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Composed and Conducted by:
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Leonard Rosenman
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Produced by:
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Jeff Bond
Lukas Kendall
Nick Redman
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Release Date:
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November, 1998
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Availability:
The album is a Silver Age Classics product (FSMCD Vol. 1, No. 3)
limited to 3,000 pressings and available through the FSM
site or online soundtrack specialty outlets.
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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... only if you are explicitly aware of Leonard Roseman's
score for the film and, like many collectors, have waited decades to
hear it on album.
Avoid it... if you don't care for the consistently messy layers of
atonal dissonance that Rosenman can often produce.
Filmtracks Editorial Review:
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Fantastic Voyage: (Leonard Roseman) When 20th
Century Fox debuted Fantastic Voyage in 1966, it was a
technological triumph on film. Its ingenious sets and special effects
brought immediate box office success and the film's visuals were so
stunningly accurate in their portrayal of the insides of a human body
that some of those visuals would later be used in documentaries. The
purpose of the film is to show a crew of scientists and their submarine
shrunken to the size of a molecule and put into the body of another
scientist who needs a blood clot removed from his brain (from the
inside, of course). After being attacked by the patient's natural inner
defenses (and a saboteur), some of the crew survives and is blown back
up to normal size. But it's the journey that counts, and the process of
showing the navigation within the body compensated for obvious and
painful leaps of logic in the both the scientific and basic elements of
the story. For instance, the crew has 60 minutes to operate before
expanding to normal size, and along their trek, they abandon their
submarine because it comes under attack by the body. It seems that
nobody stopped to think of what a 42-foot submarine would do to a guy if
it expanded from within his own body, whether it was manned or not. At
any rate, the film went on to be nominated for several Academy Awards in
the technical realm, winning for visual effects and art direction. One
of the "love it or hate it" aspects of the film that wasn't nominated
but received a loyal following from collectors was Leonard Rosenman's
score. The composer had made the decision not to score any of the film
before the crew actually enters the human body, essentially identifying
the music as a sound effect element of the environment within the body.
Rosenman also approached the scoring process from the perspective of the
unknown, using the score as an element of both curiosity and suspense.
To do this, almost the entire score is atonal and dissonant.
Whether or not the atonality of the score actually aids
in the suspense of the journey and the strange visuals we see along the
way is open to debate. But one thing is definitely clear about the music
for Fantastic Voyage: it's either a score you had been waiting
for decades to hear, or it sounds like every other atonal Rosenman score
and has no significance (or enjoyment quotient) whatsoever. Rosenman had
been experimenting with the effects of atonality and dissonance for over
a decade, and Fantastic Voyage exhibits this approach with a full
orchestral ensemble. The score is led by a four-note motif that is
varied significantly in tone and instrumentation throughout. Rosenman's
off-pitch woodwinds wail in the upper regions while low brass offer the
usual ominous notes down below. Piano and percussion are not used to set
rhythms, but to play the role of sound effects in and around the lengthy
notes of atonal strings and brass. Dissonant layers of strings often
culminate in uncomfortable crescendos of sheer noise, always boosted in
power from the brass. At the very least, Rosenman is very consistent in
this approach, and it can very easily get under your skin after twenty
minutes. The only notable track is ironically the final one, in which a
tonal thematic statement heralds the successful return of the crew, and
you can't help but wonderer if the fantasy of the story would have been
served equally (or better) by this more readily accessible writing.
Succinctly put, whether you will enjoy Fantastic Voyage or not
depends on your opinion of the use of the kind of uncomfortable
dissonance and atonality that Rosenman (and more prominently, Alex
North) used throughout their careers. On album, Fantastic Voyage
will be extremely difficult to enjoy for most digital age listeners,
especially with the fact that Rosenman doesn't make much of an effort to
provide distinguishing cues or individual ideas to take with you from
the score. Still, fans of the film and composer were elated by the first
ever release of the music on CD in 1998, when the new Film Score Monthly
Silver Age series released Fantastic Voyage as their third entry.
Mixed from stereo master tapes, the score sounds decent, though the
opening sound effect track will add to the annoyance of people who
aren't fans of the film or scoring approach. **
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Viewer Ratings and Comments:
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• 1. Main Title Sound Effects Suite (1:41)
• 2. The Proteus (5:56)
• 3. The Chart (5:30)
• 4. Pulmonary Artery (5:35)
• 5. Group Leaves (2:49)
• 6. Pleural Cavity (0:17)
• 7. Proteus Moving Through Sac (4:52)
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• 8. Channel to Ear (2:40)
• 9. Cora Trapped (4:12)
• 10. Proteus in Inner Ear (0:44)
• 11. The Human Brain (1:52)
• 12. Get the Laser (7:20)
• 13. Optic Nerve/End Cast (3:36)
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The album contains the usual excellent quality of pictorial and textual information
established in other albums of FSM's series, with extremely detailed notes about the film
and score.
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