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Mars Attacks!: (Danny Elfman) It's hard to really
figure out if Tim Burton was trying to make a film better or worse than
Mars Attacks!, for in either case, the picture would have
succeeded better. Never receiving a glowing response from critics and
blown off in the end by viewers, Burton's tribute to the schlocky
B-minus films of Ed Wood and others in the 1950's sci-fi genre (as well
as being inspired by a series of old Topps bubble gum cards) tried just
a little too hard to actually be good... to be above its own material.
And therein lies the main reason for the film's downfall: the
combination of a spectacular cast, magnificent special effects, overdone
gore, and a refusal by Burton to allow the film to take flight with its
parody lines cause
Mars Attacks! to be nothing more than a
bizarre spectacle. It's intriguing, but completely defocused and lacking
in genuine character development that is still necessary for even films
like this to make you care. Perhaps one of the more important and
overlooked aspects of
Mars Attacks! is the fact that the project
re-united director Burton with composer Danny Elfman, with the two of
them having a personal falling-out and Elfman thus missing the
opportunity to score
Ed Wood in the interim. And that's a good
thing, because it's hard to imagine
Mars Attacks! without its
similarly wacky Elfman score.
Without missing a beat, Elfman seems to have read
Burton's mind once again for this score, because the finished product is
musically identical to the film their mutual success and failures.
Elfman dove head-first into the notion of raising Bernard Herrmann's
The Day The Earth Stood Still from the dead, taking the most
famous and stereotypical elements of 1950's and early 1960's sci-fi
music and beefing it up with all the power and diversity of a modern
symphony orchestra. The resulting barrage of alien marches, theremine
statements, and genre-bending sub-themes is a marvel of creativity and
ingenuity, but ultimately suffers the film's fate: a total lack of
focus. At best, the most positive descriptor of Elfman's
Mars
Attacks! score would be "fun." Many other film music collectors
would call it effective as well, and no doubt it was, but what's the
point of a score that mirrors its film so well that they plunge together
into failure? It's not quite as far to take the leap towards the realm
of "intolerable"-related descriptors, for
Mars Attacks! is a
self-induced headache waiting patiently on the shelves to shatter the
silence in your room with enthusiasm and zeal. If you divide the score
into its major parts, you have the Martian march, a definite highlight
of the work and a foreshadowing of the spirit of
Men in Black,
along with frenetic and wildly inconsistent action music, the lovable
portions of source and cutesy romance music, and the two finale tracks
of victorious harmony.
Spread throughout all these sections are the theremine,
the quintessential representative of 1950's schlock, the high-pitched
female choir, which eew's and ahh's its way into another level of
fantasy schlock, an organ performing the usual menacing chord
progressions, the mandatory synthetic sound effects of zipping saucers,
and a perpetual presence of snare or timpani to represent the
militaristic nature of the invasion. Where
Mars Attacks! becomes
derailed is in its establishment of a strong and enjoyable title theme
(which gloriously and hilariously ends with the same finale of wailing
brass as
The Day The Earth Stood Still) and the lack of its
necessary obvious usage throughout subsequent major cues. By the time we
reach the "Martian Lounge" and "Martian Madame" cues, with Latin club
rhythms and bongo drums, the identity of the score has become so
fragmented that you just wish some of the spunk and movement from the
opening titles would return. The "End Credits" cue is perhaps a best
representative of the score's curious and ultimate failure, not sure
whether to continue the parody style of the opening titles theme or to
take the mood down a dark and ominous path instead. This all said, keep
in mind that
Mars Attacks! is a beloved score for Elfman
collectors, and to be fair, a cue like "The Landing" is impressive in
its bridging of choral elements from Elfman's early career (and
Scrooged in particular) to the popular percussion use that
foreshadows his
Spider-Man work. A plus: the CD includes the two
major songs from the film at its end. Fans have embraced the complete
isolated score on DVD releases of this film and have widely spread that
music via bootleg. But
Mars Attacks! flies all over the map,
leaving its main titles as the only truly memorable piece.
**
| Bias Check: | For Danny Elfman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.14 (in 42 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.28
(in 93,536 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
