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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. 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 related 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 badguys --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
interaction alone. With such a violent story line, 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 mess. Composer James Horner had a working relationship with Spielberg's
production company in the early 1990's, leading to his involvement in
several of these rather curious 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
of significant proportions. And while he does venture into the realm of
large scale action and themes, he does so with hesitation and a lack of
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
that exhibit the composer in "auto-pilot" mode. His work for
Clear and
Present Danger and
The Pelican Brief, both related to
A Far
Off Place in their suspense and action roots, 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 title 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 title theme is
both lyrical and romantic, appropriate for the setting, and containing the
kind of deep string-based heart that suits a children's film. Its
appearances in the opening and closing, as well as "The Elephants" and
"Gemsbock Gift" are easy highlights of the score. 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 (which is somewhat unrelated to this locale), 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. 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
these ideas 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 in a huge, simultaneous
minor/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 title theme with an extended performance in the final cue raises
A
Far Off Place to average status.
***
| Bias Check: | For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.12 (in 89 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.34
(in 158,769 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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