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Red Dawn: (Basil Poledouris) In the 1980's,
Hollywood fueled young peoples' fantasies about taking huge weapons and
blowing up nasty badguys on behalf of America, expressing freedom of
will through the pumping of countless bullets into preferably Communist
foes. Director John Milius was one of the few who actually managed to
take those fantasies and apply them to pop culture teenage life, using
the already questionable premise of a Soviet invasion of the United
States to force a group of usually fun-loving teenagers into taking up
arms and fighting their way to glory. In retrospect, everything about
Red Dawn is pure cheese, from the ridiculous obsession the
country had with invasions of the homeland to sappy interactions between
teenagers struggling to express themselves. It's also amusing to
recollect just how conservative Milius had been in real life, a National
Rifle Association champion who obviously got tingling sensations in his
loins when conceiving of a group of average American teenagers justified
in their gross employment of military-grade weaponry. The film opened to
decent success in 1984, though it has dissolved into mindless fallacies
of logic since, drawing endless cable runs only due to its wealth of
attractive young stars. Milius' career was past its prime by then,
though his college friend and reliable collaborator, composer Basil
Poledouris, was still on the rise. Poledouris became known in the 1980's
for his patriotic music, using his skills at manipulating the sounds of
Americana in both
Red Dawn and
Amerika before moving on to
high profile Western and Olympics compositions. His music often
addressed the nation's bravado in wide open spaces, from the seas and
skies to the rugged landscape of Middle America. It is this last area
that produced the heart of his music for both
Red Dawn and
Amerika, two scores with as many similarities as the films that
share so many holes in their screenplays. In a technical sense,
Poledouris' music for this environment was adept at finding the right
instrumental tone and often utilized strings of melodic ideas quite
effectively.
In the end, though, there is a certain anonymous
quality to Poledouris' invasion scores that makes them somewhat
difficult to appreciation apart from context. Another challenge with
Red Dawn was Poledouris' employment of synthesizers directly into
the live ensemble performances, a choice that gives the music a vague
atmosphere of future fantasy but also causes the soundtrack to suffer
from the same badly dated qualities in retrospect. The synthetic
elements in the score serve to accentuate the harsh nature of the
already abrasive tone of the orchestra. The group of 90 players heavily
emphasizes low brass, with tubas and trombones almost perpetually
grounding the work in a sense of foreboding. In some cues, this emphasis
yields the kind of muscular sound that Poledouris' collectors almost
always fondly recall (mainly from
Conan the Barbarian). In
others, the repetition of this brass blasting in each measure on key may
seem like a play for cheap gravity. Solo trumpet is an element teased in
the score but sadly underutilized. Strings and woodwinds predictably
convey the perilous emotional journey of the kids. More interesting than
the tone in
Red Dawn is Poledouris' strangely overdeveloped
melodic organization. It's not often that you hear a score with too many
thematic representations, but
Red Dawn is curiously over-thought
in the intertwining of thematic ideas. The film, for instance, uses two
main fanfares, one of march-like patriotic spirit and another to match
the actions of the kids (the former really only heard in full during the
opening and closing credits and the latter forming the basis for action
when the kids attack). Another primary theme is a softer one for the
concept of freedom (introduced at the end of "Main Title"), adapted into
numerous guises throughout the score and really the highlight of the
score. Two propulsive rhythmic identities are the guilty pleasures of
the score, the first for the Russian invasion (pounded deliberately in
"The Invasion" and later during the climactic helicopter ambush) and the
second generating momentum for the kids' "Wolverines" group in the role
of more subdued or melodramatic resistance. Beyond that, Poledouris
provides two additional themes primarily for the interactions of the
teenagers, one softly reflecting on a tone of remorse and the other more
whimsically grasping at the concept of peace.
These many thematic ideas interact and mutate
significantly in
Red Dawn, potentially making the score seem
unfocused for those not closely familiar with the film. The title theme
of immense patriotism and Wolverine theme of action are the most
curiously redundant, and the pretty freedom theme representing the
Colorado town at the start and the memorial at the end would seem to
have been a good candidate to supercede most of the other secondary
themes of conversational volume. The rambling, piano and timpani-pounded
bass of the Russians' theme has a
Rambo-like quality that Jerry
Goldsmith fans will appreciate. Unfortunately, because of the complexity
of the score, you'll never be able to find enough lengthy, uninhibited
development to any of the themes to really enjoy them on album, even in
the presentation of the complete score. It's an effective score in
context, and is impressive in short bursts on its own, but the dated
nature of the concept is directly reflected in the often irritating
synthetic accompaniment (which was not as refined here as in the
composer's scores of just another five years later). It really does make
a good companion piece to
Amerika for those inclined to look back
fondly at this topic of 1980's paranoia. Undoubtedly,
Red Dawn
has special meaning for Doug Fake and the crew at Intrada Records; the
score represented the label's first ever product on LP after
transitioning from being strictly a record store in San Francisco. That
34-minute album was transferred into a 1988 CD that eventually went out
of print and became a collectible item. In 2007, not long after
Poledouris' painful death from cancer, Intrada revisited the score and
used new technologies to remix it for a complete presentation amounting
to 69 minutes. This pressing of unlimited quantity (a relative rarity
for the label nowadays) has benefits and drawbacks. In its favor is
obviously the complete presentation (with a few alternate and source
tracks) and a mastering that really pulls fine details out of the
recording. On the other hand, the extra material doesn't offer a wealth
of new highlights, and the extremely dry mix (as opposed to the original
CD, which featured some reverb) only emphasizes the problematic tones of
the synthesizers even more. Thus, the 2007 release is admirable in its
expression of sentiment by Intrada for Poledouris and this score, but
the music is far from the composer's most enjoyable experiences on
album, no matter which product you encounter.
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| Bias Check: | For Basil Poledouris reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.47 (in 33 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.27
(in 32,977 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The inserts of both albums include information about the score and
film, though the 2007 product features a more extensive analysis.
