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Flightplan: (James Horner) No matter how many times
you've thought that screenwriters have conjured every conceivable,
serious horror plot aboard an airplane, something with a twist flies
onto the big screen. In
Flightplan, Jodie Foster is taking her
daughter across the world on a flight to address the death of her
husband, riding on a newly designed super-aircraft which Foster's
character helped engineer. Along the ride, the daughter disappears, and
for a while, the film seems to follow similar psychological lines as
The Forgotten, and the plot keeps you wondering if the film is
either a psychological thriller or a typical maniac/kidnapper story. The
first major American film by German Robert Schwentke,
Flightplan
relies upon the growing frustration, self-evaluation, and ultimately the
panic of its star, and in these regards, the score for
Flightplan
by James Horner closely mirrors Foster's progressive decline. After a
quiet summer of 2005 for the veteran composer, his output at the end of
the year includes this throwback to some of his better horror genre
scores of decades past. Horner has provided both some stinkers and
winners in the "child abduction" department, even as recently as
The
Missing and
The Forgotten a few years earlier, although
Flightplan will likely better resemble the suspense scores of the
early 1990's for collectors of Horner's works. To understand why the
music for
Flightplan starts and stops, builds hope and the
deflates, and generally exists in a sort of dazy lack of focus, the
relationship between Horner's direction and Foster's immediate frame of
mind seems the be the key. To this end, what Horner has done here is
extremely effective and intelligent, but like the trauma of any
distressed mother, quite difficult to enjoy in a musical
soundscape.
As the search for the missing child intensifies, and
the girl's very existence is questioned, Horner brings the score in and
out of harmonic and rhythmic line, using ideas so basic as a rising bass
string progression to represent hope, and thunderous percussive ends to
his cues for the disappointment that Foster feels every time she gets a
new idea that yields nothing. While these resolute, rising progressions
of hope have individual crescendos throughout the score, it's hardly an
imposing musical force. The performance often rumbles and meanders
during much of its length, fooling you as it slowly tightens its highly
dense structure until finally bursting into a panic near the climax. The
dazed atmosphere includes most of the percussive elements you hear in
the opening cue of
Bicentennial Man (the woodblocks being the
most noticeable), spread throughout the light rhythms that sustain
Flightplan. The highlight cue in the score is "The Search," in
which the percussive presence in Horner's rhythms do great justice to
the technology of the plane. Some of the uses are familiar, like the
tapping of a cymbal before a highlighted note or key change, distant
tolling chimes, clusters of drum strikes and snare from
Clear and
Present Danger, and an assortment of metallic strikes and taps.
Rhythmic pan pipes and fluttering woodwinds produce a quiet frenzy that
Horner masterfully increases in intensity throughout this cue. By
"Creating Panic," Horner is still using all of these elements, but he
packs them into an even more dense, confused, and short period of time,
quite effectively jarring the audience with the same desperation felt by
Foster's character. As the stakes get greater, Horner starts teasing the
audience with lush layers of harmonious strings, representing the
monumental, romanticized hope for relief felt by the mother.
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But the film has some curveballs to throw at the
audience, and the stakes are greatest in "Carlson's Plan," in which more
stereotypical horror thrashing is accompanied by electric choir and many
familiar percussive rips from
Apollo 13. The use of the wildly
crashing piano is integral to this cue (and the entire score), and while
it is tiring in its consistent use by Horner, nobody can argue with its
effectiveness. As the score approaches its finale, it should be noted
that during this entire process of slowly tightening his grip on the
intensity, Horner does offer an overarching thematic idea. Heard with
distant, but nevertheless melodic identity in the first two cues, the
teasing performances by strings later in the score offer snippets of
this same idea. Finally, the predictable resolution allows for Horner to
provide a victorious performance of the theme by the full strings at the
end, much to the same satisfying degree as in
The Pelican Brief.
The 3-note swells of the theme in the "Mother and Child" cue alternate
between major and minor keys as they rise to their conclusion, well
representing the bittersweet emotions of severe tension suddenly
released. The recording quality of
Flightplan is well executed,
with the percussion-heavy orchestra (no brass, eight piano performers)
easily allowing for the lighter elements of woodwinds and percussion to
be enjoyed clearly... even despite the fact that recording seems to have
been given a wet, echoing atmosphere to heighten the mental confusion.
It's an admirable score by Horner, and one in which he really plays well
to the growing emotional turmoil of a character on screen. On the other
hand, there are significant elements of this score heard in his other
works once again, and any score with this amount of disruptive density
isn't the most pleasant experience on album. It does it's job, however,
and Horner collectors will appreciate the finer points.
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Score as Written for Film: ****
Score as Heard on Album: ***
Overall: ***
| Bias Check: | For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.13 (in 98 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.25
(in 184,725 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes a list of performers, but no extra information about the score or film.
