such a tight
budget. Snow, if anything, proves that he is capable of producing
extremely satisfying results on a scope as large as this despite
budgetary constraints. The album is a short representation at only 45
minutes, and it was released only as a specialty product through
Prometheus. Before you search it out, you can hear one of the better
cues from the film ("Midnight Arctic Walk") on the 1999 Sonic Images
"Snow Files" compilation. Some orchestral purists will be disappointed
by the clear mix of symphonic and electronic elements in
20,000
Leagues Under the Sea, but give the circumstances, it's hard to
imagine a score as richly engaging as this. The fact that Snow has not
had the opportunity to adapt music like this for a full ensemble in a
blockbuster film setting in the following ten years remains reason for
lament, though pieces of this material would expose themselves in the
later, more harmonic years of his music for
The X-Files. A very
pleasant surprise in a highly unlikely place.
***** Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download
The insert contains information about the film and Mark Snow's career to date.
