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The Island: (Steve Jablonsky, Various) As the
progression of director Michael Bay's films has declined in quality and
enjoyability, so have the scores that accompany them. The problem with
Bay is that his breathless action films are no longer snappy in their
humor, nor enticing in their edits. The man has simply lost his touch.
Sadly, this decline in filmmaking standards by Bay (though some would
argue there wasn't much there to begin with) is a problem compounded in
2005's
The Island by the fact that several masterful films about
the subject have come before, including
Logan's Run and
THX
1138. The concept this time around is that future humanity has been
restricted to bubbles in which there is little education and less
individuality, and people are occasionally selected as winners of a
lottery to go off to a gorgeous island where they are unsuspectingly
harvested (reminds of that short story "The Lottery" where the winner in
the small town is ritually stoned to death). A few clones decide to grow
some individuality and rebel against the system, leading us on the more
typical Michael Bay series of chase sequences that just happen to this
time take place in the futuristic science fiction realm. These Bay films
have always been tied to composer Hans Zimmer from the very start, and
from
The Rock to
Pearl Harbor, Zimmer's participation has
always involved the usual random collection of his Media Ventures
artists. This time, as in a few previously, the clones have taken over
and five of them produce the music for
The Island. They are led
by Steve Jablonsky, whose work in the sound design film score genre
expanded to a strong orchestral presence in
Steamboy that did
significantly more to advance Jablonsky's name in the public eye. But
given that we're back in the Bay-realm of simplistic testosterone, so
too does Jablonsky revert to the stock Media Ventures library of tired
ideas, hoping that a subtle change here and there will suffice for the
musical presence in the film. Unfortunately, the amount of originality
in that library was limited in the first place, so to hear it rearranged
and regurgitated once again by Zimmer junkies isn't impressing or
fooling anyone.
Even the immediately opening motif of
The Island
is tired. A series of eigth notes used by Zimmer in a number of scores
(including
Batman Begins most recently) is translated onto guitar
by Jablonsky. A meandering, harmonious series of chords for synthetic
male choir attempts to bring epic scale into the coastal aerial shots.
Familiar drum loops take over and offer nothing that we haven't heard
previewed in Jablonsky's remix of
Tears of the Sun or half a
dozen ideas from other Zimmer clones. Chopping synths behind a small
ensemble of strings and brass provide the usual rapid orchestral hits on
each note. The entire score is a series of these repetitious drum loops
and ensemble hits interspersed with the obligatory faux-important synth
choir statements of a few basic, harmonious chord progressions. By the
end, you're even treated to a reinterpretation of "Now We Are Free" from
Gladiator, and it leaves you wondering what exactly these artists
are attempting to accomplish. For Hans Zimmer himself, whose name is
once again on the product as the producer, it's becoming strikingly
clear that "process" has now surpassed "style" as the primary
consideration in his ventures. He has become the ultimate music
coordinator, and has programmed his associates to build their scores
based on ideas he conjured ten years ago... and at some point, each of
these imitation scores, never advancing any kind of musical identity of
their own, must be treated with a summary one-star treatment. You'll get
some debate on this in the circle of film music critics. On one side,
you have the group who believes that this music serves its functional
purpose and is therefore at least a three-star effort. On the other side
are the film music purists who acknowledge personal accomplishments in
film scoring and expect their scores to exhibit more unique style than
the Media Ventures clones are trained to provide. The album for
The
Island isn't terrible, although the hip-hop vocals in "Mass
Vehicular Carnage" (despite the irony of its uniqueness) and the song at
the end are definite detractions. The whole endeavor just seems like
pointless repetition and variation, and the fault is just much Zimmer's
as it is Jablonsky's. A $120 million overall production budget bought
this music? The page must be turned.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
