Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you can appreciate intelligent sound design and rhythmic manipulation despite an often tumultuous, dense progression of percussion-heavy crescendos. Avoid it... if several recognizable James Horner styles rolled into a tight, intense package would only aggravate your distaste for those styles. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
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. 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.
Score as Heard on Album: *** Overall: *** Track Listings:
Total Time: 50:36
All artwork and sound clips from Flightplan are Copyright © 2005, Hollywood 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 11/12/05, updated 11/13/05. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2005-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
