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Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
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Composed, Co-Orchestrated, and Co-Produced by:
Conducted by:
Dirk Brosse
Co-Orchestrated by:
Robert Elhei
Co-Produced by:
Teese Gohl
Performed by:
Score Vocals by:
Lara Fabian
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LABEL & RELEASE DATE
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ALBUM AVAILABILITY
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Regular U.S. release.
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AWARDS
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None.
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ALSO SEE
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Buy it... if you seek appealing thematic development and emotional
depth on top of Elliot Goldenthal's usual, morbidly dramatic
sensibilities and wild instrumental applications.
Avoid it... if you expect this score to be as tonally challenging
as Goldenthal's straight horror scores or if you, like many, demand only
game composer Nobuo Uematsu's strikingly different music for the
concept.
BUY IT
(9.99)
 | Goldenthal |
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within: (Elliot
Goldenthal) By the time of Columbia Picture's feature length production
in 2001, Hironobu Sakaguchi's extremely popular creation of the nine
Final Fantasy video games had already established one of the
greatest cult followings the genre had ever seen. With a futuristic,
fantastic vision of Earth in decades to come, as well as the nasty alien
forces that come to conquer 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 full Final Fantasy
production exhibits the best CGI rendering technologies to date, making
its animated characters, with voices performed by an impressive cast,
look remarkably realistic. The film's debut coincided with the imminent
release of the tenth installment of the game, though fans looking for
shared content between the two were inevitably disappointed. Somewhat
surprisingly, the film failed to garner the impressive fiscal success
necessary to inspire the assumed cinematic sequels of like-minded
technology. Enthusiasts of the concept were hoping to hear the music of
Nobuo Uematsu, composer of all of the game entries to date, in Final
Fantasy: The Spirits Within, but were instead treated to an entirely
different sound from avant garde composer Elliot Goldenthal. The two
composers' styles are radically divergent, as any avid collector of
Uematsu's game scores can testify, and debate has persisted throughout
the 2000's about the comparative merits of Goldenthal's involvement with
the franchise. Since Goldenthal's emergence into film scoring in the
early 1990's, the classical composer stood on the fringe of the
mainstream, shunning most major projects that didn't involve a dark,
mysterious, or terrifying plot. The exceptions, of course, had been his
two scores for the first Batman franchise, which, along with
Alien 3 and Interview with a Vampire, gave him enough
mainstream name appeal to add credibility to Final Fantasy: The
Spirits Within.
Still, Goldenthal was an anomaly best appreciated in the
totality of his works by a fraction of the film music collecting
community. His distance from mainstream popularity at the time was best
exemplified in a large, late 1990's Vanity Fair photo of the top
two dozen film composers of the era, for which most were seen happily
conversing with each other, oblivious to the camera. That is, except for
Goldenthal, who took the opportunity to give the cameraman the evil eye.
His scores aren't much different, often verbose in their unpredictable
expressions of dramatic darkness. His experimentation with electronics
is often accompanied by the challenges of 20th Century avant garde
creativity and 19th Century classicism that mutate into gothic themes
and high pitch strings that typically perform his solemn adagios. More
than anyone else in the 1990's, Goldenthal was a master of creating
unnerving scores, and although such music doesn't always translate well
onto album, his disharmonious scores for films such as Alien 3
and Sphere had proven very effective in stirring debates among
intellectual listeners and, more importantly, scaring audiences. While
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within contains its fair share of
creepy and frightening moments, it is an entirely different breed of
film. The fact that the film was an animated project presented
Goldenthal with a difficult twist, one that would require him to change
his equations to an extent. Rather than allowing his work to exist as
simply a supplementary atmospheric tool 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 suffered from a lack of convincing
realness for many audiences. To accomplish this emotional depth,
Goldenthal was forced to create a more lyrical and melodic score than
his norm, something that might have come as a shock to film score
collectors at the time. This general shift in the direction of
consistent harmony would assist him in acquiring an Academy Award the
following year for Frida.
Goldenthal recorded Final Fantasy: The Spirits
Within with a massive expansion of the London Symphony Orchestra in
several of the largest and most impressive English locales available.
For cues of large-scale bombast, 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 obviously no run-of-the-mill Los Angeles
recording; the budget allotted for Goldenthal was very generous, and he
used every last bit of it to record one of the most brutally expansive
scores heard in recent memory. In sheer volume, Goldenthal's music
abounds with a mighty force of sound. While the composer may claim that
his thematic development is more lyrical and melodic than anything he
had ever done before, his title theme and softer secondary ideas for
this work are still saturated with his gothic, melodramatic style of
brooding weight. Instead of creating straight forward major key motifs
to signify a hero's theme or a grand vista, Goldenthal continued to
handle such cues by simply amplifying his oppressive minor key
inclinations to a level of monumental resonance and volume that produces
a similarly adequate result. The title theme for Final Fantasy,
heard first on album at the outset of "Race to Old New York" (a cue not
heard in the film), is a twisted waltz with agonized strings performing
over layers of ostinatos that are as turbulent as those in any of
Goldenthal's other scores. There's a certain pompous nature to this
theme, especially when the brass section takes its helm, which gives it
the personality of a treacherous yet gloomy fanfare. An actual fanfare
of solitary simplicity is introduced prior on the product; in "The
Spirit Within," Goldenthal employs his bloated brass section and pipe
organ to deliberately blast out a theme of more malicious intent. A
softer theme for both humanity and romance is heard in "The Kiss,"
exploring on piano the personal element in its most commonly related
form. None of these themes is particularly catchy, for their arguably
awkward constructs lend them a complexity that is best appreciated only
in the context of their often complicated renderings.
The majority of the score consists of abrasive action
cues will likely please listeners who enjoyed Goldenthal's two
Batman scores, with significant references made back to Batman
Forever specifically. These sequences are sometimes scored with the
monumental power of the percussion section at the forefront, highlighted
by "Winged Serpent," which returns to the opening fanfare of gloom over
a bed of relentless timpani and snare drum performances. Luckily absent
from this score is the trilling of brass that Goldenthal seems to love,
and even his usual high pitched quivering of strings is limited to a
handful of cues. Only in "Toccata and Dreamscapes" does Goldenthal
(admittedly) revert completely to his Alien 3 style of total
disharmony and obnoxious sample mutilation. For their novelty at the
time, the highlights of Final Fantasy are the cues that gently
explore love and remembrance in the softer theme for humanity,
culminating in a full ensemble statement in "Adagio and Transfiguration."
These cues show that Goldenthal can indeed express his own intense
styles within the context of a highly romantic performance of a harmonic
nature. The project allowed Goldenthal the rare opportunity to expand
his theme into a song for the film, which he adapted for Canadian Lara
Fabian (a native of France) to perform. Hearing a pop song translated
from Goldenthal's unorthodox chord progressions is an interesting
experience, perhaps too awkward compared to the commonly accepted and
simplistic James Horner type of song to be successful. The second song
is a harder, more irritating rock affair that will probably not interest
Goldenthal's collectors. Both songs were set to appear over the film's
end credits. The album is an "enhanced CD" that concentrated on giving
concept fans a preview of the forthcoming Final Fantasy X game.
Overall, Final Fantasy is stylistically rooted in Goldenthal's
usual, morbidly dramatic sensibilities and wild instrumental
applications, so it will be jarring for some listeners in its more
active moments. The brutality in its tone can be overwhelming. But its
thematic development and emotional depth is far beyond anything heard
from Goldenthal outside of Frida, and it's therefore an easy
album to recommend. Parts of it will blow you out of your seat. **** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
Bias Check: |
For Elliot Goldenthal reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.13
(in 16 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.12
(in 15,947 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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unbeleivable Expand >> Justin Hebert - July 8, 2005, at 4:28 p.m. |
2 comments (2905 views) Newest: July 20, 2005, at 10:42 a.m. by toxygen |
A thought bmwxcore - December 2, 2004, at 4:45 p.m. |
1 comment (1422 views) |
Total Time: 56:36
1. The Spirit Within (2:05)
2. Race to old New York (1:20)
3. The Phantom Plains (1:42)
4. Code Red (2:05)
5. The Kiss (4:14)
6. Entrada (0:54)
7. Toccata and Dreamscapes (8:29)
8. Music for Dialogues (2:18)
9. Winged Serpent (1:35)
10. Zeus Cannon (3:24)
11. Flight to the Wasteland (5:56)
12. A Child Recalled (2:25)
13. The Eighth Spirit (0:50)
14. Dead Rain (1:50)
15. Blue Light (3:29)
16. Adagio and Transfiguration (5:23)
17. The Dream Within - performed by Lara Fabian (4:43)
18. Spirit Dreams Inside - performed by L'Arc-en-Ciel (3:42)
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film. The CD is
an "enhanced" product with information about the concept of the game.
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