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Turbulence 2: Fear of Flying: (Don Davis) One of
the lesser discussed drawbacks of the attacks on America on September
11th, 2001 was the fact that it ushered out the era of airplane
hijacking movies. So bankable was this genre in the late 1990's that a
mediocre film like 1997's
Turbulence could actually be considered
sequel material. When that push for more cash from the concept came in
1999, Trimark dumped the cast and storyline of the first film and
replaced them with another plane load of people who not only are afraid
to fly, but are once again in the ride of their lives. The plot is one
that we've seen a thousand times: a commercial airliner filled with
frightened flyers trying to make an (unfortunate) journey from Seattle
to Los Angeles are hijacked by a group of non-English speaking,
angry-faced Czechs who possess various deadly weapons of mass
destruction and want to get revenge for... well, you get the idea. If
everyone on board was naked and suffered from herpes outbreaks, then
maybe this film would have been worth watching. Luckily for bored
theatre goers,
Turbulence 2: Fear of Flying was a
straight-to-video venture, though it should be said that the movie's
poster art (identical to that on the soundtrack cover) is delightfully
politically incorrect in a post-9/11 world. One part of
Turbulence that was thrown away was Shirley Walker's score and
its associated themes and motifs. Sequel director David Mackay had
worked with orchestrator-turned-composer Don Davis twice before on low
budget affairs, and why Davis would accept
Turbulence 2: Fear of
Flying as an assignment, especially in light of his recent success
with
The Matrix, is baffling. The story and two-dimensional
characters are stock, and as you might expect, the score is as well.
Davis performed and arranged the entire score for
Turbulence 2 on
his desktop computer, which isn't necessarily an automatic negative. But
just like a film with a plot and characters we don't care about, Davis'
score makes use of all the same old synthetic, B-film action cliches
that we expect to hear from the software available to less successful
composers at the time.
From the synthetic "orchestra hits" (for which samples
really hadn't mastered at the time) to the flat electronic snare that
predictably accompanies any militaristic slug-fest in the skies, the
score provides no twists, no refreshing material, and no spur of the
moment creativity on the part of Davis. Had some of the action rhythms
(especially "Cockpit Fight") been recorded with an orchestral ensemble
of decent size, perhaps something useful could have come from these
ideas. The film contains a few lame character-building moments at the
start and end which require a more humanly touch by Davis, and even his
underdeveloped scoring of these moments with a handful of half-hearted
major key chords seems to poke fun at the flatness of those characters.
Soft, false string harmony for the pleasant tones of "Hug Wrap Up" will
remind of some of Randy Edelman's more stale keyboarded work. The only
barely redeeming highlights of the score are the first and last cues of
the film, which both feature a more appropriately charged rhythm from
the Jerry Goldsmith library of sounds (mainly
Total Recall) and a
somewhat muted theme. There are pieces of Goldsmith ideas for his own
90's hijacking films that Davis appropriately adapts in
Turbulence
2, though their constructs aren't particularly noticeable unless you
strain to hear them. Overall,
Turbulence 2 displays nothing more
than a library of previously conjured synthesizer trials that Davis
could have arranged in his sleep for this score. Most of them aren't
offensive, and it's probable that they work fine in the film. But who
would want to sit and listen to this mindless crap? And 72 minutes of
it, no less? The album was the first release of an American score by the
Pacific Time label, which up to October 2000 had provided CDs of a
variety of soundtrack music from the European scene. The fact that the
score was cheap (to purchase the rights to) likely caused the 72
minute-presentation, but this is a score that needed to be condensed
down to 20 minutes and combined with other, similar Davis projects.
Unfortunately, despite the impressive production values of this product,
Pacific Time would not venture into the American music scene for many
significant scores hereafter.
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| Bias Check: | For Don Davis reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.2 (in 10 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.02
(in 43,269 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes a note about Davis from the director of the film.
