Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... only if you can satisfy yourself with about five minutes of deeply engaging, full ensemble heroism with an effective, propulsive touch of dread. Avoid it... if an otherwise mundane, ambient environment for basic gravity threatens to bore you as thoroughly as the plethora of similarly conservative scores for television documentaries and second-rate dramas. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
United 93: (John Powell) In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, mainstream entertainment avoided the topic of airplanes, terrorism, and the attack itself for fear of repelling audiences. Five years seemed to be the right amount of time for serious cinematic explorations of 9/11 to begin to appear, and before too long there were action films with crashing planes and crazed terrorists sprouting up as before. Both Paul Greengrass' United 93 and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center opened the wounds of the events in 2006, the former taking a partially fictionalized look at the actions aboard the fourth and final plane to be hijacked that day. Like the previous television film Flight 93, a merging of documentary format and personalization gives United 93 as much credibility as possible. Nobody knows the exact events leading up to the nosedive of the flight into a Pennsylvania field that day, but Greengrass uses all the available known facts and fills in just enough necessary fiction to make a coherent and plausible narrative. Conspiracy theorists have long claimed that the plane was hijacked as part of an elaborate scheme by the American government, but the evidence in the case of this particular flight is too significant in quality and consistency to doubt anything that Greengrass recreates. The film performed extremely well with critics, eventually earning two Academy Award nominations (for direction and editing), and it doubled its $15 million budget domestically and tripled the investment elsewhere. There were no particularly big names associated with United 93, despite Greengrass' involvement with The Bourne Supremacy. Still, he choose to continue his collaboration with composer John Powell, who had officially arrived at the forefront of the composing industry with multiple major blockbusters just prior to United 93. The musical needs of the film were relatively minor; unlike Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams, Powell seemed to have no need to write an emotionally overflowing requiem for the event. Instead, United 93 required little more than the type of generic, minimally rendered ambience that you typically hear in cheap, second-rate television documentaries involving character struggles. And while it has been mentioned many times that United 93 was not meant to be a documentary, the score that Powell assembled for the production really does fall into the aforementioned category of mundane background noise. Powell's merging of a moderately sized orchestral ensemble, occasional vocal contributions from his young son, and dominant electronic atmosphere for United 93 is adequately conservative but also largely inconsequential on album. The structures in the score are extremely basic, until the final moments intentionally vague and gravitating towards somber whole notes on key. The most interesting aspect of the score is Powell's ability to begin cranking up the tension in this environment through the alteration of tempi and harder performance emphasis on the instrumentation (beginning in "The Pentagon"). By the highlight cue, "The End," the bland whole notes for strings or French horns begin to shift in key and form chords that some might interpret as thematic. There really is no defining motif in United 93 outside of its pulsating whole notes, but "The End" does bring satisfactory shifts of harmonious fashion to suggest (still in restrained tones) the heroic actions of the passengers aboard the plane. The cue opens with an accelerated presentation of the usual whole notes and ends with the album's only really engaging expressions of harmony. At about 1:35 into that track, the suggested snare applications of previous cues begin to denote the passenger uprising in earnest, and Powell's usual knack for percussive creativity adds another few layers to the steady drumbeat towards death. Outside of this morbidly attractive cue, there are really no highlights worth extended mention. The "Dedication" cue at the end reprises the boy vocals that opened "Prayers" and "Phone Calls," but these moments are so infrequent and barely developed (probably in an attempt to avoid religious cliche) that they don't resonate in memorable ways. The instrumentation alone in United 93 can't carry the remainder of the score; in the cues of better depth, Powell collectors will recognize elements carrying over from his scores for Jason Bourne, especially in the combination of percussion and electronics. The synthetic bass thumping in the latter half of "The End" is successful in both its expression of dread and completion of the harmonic spectrum for a heroic deed. The first twenty minutes of this score are about as bland as one could imagine, however, and you would be best served if you can find "The End" on a compilation (Varèse Sarabande unfortunately included "Dedication" on their 30th anniversary box set instead). Otherwise, United 93 is a competent and functional score. It simply doesn't merit a 43-minute presentation on album, however, not a surprising opinion given the film's need for a starkly ambient emotional connection in its music. ** Track Listings:
Total Time: 43:22
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