 |
|
| Horner |
|
|
A Far Off Place: (James Horner) While produced by
Steven Spielberg's affiliated Amblin Entertainment and Walt Disney
Pictures,
A Far Off Place is not your usual fluffy children's
film in 1993. Nor was it any great success with audiences, for perhaps
that very reason. Films have been made before about children persevering
in adverse conditions, but
A Far Off Place takes the genre's
inherent series of cliches to all new heights. A South African white
girl, American white boy, and young African bushman are forced to trek
2000 kilometers across the Kalahari Desert in Africa after the girl's
parents (whom the boy was visiting for the summer) are brutally murdered
on their farm by ivory poachers. Instead of traveling to Cape Town or
any number of small villages within reasonable range, the film
illogically takes them on this long, unrealistic trek and has to rely
upon the stereotypical antagonists (in this case, the poachers tracking
them in helicopters and attempting to machine gun them down) in order to
compensate for their inability to sustain the film with the vistas and
character interactions alone. With such a violent storyline, including
some graphic slaughter scenes involving elephants, there isn't much for
children to enjoy in
A Far Off Place. And for adults, the
potentially interesting relationship between the youths is sadly
underdeveloped, leaving the film as a useless mess. Composer James
Horner maintained a working relationship with Spielberg's production
company in the early 1990's, leading to his involvement in several of
these rather odd children's films. With the wealth of grand locations
and other magnificent visual elements in
A Far Off Place, the
equation would seem to have been set for Horner to pull out an adventure
score of significant proportions. While he does venture into the realm
of large-scale action and thematic grandeur to acknowledge those
expectations, he does so with hesitation and a lack of instrumental
imagination that causes his score for the project to linger in the muddy
depths of mediocrity. In 1993 and 1994, Horner had a tendency to provide
scores for questionable pictures that exhibit the composer in auto-pilot
mode, and
A Far Off Place unfortunately exhibits the sounds of a
man earning a paycheck rather than injecting much passion into the
equation.
That lack of engagement in
A Far Off Place
reflects challenges similar to those heard in
Clear and Present
Danger and
The Pelican Brief, works both related to this one
in their suspense and action roots. All of them are restrained by the
composer's seemingly lazy inability to kick his music into a higher gear
and provide the kind of originality that was heard from him before and
after this period. While its primary theme is more unique than many
during this time,
A Far Off Place continues many of the same
orchestral ideas that Horner has relied upon time and time again to
produce a merely sufficient and functional score for his assigned films.
This particular theme is lyrical and romantic, appropriate for the
setting, and containing the kind of deep string-based heart that suits a
children's film well. Its appearances in the opening and closing cues,
as well as "The Elephants" and "Gemsbock Gift," are easy highlights of
the work. In the score's slower adaptations of this theme for broad
strings and woodwinds, Horner takes no instrumental chances. To
represent the landscape, Horner throws in the shakuhachi flute (which is
unrelated to this locale, of course), some African drums and rattles,
and other light percussion. In this department, Horner misses the
target, wasting an opportunity to extend beyond his usual collection of
sounds to produce something as vivid as, for instance, Jerry Goldsmith's
The Ghost and the Darkness. The instrumental creativity of a
score like
Vibes is completely absent. Moments of fright and
action revert to familiar snare rhythms and the crashing of piano and
chimes. The rumbling piano is joined by harsh brass and generic drum
rhythms in cues such as "Attacked from the Air," and in this and many of
the other action sequences,
A Far Off Place suffers from an
inability to maintain a mood for any great length of time. This is a
shame, because as he does in many of his animated children's film
scores, Horner introduces many intriguing ideas; in this project,
though, he fails to deliver extended development of any of his concepts
outside of the title theme. Like the film, there's a slightly
schizophrenic aspect to the score in that you can enjoy a truly
uplifting string rhythm in "Gemsbock Gift" and then be struck down by
the opening clangs of the following cue, "The Swamp," which ends on a
huge, simultaneous minor and major key chord for the entire orchestra.
Overall, it's difficult to pinpoint exactly where this score fails to
meet its expectations; a very strong main theme with an extended
performance in the final cue raises
A Far Off Place to average
status.
*** Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download
| Bias Check: | For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.13 (in 98 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.25
(in 184,725 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
