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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if, simply put, you liked James Horner's Apollo 13. Avoid it... if you didn't like James Horner's Apollo 13 and you don't want to hear another composer cough it up again. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
The Dish: (Edmund Choi) Few people know that Australia played a pivotal role in the broadcasting of live images during Neil Armstrong's historic step onto the moon in 1969. The film The Dish is the story of the Australian satellite complex, located on a sheep paddock, that served as the backup transmitter for the live images from the moon to the rest of the world. Inevitably, when the primary NASA satellite in America failed, the Australians served a silent, heroic part in the adventure. A character drama with a decent cast, the film is a lightweight tale that received primarily positive reviews from critics in 2000, but failed to win the hearts of audiences. Director Rob Sitch was familiar with composer Edmund Choi, who had been director M. Night Shyamalan's first collaborator on two films and had worked to re-score a Sitch film a year before. With Choi's career still in the fledgling stages, his music for Wide Awake had been heard on album at about the same time. For The Dish, Choi would be given the task of writing a patriotic score for the hometown Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and a local choir. He indeed accomplished this feat, but at a cost. Choi and/or the film's production team had obviously used one (and maybe two) score(s) as "temp tracks" to offer a musical backing while the film was in post-production. That said, Choi's finished score, albeit pleasant, is a mirror image of those temp scores: James Horner's Apollo 13 and, to a lesser extent, Bill Conti's The Right Stuff. While Conti's work was a well-known staple of 1980's cinema, Apollo 13 remained NASA's musical calling card throughout the 1990's and past the year 2000. It is difficult to say where a project like this goes wrong, but the music is common enough in its genre to slip past 90% of the film's viewers without much notice. The other 10%, the film score enthusiasts, will cry foul immediately. If a professor of film music composition at the college level wanted to choose a score as part of an exercise identifying the close adaptation of existing material, Choi's The Dish would be perfect. The themes, motifs, and instrumentation are just distinct enough to avoid legal troubles, and yet the similarities to Apollo 13 in particular are a textbook study. The solo trumpet, tolling bells, rolling snare drum, anxious piano, light choir... There is a little bit from every part of Apollo 13 adapted into The Dish. As blatant as it may be, the interesting aspect of the adaptation is that the music stands strongly as a coherent score. This is, despite the troubling structure of the score in several very short cues, few of which able to develop their own individuality. Instead, with each passing cue, you get another snippet of James Horner tribute, culminating into one massive Apollo 13 rip at the climax of the film. With the help of Tina Arena's voice, a choir, and an orchestrally rich harmonic performance, Choi manages to completely recreate the Annie Lennox finale to Apollo 13. In its own right, the cue "The Day the World Stood Still" is an easy highlight of the score. Whether the average Horner fan can get past the similarities at the root of the problem is another issue. Anti-Horner fanatics will find The Dish to be an ironic twist on Horner's own self-ripoffs. The album contains less than 30 minutes of score, and is tuned towards 1960's songs in its first half. They are not the songs from the era that you will recognize, but there will be a gem in the selection for any listener. Overall, The Dish is a bizarre listening experience. Choi's talents are strong, but let's just hope that a Horner temp score isn't part of the equation next time. ***
The insert includes a note from the producer of the score and film. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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