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Flight of the Intruder: (Basil Poledouris) Director John
Milius' 1991 translation of the popular Stephen Coonts novel came under much
criticism at the time of its release. Viewers who had appreciated the novel
sharply criticized the adaptation, claiming that much of the intrigue involving
the intelligent, politically complex portion of the plot was replaced with black
and white wartime situations that make for good, dumbed-down American cinema. For
the story of A-6 fighter pilots during Vietnam of the early 1970's, the
characters, while maintaining flight names such as Cowboy, Razor, Rabbit, or
Tiger, didn't closely resemble their counterparts from the book as well, further
irritating Coonts' readers. Adaptations of techno-thriller war novels to the big
screen were a hot idea in the early 1990's, with
The Hunt for Red October
opening the box office floodgates to potential mega-profit imitations. Composer
Basil Poledouris had by chance been the composer of the popular score for
Hunt
for Red October, and his friendship and working partnership with Milius would
make him an immediate choice to score
Flight of the Intruder the next
year. By 1991, Milius and Poledouris would already have half a dozen
collaborations between them, with many of them existing in the war or action
genres (and their most successful venture still being the first,
Conan the
Barbarian). Poledouris felt so strongly about his loyalty to Milius that he
dropped his assignment to Kevin Costner's
Dances With Wolves because the
post-production parts of
Flight of the Intruder relating to the score
would overlap the Costner production by two weeks. In an intriguing and
frustrating development, however,
Flight of the Intruder was delayed by
half a year, opening up the entire time in which John Barry scored
Dances With
Wolves. It's been mentioned that Poledouris, the process of leaving the
award-caliber film for Milius' ridiculous venture cost the composer his best shot
at an Academy Award nomination and win. The criticism of
Flight of the
Intruder would catch up to Poledouris' score as well, for an argument could
be made that the music is one of the reasons why the concept failed to maintain
its intelligence and degenerated into a mindless action flick.
The composer's contribution to the film is a very simple,
straight forward piece of music. It is patriotic where appropriate, pulsating
with snare rhythms during action sequences and subdued in ambiguity in places in
between. As with
The Hunt for Red October, Poledouris employed a
moderately sized orchestra for
Flight of the Intruder and then mixed in
his own array of modern sound effects to satisfy the military genre. The title
theme, heard in full during the opening and closing of the film (as well as
scenes of departure) is one of Poledouris' most transparent ideas; it is
obviously aimed at the same narrow audience as the film in its whole. The theme
is robust with patriotic testosterone, but it suffers from the same kind of
brutish attitude that left former pilots wondering why so many of the flying
scenes in the film were unrealistic. Its tone on album is distractingly upbeat as
a result. There is little suspense in the score, with the one preparation motif
(heard best in "Bomb Run") being a 1:1 copy, an exact replica, of the one used in
The Hunt for Red October. With that rhythm identical and the synthetic
effects similar,
Flight of the Intruder does seem like an extension or
sequel score in parts. The electronics this time, however, are not as well
handled, with some of the rhythmic effects used in the music reverberating with a
bit too much of an underwater echo mixture. The tingling, steady bass electronics
that Poledouris used in his other sea-faring scores are largely absent in
Flight of the Intruder as well, and they are missed. For the flying
sequences themselves, Poledouris abandons the graceful kind of writing that he
produced for
Flyers and instead continues the tone of testosterone-driven
force in simple fashion. Thus, the emotional depth of the score is minimal, and
the work only serves as a good listening experience if you want your stock
military action without much contemplative thought. Surprisingly, the score for
Flight of the Intruder was never released commercially, despite
Poledouris' considerable popularity at the time. A widely circulated bootleg has
existed since the mid-1990's, however, and although several different covers have
accompanied that item, every variant offers the same 45 minutes of Poledouris
material in very good sound quality. Overall, it's a very average war score that
requires you to turn off your brain.
**
| Bias Check: | For Basil Poledouris reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.48 (in 30 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.42
(in 27,554 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
