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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you appreciate John Williams' high standards of complexity no matter the level of atonality or dissonance prevalent at nearly every moment of this score. Avoid it... if you prefer your Williams scores to have strong lines of thematic cohesion and an obvious concert arrangement. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
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 horn 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 the persistent jumps, sudden stops, and complete changes in direction. 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. 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 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 chooses not to provide anyone in the film with 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. Luckily, Williams still is able to provide some of the warmth in his solo piano writing without the 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. The closest cue Williams has to adapting for a concert performance is "The Return to Boston," which resembles some of his Indiana Jones music in its heightened organization of rhythm, propulsion by snare, and final, tonal brass notes that take a page from Revenge of the Sith. Aside from this "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. The epilogue cue is all the evidence you need; Williams provides the structural 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. With this in mind, the average Williams collector will not be leaping at the chance to listen to War of the Worlds with any great frequency. It's difficult to fault Williams for producing a score that is so largely unmemorable outside of its context, for this path towards the atonal was obviously his intent. At the same time, both the action and suspense has been better rendered in his previous works, even at the expense of harmony, and many listeners will be reminded of the interesting, but equally unglamorous score for Minority Report when enjoying War of the Worlds. Neither effort will leave you humming a theme after their conclusion, and with a remake on the magnitude of War of the Worlds, you can't help but wonder if the fright could have been realized with a sound more readily identifiable. Even among the complexities of Williams' action writing here, which you have to appreciate for their mere structure, you still are left wishing for just a little continuity from cue to cue. Without the typically masterful threads of cohesion usually evident in Williams' work, War of the Worlds is merely an average background listening experience on album. The album does offer Morgan Freeman's narration for the opening and closing of the film (and taken with few alterations from the novel itself). 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' tense underscore with the deep, soothing voice of Freeman performing some of the story's most famous lines. At an hour in length, the album is an interesting listening experience for those score collectors who appreciate Williams' high standards of complexity, but the score 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. ***
* includes narration by Morgan Freeman
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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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