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War of the Worlds: (John Williams) Fifty years
after its initial appearance on the big screen, H.G. Wells' novel "The
War of the Worlds" received a $135 million Steven Spielberg facelift
with megastar Tom Cruise as the heart of its people story. Written just
before 1900, the original tale is best known for the historic 1938 Orson
Welles radio broadcast in which the actor deviously convinced much of
the nation that our planet was actually under attack (it really is too
bad the media can't get away with such a thing today), as well as a 1953
cinematic adaptation that has long been a favorite of the vintage
science fiction crowd. Spielberg's adaptation of the story, with the
help of
Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp, forgoes the
opportunity to update the alien pod creatures (as well as their mission
and their demise) and instead reverts to the original concepts and
illustrations that accompanied Well's novel. Some critics and
enthusiasts of the concept were not kind to this Spielberg vision of the
invasion, for the film does seem to suffer from its share of fallacies
of logic, including the awkward design of the alien pods themselves. The
necessary human drama element also bogs the film down, and without the
spectacular imagery of
Independence Day,
War of the Worlds
is a comparatively mundane film. It did manage to earn more than half a
billion dollars at the box office and three technical Academy Award
nominations, accolades long forgotten due to the film's failure to build
a lasting legacy out of its initial hype. Tackling the project with a
very serious intent was composer John Williams, whose level of mastery
in his music maintained itself with force as he ventured further past
the turn of the century. Spielberg's usual collaborator, Williams
offered
War of the Worlds only a month after his final journey
into the
Star Wars universe, and despite the two films' shared
topic of human despair, alien creatures, and large-scale special
effects, the focus of the two scores could not be further apart from
each other. It's safe to say that
War of the Worlds has a happy
ending, albeit not one of human triumph. Our military is useless, our
collective panic forces us to turn on each other, and, in the end, the
solution to our problem is a technically intellectual one rather than
something blatantly victorious. Williams responded to this challenging
narrative by providing music that is so enveloped in this chaos that he
actually forgoes a discernible concert piece, a major deviation for the
composer.
The base complexities of Williams' usual high standards
are clearly evident in
War of the Worlds. Flourishing woodwinds,
explosions of timpani, and rapid brass bursts that would test any
player's abilities are put on good display. The strings are as frantic
as ever, sprinting over massive blasts of deep brass and rolling rhythms
that keep you on the edge of your seat with persistent jumps, sudden
stops, and desperate changes in direction. A steady momentum in these
cues is conveyed by brutal rhythmic propulsion, chopping incessantly in
the composer's typical way for this period in his career. This would be
describing, of course, the action cues in the score. Interspersed with
these walls of noise are the even more disjointed and dissonant cousins
of those cues, representing the suspense in the film. Outside of
"Probing the Basement," perhaps, the term "spine-tingling" isn't
accurate to describe these cues, for Williams hits the listener with the
blunt force of his Los Angeles ensemble of players rather than using
particular, individual instruments mixed above the ensemble to create
his fright. Large washes of atonal sound, sometimes painful to the ears
in their ability to take the ensemble and simply move its pitch upward
in uncomfortable ways, effectively create a twisted atmosphere of panic,
though they don't linger on the mind long after. The final elements in
the score are those for the film's primary two characters, as well
humanity and its suffering. Surprisingly, Williams chose not to provide
anyone in the film with dedicated thematic development. Motifs
representing the destructive pods are scattered throughout the score,
but the people themselves receive the treatment of a lost piano and
string section, "Refugee Status" passing those duties onto the
composer's standard noble horn stature. Only in the extensions of this
material in "Epilogue" do Williams' obscured melodies barely reveal
themselves. Luckily, he is still able to inject some of the warmth in
his solo piano writing without accessing available themes, so once
again, the music suffices on a primordial level. Without a title theme,
and certainly without any statement of resolution at the end,
War of
the Worlds is not a readily enjoyable Williams score, however, a
reflection of the composer's desire not to resolve anything in this
composition. The closest cue Williams has to adapt for a concert
performance is "The Return to Boston" (and only portions therein), which
resembles some of his
Raiders of the Lost Ark franchise music in
its better enunciated organization of rhythm, propulsion by snare, and
finally tonal brass notes that take a page from
Star Wars: Revenge of
the Sith.
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Aside from the generally palatable "The Return to
Boston" cue, however, Williams' score intentionally strays towards the
intellectual consequences of the attack on humanity rather than the
bombastic alternative that would have made for better listening out of
context. The epilogue cue is all the evidence you need to support this
point; Williams provides the standard structure of a momentous string
crescendo that you would expect, followed by the solo instrumental
sendoff, but he does so with continued dissonance up to the final note,
leaving us to wonder if the tale is really finished (or lessons
learned). With this challenging conclusion in mind, the average Williams
collector will not be leaping at the chance to listen to
War of the
Worlds with any great frequency. You cannot fault Williams for
producing a score that is so largely unmemorable outside of its context,
for this path towards the atonal was obviously his merited intent. At
the same time, both the action and suspense material along these lines
has been better rendered in his previous works, even at the expense of
easy harmony, and many listeners will be reminded of
The Lost World:
Jurassic Park and the similarly interesting but equally unglamorous
score for
Minority Report when attempting to casually enjoy
War of the Worlds. These efforts will not leave you humming a
theme after their conclusions, and with a remake on the magnitude of
War of the Worlds, you can't help but wonder if the same fright
could have been realized with a sound more readily identifiable. Even
with the inherent complexities of Williams' action writing here, which
you have to appreciate for their mere prowess, you still are left
wishing for just a little continuity from cue to cue. Without the
typically masterful threads of cohesion evident in most of Williams'
work,
War of the Worlds is merely an average background listening
experience on album. That hour-long product does offer Morgan Freeman's
classy narration for the opening and closing of the film, featuring a
few alterations from the original novel. With the score functioning in
context much better than on its own, the narration is a welcome addition
to the album (if not the highlight), supplementing Williams'
disturbingly tense underscore with the deep, soothing voice of Freeman
performing some of the story's most famous lines. The album will remain
an interesting listening experience for those score collectors who
appreciate Williams' stylistic mannerisms despite how derivative they
became by this point in his career, but the many "Williams table scraps"
that form the nucleus of the work will more likely alienate the majority
of his fans who prefer his scores to have strong lines of thematic
cohesion and an obvious concert arrangement.
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The insert includes a note from Spielberg about the score and
film, as well as a list of players. The format of the unfolding insert,
however, is very cumbersome.
