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Poseidon: (Klaus Badelt) If composer Klaus Badelt's
studio was flipped over, filled with water, and rocked by random
explosions, would he do the sensible thing and make for an immediate
escape? Or would he stop just long enough to try to salvage his hard
drives of redundant orchestral samples and drum loops? After listening
to
Poseidon, you get worried that he'd actually consider the
latter. There are lots of mind-numbing aspects of the 2006 remake of the
popular 1972 film, and Badelt contributes to that haze. Wolfgang
Petersen's film isn't a step-for-step remake of
The Poseidon
Adventure, but all the essentials are the same. An ocean liner
celebrating new year's eve is broadsided by a rogue wave and flipped
over. Most of the passengers flail around and are killed while a small
group of unlikely characters makes it to the bottom of the hull and
escapes. There's even a pop song in mix, hoping to attract Oscar
consideration. While the 2006 version hasn't been whipped by critics
like it could have been, there's nothing truly interesting about a story
in which everyone knows what's going to happen. Irwin Allen would be
proud that his inspiration has been resurrected once again, but it's
hard to say that anyone else would be excited by
Poseidon. One
possible positive aspect of
Poseidon is its reluctance to dig too
deeply into its characters; we simply accept them as stereotypes and
move on. Klaus Badelt does the same with the score, ignoring the
individual stories and focusing on only one overarching theme and style
to represent the story. Badelt has had a severely hit-and-miss career,
attached mostly to Hans Zimmer and other Media Ventures artists, and
Poseidon will cause many of the same frustrations for detractors
of Badelt (and Zimmer) who find his music underachieving and
uninteresting. Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of this score is
Badelt's reliance on the synthetic when he obviously had an orchestral
ensemble ready for the task. In these cases, only a tight budget can
usually justify such moves.
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Despite the presence of an orchestra in most of the
cues in
Poseidon, the electronics prevail. This may have been
intentional, with Badelt deciding to tackle the score by addressing the
highly mechanized appearance of the ship (and its challenges) with his
synthetic groaning and tearing sounds. But the story is inevitably one
of human perseverance, and it is here where the
Poseidon score
fails. And whereas the synthetic chopping cello effect may represent
perseverance in a submerged military setting, the use of such
non-organic sounds in
Poseidon makes the story cold and uncaring.
Badelt does go through the proper motions, however, writing a somewhat
compelling title theme for the film and reprising it in several places
outside of its full performances in the opening and closing cues. The
rising progression of the theme is appropriate for the struggle at hand,
and it suffices in providing the satisfaction necessary (with the
typical choral effect) at the end of the film. But even at its height,
this theme is nearly drowned out by a thick bed of drum loops and
electronic filler samples. Several of the action pieces in the middle
portion of the score will hint at interesting orchestral motifs, with
individual instruments struggling to be notice, but Badelt's samples and
loops win the battle and define the score. Aside from the sustained
dissonance of "The Wave," there's nothing really suspenseful about the
score, nor does instrumentation provide any interesting entertainment.
An acoustic guitar attempts to carry the title theme several times, only
to be squashed by percussive rhythms. Collectors of Hans Zimmer works
will find some highly derivative moments, confirming for skeptics that
Poseidon could very well have received nothing more than a
mechanized, out-of-the-box score. Aside from that drab score, the studio
decided to replace 1972's "The Morning After" with two average songs
performed by Stacy Ferguson of the hip-hop group Black Eyed Peas, and
thus marketed the album with her name and picture all over it. The
thirty minutes of Badelt score won't become the guilty pleasure that
some of his works tend to be, and given the symphonic talents he
displayed for the concurrent release of
The Promise, it's hard to
imagine why he produces such simplistic muck for a film that could truly
benefit from an Irwin Allen-sized score. John Williams is sitting
someplace and reminiscing.
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| Bias Check: | For Klaus Badelt reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3 (in 11 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.19
(in 99,833 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
