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| • | Newest Major Reviews: | . | • | This Week's Most Popular Reviews: | • | Best-Selling Albums: | ||
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Filmtracks Editorial Review:
While Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within contains its fair share of creepy and scary moments, it is an entirely different breed of film. Hironobu Sakaguchi's extremely popular creation of the nine Final Fantasy video games has led to one of the greatest game cult followings ever. With a futuristic, fantastic vision of Earth in decades to come, and the nasty alien forces that come to get us as we evolve into energy, the games feature awe inspiring graphics, as does the film. While technically falling under the anime genre of films, this first Final Fantasy film exhibits the best CGI rendering technologies to date, making its animated characters, with voices performed by an impressive cast, look darn near real. With the tenth installment of the game set for imminent release, don't be surprised if the film inspires sequels of like-minded technology. But because the film is still an animated project, Elliot Goldenthal's task with the score was made far more difficult. Rather than allowing his work to be simply a supplementary sense in the film, Goldenthal was presented with the challenge of portraying and extending the emotions that the animated characters feel, since those characters (despite the fantastic CGI rendering) still suffer from a lack of realness for many audiences. To accomplish this emotional depth, Goldenthal was forced to create a more lyrical and melodic score --something that might come as a shock to film score collectors. Goldenthal recorded Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within with the massive London Symphony Orchestra in several of the largest and most impressive English locales. For the larger cues, Goldenthal employed extra brass players and a wide array of percussive experts. When combined with the full chorus, the total sum of players and singers for this score numbered in the hundreds. This is no run-of-the-mill Los Angeles score; the budget for Goldenthal was very generous, and he used every last bit of it to record one of the largest scores in recent memory. In sheer volume, Goldenthal's music abounds with a mighty touch. While he may claim that his thematic development is more lyrical and melodic than anything he's ever done before, the title theme and softer secondary themes are still saturated with his gothic, melodramtic style of dark harmony. Instead of creating straight major key motifs to signify a hero's theme or a grand vista, Goldenthal continues to handle such cues by simply amplifying his minor key inclinations to a level of volume that produces a similarly adequate result. Gone from this score are the trilling of brass that Goldenthal seems to love, and even the high pitched quivering of strings that is also his trademark is limited to a handful of cues. The action sequences are scored with the monumental bass power of the timpani and snare drums, highlighted by the absolutely enormous brass sections, which you can hear in full force during the opening cue. Only in the lengthy seventh track does Goldenthal (admittedly) revert to his Alien 3 style of total disharmony. The rest of the action cues will likely please those of you who enjoy his two Batman scores. There is quite a bit of action filler material in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within that seems lifted from Batman Forever, but included in this effort are some of the best motifs that the prior score had to offer. The highlights of Final Fantasy, however, are the three tracks during which Goldenthal accentuates the toughest emotions: love and rememberance. He decided upon a piano to best represent these emotions, because that instrument, more than any other, is easily identifiable to audiences. The fifth, twelfth and sixteenth tracks are the best compositions of Goldenthal's career, showing that he can indeed express his own intense styles with a romantic performance of theme. The project allowed Goldenthal the rare opportunity to expand his theme into the title song of the film, which he adapted for French-native Canadian Lara Fabian to perform. Hearing a pop song translated from Goldenthal's unorthodox chord progressions is a very interesting experience, and I wonder if it will be too awkward compared to the commonly accepted, simplistic James Horner type of song to be successful. The second song is a harder, more irritating rock affair that may or may not interest the Goldenthal fans. Both songs are set to appear over the end credits. The album is an "enhanced CD" which will give you a preview of the upcoming Final Fantasy X game in your CD-ROM. Overall, this is still a Goldenthal score, so it will be jarring in its more active moments. But its thematic development and emotional depth is far beyond anything heard from Goldenthal before, and it's therefore an easily recommendable album. It will blow you out of your seat. ****
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