Buy it... if you relish those early David Arnold scores of immense orchestral power and rich harmonies without synthetic interference.

Avoid it... if you did care for the lyrical depth of Stargate or Independence Day and wouldn't be interested in an even more lush version of those scores.

Arnold

Last of the Dogmen: (David Arnold) There was a law in Montana that was just recently repealed: "Seven or more Indians are considered a raiding or war party and it is legal to shoot them." Perhaps the people who still believed in the validity of that law in the 1990's had seen the movie Last of the Dogmen, though even they should have figured out just how far-fetched the plot of the film really is. Writer/director Tab Murphy's 1995 film presents the idea that it's possible that a handful of Cheyenne dogmen survived the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre and were still miraculously living hidden from modern-day 1995 life in the treacherous mountain regions of Montana. Anyone who's lived in Montana (as of 1995) knows that hippies have hiked into every last square mile of the Rocky Mountains and hugged their trees, not to mention geologists and forest rangers that survey all that territory every day. In short, in an age when there exist little airports and portable toilet cabins in even the most remote regions of the Bob Marshal Wilderness, the very notion that there could be unaffected Native Americans someplace in the mountains is utterly ludicrous. Never mind that it's only reality that's lost in Last of the Dogmen, however; the discovery of the remote Cheyenne tribe is made by an expert tracker hired by a local sheriff to locate three escaped convicts. He takes a leading Indian expert (and natural love interest) with him to communicate with the Cheyenne he suspects as having killed the convicts, and once they find the tribe, they're conflicted about how to protect them.

The film's cinematography is sharp, even offering the juxtaposition of Montana's remote scenery with a high-flying airplane overhead. For critics, an uncredited narration of the story by Wilford Brimley nearly ruins the picture, for his voice interrupts several scenes without good reason. Also of note in the picture is David Arnold's score. A budding British composer who had just been discovered with Stargate the previous year, Arnold was flown to Los Angeles to write Last of the Dogmen in, of all places, a hotel room. The result of Arnold's efforts are either plagiaristic or brilliant, depending on your opinion of John Barry and James Horner in the same genre, and, to a lesser extent, Arnold's own narrow style of the period. Despite the modern setting of the film, Arnold wrote an old fashion Western adventure score of the highest dramatic style. He takes Barry's Dances with Wolves (it's perhaps ironic that Arnold keeps seemingly borrowing inspiration from Barry in so much of what he does for the blockbusters) and Horner's Legends of the Fall and produces an extremely heavy and dense title theme that repeats without fail throughout the picture, and it's hard to figure whether this overly melodramatic touch was the idea of Murphy and Savoy Pictures, or if Arnold was simply so eager to impress everyone with his second major score that he went over the top in his composition. The music really is impressive, merging the modern dramatic classics mentioned above with a preview of his own immense action music for Independence Day that would explode onto screens the next year.

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Without a doubt, film music fans weary of Arnold's post-2000 return to the electronica styles of his pre-scoring years point to Last of the Dogmen as one of his great, unexplored triumphs. Performed with phenomenal power by the London Symphony Orchestra (another reason, by no coincidence, that the orchestrations sound similar to Horner's in the less bombastic cues, such as "Cheyenne Valley"), the score is rich with harmony and bass-heavy grip, relying significantly on the percussion section to propel its strong, slowly developed rhythmic pace. Timpani pound, snares rip, and triangles clang with great energy, turning the latter half of the score into an action piece worthy of Independence Day, if not better in its consistency. Arnold's thematic presentations are saturated with layers of activity; his counterpoint was always a strength in his orchestral efforts through Tomorrow Never Dies. There could be a downfall to this monumental scale of performance, however, for the density of the music can also become burdensome by the end of the album's short running time. As beautiful as it is, Last of the Dogmen is a tiring listening experience, and with only 36 minutes of music from the two-hour film represented on the album, it's hard to imagine the scope of the entire project. In the end, though, Last of the Dogmen is just more proof as to why film music experts predicted in the mid-1990's that David Arnold would be the next John Williams. It's also evidence of why many collectors claim great frustration in Arnold's career choices, because there's so much potential in Last of the Dogmen that has since gone underdeveloped. ****   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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For David Arnold reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.33 (in 15 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.33 (in 42,389 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.