Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you appreciate unconventional, crossover, and postmodern film music, for Red Planet is a notably lovely merging of opera and electronica. Avoid it... if you expect to hear some of the best music from the film on album (and vice versa, which is the truly curious aspect of this flawed production). Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Red Planet: (Graeme Revell) The year 2000 saw two high profile movies about Mars, and debates ensued about which one was worse. Arguably, the earlier Mission to Mars loses the battle, though Red Planet has its fair share of problems. The directorial debut of Antony Hoffman proposed that a few decades into the future, Earth's environment would be poisoned and humans initiate an attempt to terraform Mars to give it an inhabitable atmosphere. A crew of six astronauts is sent to the planet to determine what has gone wrong with the remote process, and, after freak accidents and mutinous robots, among other problems, only a couple of them survive. The film's extremely poor character development, combined with ridiculously shallow dialogue and logical fallacies, sunk its chances at the box office, and it's no surprise that studios kept the topic of Mars at a distance for years. Both Graeme Revell and Ennio Morricone's scores for the two Mars films of 2000 were extremely unconventional. The Morricone work for Mission to Mars is an interesting study apart from the film, but is an absolute disaster in context. In fact, it remains one of the poorest matches with its visuals of any score in the Digital Age. Revell's work for Red Planet is much more difficult to evaluate, because so little of it is actually used in the final cut of the film. Like Morricone, Revell recorded his music in a concert-like format that doesn't always follow synchronization points in the narrative. But Revell wrote, performed, and produced extensive material that was not heard in the film, making Red Planet a bit perilous to examine in terms of its impact. Some of this material had carried over from his score for Strange Days. Complicating matters is the fact that the score fanned the flames of the debate about unconventional, crossover, and postmodern film music. The issue of postmodernism in film scores had come to the forefront in the 1990's thanks to Elliot Goldenthal and, more popularly, Don Davis' The Matrix in 1999. Revell's imaginative blend of opera and electronica is one of the most obvious, vibrant, and beautiful entries in that field of experimental sounds. Because the film, while technically residing in the sci-fi genre, is an existential thriller about the end of the world, Revell's music reflects that disjointed emotional battle between fear and salvation. He accentuates the precarious balance between the frail characters and their overwhelmingly difficult surroundings by combining the two seemingly unrelated genres of music. His use of opera and classical chorus to represent the fantasy and human adventure of the awe-inspiring journey is countered by his dance beats and hard electronica tendencies, which very well capture the mechanized thrill and fright of the technical side of the story. The latter side has some of the characteristics of Paul Haslinger's work, which should come as no surprise since he co-produced the score with Revell. At first glance, it's difficult to figure out exactly what kind of contribution Revell made to the film, for the movie fails to use the composer's work in many places and the album from Pangaea Records doesn't advertise that it features as much (unused) original score as it does. In fact, the executive producers of the album arranged the text in the art direction to make it look like the album is a typical song compilation. This is not the case. Over half of the music on the album is original (or semi-original) Graeme Revell material. Since he uses vocalists to perform much of his score, the album incorrectly credits the performers with the tracks, while placing the attribution for composition in tiny print within the insert. In any case, Revell's music is extensively the heart and soul of the soundtrack. Unprepared listeners could find it unnerving on a first listen, especially given that most of it wasn't heard in the film and won't be recognized. It's difficult to place electronica rhythms and instrumentation in the context of this genre's more serious side, but the when combined with the stunning operatic vocals, the score takes on a new age personality that actually works. A less serious combination of the same crossover effect was heard in Eric Serra's The Fifth Element, but that score offers absolutely nothing with as much raw power and resolute ambience as that which is provided in Red Planet. The duality of this score is truly fascinating. It has a constant, electronically sampled or keyboarded presence, sometimes with harsher guitar accents, and yet Revell never loses track of his melodic harmony or the choral accompaniment that adds the sci-fi edge to the music. The score doesn't exhibit a primary theme, though the repeating idea heard in "Alone" and "Canto XXX" is the closet to a central identity; this theme was translated into a song by Revell in Strange Days, and while it's possible that the composer wanted to combat his previous score's disenfranchisement by repeating its theme here, the idea ended up playing a very minor role in Red Planet as well. The secondary melodies simmer almost constantly as an auxiliary element to the ambience of the electronics. There are only three tracks of pure underscore by Revell to be heard on the album. The tone of "Mars Red Planet" matches the vocalized score tracks in many ways, including the mixing of massive choir with sampled rhythms. The "Alone" cue offers an orchestral accompaniment to Revell's own heartbreaking piano performances of the title theme. The frightful "Crash Landing" is the score's only dissonant and noisy detraction. Some of the most compelling orchestral cues recorded for the movie didn't make the album, unfortunately, including the brass piece heard valiantly during the rescue scene near the end of the film. The most intriguing cues in Red Planet are, however, the four operatic electronica pieces. Parisian opera star Emma Shapplin's 24-year-old soprano voice is simply stunning in its clarity and appeal, singing in 14th Century Italian for "The Inferno," "The Fifth Heaven," and "Canto XXX" (of which only "The Fifth Heaven" is actually heard in the film, and unfortunately only at its final moments). Her performances over the electronics are accompanied by a deep male chorus singing in Latin, and the mixture is so potent that it is easy to forget that the rhythms are those of a potentially obnoxious dance song. These fifteen minutes alone are simply fantastic, beautiful in their crossover construct, and featuring an extremely wet mix that echoes across the soundscape. Melissa Kaplan's voice in "Dante's Eternal Flame" is a less refined, harsher measure for a more unnerving, yet similarly haunting vocal score track. The entirety of the score is mixed as a dance or electronica album would be: with very heavy bass. This album will rock the walls of your room, and while there are points at which it would have been nice if the bass had been toned back to better exhibit the lovely vocals, the overall package still works. Speaking of rock, the song inclusions on the album were so highly advertised by Pangaea that, in much of the press material, Revell's name is nowhere to be seen (that's not surprising for a label that didn't deal with score material much in its soundtracks of the time, including the poor presentation of Bill Conti's work in The Thomas Crown Affair). The Peter Gabriel song and its remix are simply unlistenable in their incessant pounding of brash 1980's-era synthetic sounds. The Sting (and knock-off Police) songs are not of much consequence at all ("A Thousand Years" seems too light for this album). By contrast, the Strange Cargo performance of "MontokPoint" in the middle fits rather well with Revell's original music. In the end, however, it is Revell's underscore which dominates this album. Only "Crash Landing" resorts to unorganized noise-making; his other score tracks are a risky, but interesting and rewarding experience. Parts of "Canto XXX" are mixed with so high a gain that there unfortunately exists some upper-range distortion in the soprano vocals. At the very end of the album (after the conclusion of "When the World is Running Down"), you hear a fading cry for help from Carrie-Anne Moss' character as the landing vessel and orbiter lose contact and the peril becomes most serious. It's a nice touch, though inconsequential. Ultimately, the Red Planet score is a risk that most open-minded score collectors should investigate, regardless of its substandard album. In its presentation here, up to fifteen minutes of worthy compilation material can still be gleaned. Still, no solid commercial release of Revell's used and unused material has ever existed, and such a product could easily earn four stars. For fans of the collaboration between Revell and Shapplin, the composer would go on to produce the singer's subsequent solo album "Etterna." In Red Planet, Revell has brought us by far one of the most original, postmodern scores of 2000's. *** Track Listings:
Total Time: 56:26
All artwork and sound clips from Red Planet are Copyright © 2000, Pangaea Records. The reviews and notes contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Filmtracks Publications. Audio clips can be heard using RealPlayer but cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 10/31/00, updated 9/28/08. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2000-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
