Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... for James Horner's lyrical primary theme if you're a sucker for such romanticism from the composer's typical expressions on broad strings. Avoid it... if ten minutes of that pleasant lyricism does not merit another 30 of poorly developed instrumentation for the locale and lackadaisical action motifs. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
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. *** Track Listings:
Total Time: 40:14
All artwork and sound clips from A Far Off Place are Copyright © 1993, Intrada Records. The reviews and notes contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Filmtracks Publications. Audio clips can be heard using RealPlayer but cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 6/24/97, updated 11/7/11. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 1997-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
