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Jumanji: (James Horner) In an attempt to ride the wave
of super-popular animal special effects that was caused initially by
Jurassic Park, director Joe Johnston brings the board game described
in Chris Van Allsburg's children's book to life. The premise of the
Jumanji story involves a supernatural game that brings its jungle
world to life and puts the actual players in jeopardy of being maimed, or
perhaps worse yet, caught in the spell of the game forever. Johnston had
brought a child's twist of special effects perspective to
Honey, I Shrunk
the Kids several years earlier, and unfortunately, for
Jumanji,
the technology had begun to overwhelm the storyline by 1995. The massive
failure of
Jumanji in the theatres during the Christmas season of
that year was due in part to the fact that critics failed to see the purpose
in establishing the entire premise of a film simply for the sake of special
effects, and due partly to the fact that the film deserved far more than a
PG rating since it proved capable at terrifying children in the audience
rather than entertaining them. For composer James Horner, who had scored
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids for Johnston,
Jumanji would come at
the end of a 1994-1995 season that would reveal the composer's best
collective work in his career, and you couldn't blame Horner fanatics for
having extremely high hopes for
Jumanji. Given the extent to which
the film's special effects were advertised in the news, how could Horner
screw this one up? Well, he did, and it's difficult to pinpoint exactly why.
The pace of the film's script is one that favors one scene of mayhem after
another (as each player makes a move), so Horner is left jumping through
several hoops without the score or film being able to provide any cohesive
sense of completion. Then again, the ability to raise hell in individual
scenes of chaos and hysteria was accomplished by Horner with strong results
in
We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story. In
Jumanji, however, there
is no direction to the music whatsoever.
Along with
Balto the same year,
Jumanji would
mark the end of Horner's era of common association with large-scale
children's pictures. A problem is evident in
Jumanji, however, in the
form of Horner's lost elements of charm and magic that were nearly always
present in his superior children's works. Some of it still existed in
Balto, but by the time
Jumanji rolled around, the enticing
rhythms, the sensitivity of themes, and everything 'cute' that had defined
Horner's involvement in the genre had been replaced by a mutation of those
elements with the grown-up action sensibilities of scores like
Apollo
13 and
Clear and Present Danger. There is more in common in the
action writing of
Jumanji with
Courage Under Fire than there
is with the countless children's scores that Horner penned in the previous
decade. Two sadly underdeveloped themes are introduced in
Jumanji,
one for the innocence of the Alan Parrish character caught in the game
(Robin Williams), and one strictly for the action pieces that strangely
resembles one of Gabriel Yared's
Troy themes note-for-note. An
inspired motif for "The Hunter" is a standout cue, but Horner strays into
directionless action material for the mass of the rest of the score. Cues of
intentional orchestral chaos, such as "Monkey Mayhem" are more irritating
than their cartoonish intent is worth, and the fully orchestral moments of
dread rely far too heavily on stock rumblings of deep percussion. Several
decent moments exist in the climactic "Jumanji" cue, including some of
Horner's better inclusion of the shakuhachi flute for wailing accents over
pulsating brass (as in
The Mask of Zorro later), but even this cue
builds to a dissonant climax worthy of
Vibes. After a sensitive flute
statement of the Parrish theme in the end titles (reminiscent of
The
Spitfire Grill and
An American Tail), Horner again throws a
confusing addition to the mix, adapting some of his Native American chanting
from
Thunderheart in the final moments. It's easy to get frustrated
by the score for
Jumanji, because there was so much potential for
great action material to rival the excitement of
Willow and other
Horner classics, and despite toying with several strong ideas in
Jumanji, Horner completely fails to do what his great scores of 1995
all did: tie all those ideas into one great (or even listenable) package.
**
| Bias Check: | For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.12 (in 89 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.34
(in 158,769 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
