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Fantastic Four: (John Ottman) The rights to put the
oldest Marvel comics superhero franchise on the big screen have taken a
long and rocky road to reach 2005, when director Tim Story finally puts
Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's original 1961 characters on film. A group of
scientists goes up into space to study an approaching anomaly but are
accidentally exposed to its mysterious energy. Fittingly, each of the
four heroes receives a different superpower (it wouldn't have been as
fun if they could all just only turn a shoe into a bottle of beer, would
it?), as does the evil guy who used to be their colleague, so it's up to
the four heroes to do their duties for national security and, of course,
the usual fire truck falling off a bridge scenario. The only problem
with this picture is that the adaptation to the big screen for Mr.
Fantastic and his gang is extremely poorly written, with disappointing
action scenarios, extremely loose logical jumps, and little genuine
emotion and intrigue applied to the self-discoveries of the mutated
scientists. In a summer that featured an exceptionally strong
Batman entry,
Fantastic Four made very decent money
despite a thorough thrashing by many major critics. The common complaint
about the film seems to be that it is like a full soda pop can that was
opened three days ago... it's all horribly flat. Some people seem to
like that taste, interestingly, and perhaps composer John Ottman is one
of them. After writing a somewhat polarizing score to
X-Men 2
(mixed reactions from across the board still plague that score), Ottman
seems to have qualified himself as a capable superhero film score
writer. With the next
Superman film awaiting his talents,
Ottman's
Fantastic Four would offer an elaboration or correction
on
X-Men 2. What's interesting about Ottman's action writing is
that it is just as creative on paper as his superior work for the genres
of intrigue, mystery, and horror, and yet somewhere in the execution of
these action ideas, the music presents itself with the same flatness as
the three-day old can of pop.
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The title theme for
Fantastic Four is extremely
simplistic and underdeveloped. It's odd that Ottman can create such
wickedly thematic ideas for completely anonymous films and then crank
out such an amateurish dud for a large scale project. That's not to say
that Ottman either didn't try or didn't have his reasons for why this
score was built around such a structure. Burned by the fact that many of
the best renditions of his title theme for
X-Men 2 were cut from
the final film, Ottman was being extra careful to write his title theme
for
Fantastic Four in a shorter, more recognizable burst. The
straight trumpet motif culminating in three triplets for easy
restatement came to Ottman on a late night of writing atonal music for
Hide and Seek, and one has to wonder is this title theme was born
out of true inspiration or out a need for a simplistic change of pace.
Indeed, much of the underscore for
Fantastic Four was written
with the prospect of unfortunate edits in mind, causing action pieces to
be chopped into easily rearranged sections of outbursts. The details of
the score do speak to some creative attempts by Ottman to address the
characters' individual powers with a distinct orchestral technique. Some
of them seem quite good in concept, such as bassoon scales accompanied
by string glissandos meant to represent Mr. Fantastic's stretching; in
fact, the performance of these ideas in "Changing" makes this rather
subdued track the most enjoyable connection to the intelligence of
The Usual Suspects on the whole album. Other ideas, such as the
minor key variation on the title theme for the villain (logical, since
he was once one of the good-guys), as well as the escalating use of the
female choir for the Sue Storm character, are more predictable. In sum,
the choral element seems overused, the title theme over-simplistic, and
the little treats omnipresent in Ottman's music are lost in a blanket of brash
noise. It would be interesting to hear Ottman place more attention on
transferring some of the outstanding rhythmic creations of his lesser
known scores into these big budget features; he can often replace a
theme with a recognizable rhythm, and to hear both of them together is
always a recipe for success.
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| Bias Check: | For John Ottman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.22 (in 32 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.03
(in 17,523 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes a list of performers, but no extra information about the score or film.
