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:
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" receives a $135 million Steven Spielberg facelift with megastar Tom Cruise as the heart of its people story. Written just before 1900, the story is best known for the historic 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast in which Welles 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). 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. Critics haven't been 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 has been classified as a distinctly mundane film. Don't tell that to composer John Williams, however, whose level of complexity in his music has maintained itself with force as we venture further past the turn of the century. Spielberg's usual collaborator, Williams offers 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 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 an intellectual one rather than something blatantly victorious. Williams responds by providing music that is so enveloped in this chaos that he actually writes a score with no 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 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. *** Track Listings:
Total Time: 61:01
* includes narration by Morgan Freeman All artwork and sound clips from War of the Worlds are Copyright © 2005, Decca 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 7/1/05, updated 7/2/05. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2005, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
