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Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Whether the score is listenable beyond the confines of the movie is another matter. Spielberg has mentioned that Minority Report is a film noir throwback to the kind of suspenseful mysteries for which Bernard Herrmann scored in the late Golden Age of Hollywood. From listening closely to the disharmony and tumultuous rhythms of Williams' score for this film, you can hear that he was attempting the same kind of unnerving suspense in a grand fashion, as Herrmann succeeding in accomplishing time and time again. In fact, the beginning of the fifth track of the album, "Spyders," is ripe with Hermannesque brass. Functionally speaking, Williams does succeed in producing a solid suspense piece, but Minority Report proves as well that Williams still isn't the master of suspense that Herrmann is. Williams' suspense scores boil and churn rather than outwardly frighten a listener. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Williams is so well known for his capabilities in writing lovely themes, and those thematic urges from the composer work their way into even the darkest of his suspense scores. In A.I., in fact, the operatic moments of theme far outweight the action cues is most listeners' memories. The same will be so with Minority Report. The suspense music is functional, but, I dare say, uninteresting. The first half of this score builds a soft, but discomforting tapestry that will shape the action that will follow. Lengthy cues of uneasy string meanderings paint a relatively unhappy picture of America in 2054. The theme that Williams creates for the primary characters is touching, though highly restrained. It hints at the elegance of Williams' other themes, and is suprisingly allowed to flourish in the final cue of Minority Report. "That surprises a lot of people," explains Williams about the ending. "We've been in a dark, futuristic mode and then, unexpectedly, there's this lyricism reflecting a sense of innocence and hope." By the time the listener has reached the final cue, he or she has already been introduced to several highly engaging cues that shatter the quiet intensity of the first half of the score. Williams first introduces a full and slightly reassuring performance of the title theme in the ninth track on the album. From this point on, the album begins to provide enjoyable action cues, exploding with the beginning of the tenth track, "Anderton's Great Escape." Once the the chase music begins to heat up, so does the complexity and volume of Williams' music. Throughout the score, he uses the ethnically awkward vocals of a single female soloist --not reassuringly as in A.I., but intentionally foreign, as to add to the discomforting transformation of America in the latter half of this century. Just like the harmonica that is electronically altered in the sixth track to add even more flavor to the transformation of America into its future, the vocals are electronically enhanced to create a disturbing, though intriguing sound to represent that future. "The electronic piece is synched up with the orchestra," Williams states. "So it becomes a kind of loop that's orchestral but also synthesized. It wafts through the film." The twelth cue, "Visions of Anne Lively," offers the most explicit use of these vocals, and it is only a pity that Williams did not utilize these elements to an even greater effect. Using them as an accent to the orchestral elements is one thing, but building the entire score around them could have made Minority Report into a spectacular score. As it is, Minority Report is a score to appreciate and take pieces from for future compilations. But as a whole, the score lacks that one emotion or theme or motif to help it stand out as a great effort in Williams' remarkable career. No doubt a distinguished accompaniment for the film, the score on album stops short of involving the listener until its latter stages, and an entire 45 minutes of material can pass by without the complexity of emotion that we have come to expect from Williams. To the trained ear, the references to Bernard Herrmann's work are almost cliche, though they probably still work in the film (which should serve as a compliment to Herrmann's style). The fact that the score washes into a positive ending makes the first half all the most uninteresting. Only a handful of the chase sequences are complex enough in their construction --with that incredible tenth track leading the way-- to play with power outside of the picture. It is surprising that Williams isn't creating more elaborate or, at least, chancy scores for these futuristic films. A.I. did make use of instrumentation and theme that he had not used before. But Minority Report is a comparitively conservative effort that relies on Williams' existing stylistic skills rather than braching off into the unknown. This is a shame, because with the talent that Williams displays on a regular basis, and the ruts that he seems to get stuck in when restrained by sequel scores, it's disappointing to hear him miss an opportunity to go off on a wild excursion into the musical unknown. Minority Report sounds, in many ways, like we've been there before. If the film is compared to a pre-crime case, then Williams scored the present investigation rather than the time and place at which that crime will eventually take place... ***
The insert includes a short note from Spielberg, as per usual, but nothing else about the score or film. The note:
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