Continuing my rundown of scores mentioned in last summer’s Big Board Extravaganza that I haven’t heard before.
Last time - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=135032
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This time - Mission to Mars (2000)
Ennio Morricone
Mentioned by: Southall
Behold, the score that killed Hollywood for Morricone. That’s not to say he stopped working outside Europe after this, but after averaging at least one major English-language film per year in the 1990s Morricone wouldn’t provide music for another major U.S. film after this one until 2015’s The Hateful Eight. Brian de Palma’s panned sci-fi misadventure produced a rarity: a Morricone score that is genuinely divisive. It was no surprise that Morricone would avoid the standard sounds of space opera, not only because he usually marched to the beat of his own drum but also because he thought scores such as Star Wars were too commercial for his tastes. Still, the end result left fans who adored the score, others who liked the music but questioned its role in the film, and those who just felt it doesn’t work (plus perhaps a fourth contingent of folks whose distaste for the film overwhelmed any thoughts they had about the music on its own).
For what it's worth, I know I saw the film when it came out in theaters but only remembered a tornado ripping a guy’s limbs off - something that got a laugh out of me and my fellow teenage friends, though perhaps not the friend’s dad who thought he was taking us to a nice ol’ space movie. So between that and the aforementioned community schisms this was perhaps the biggest question mark of this rundown - and thus perhaps the work I was most interested to finally get to. What would it be like? Would I weep? Would it break my brain? Would it be worse than The Serpent?
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For the most part, the score is spectacular when heard standalone, a mix of understated emotive moments, full-on suspense, and exultant wonder - as if Ennio was looking to contemplate the entire spectrum of possibilities about journeying into the starry unknown. A track like the album opener A Heart Beats in Space that mixes shimmering strings, baroque trumpet calls, heavenly choir, and drifting electric guitar seems like madness in theory but is captivating in practice. Instead of a series of variations and arrangements of a core set of themes, a common occurrence when Morricone scores reach this work’s length of an hour or more, a lot of the tracks here are built as lengthy setpieces, the 13-minute Sacrifice of a Hero (alternatingly tense, heroic, and mournful) perhaps the most marvelously constructed of them. Bits of the score are challenging, including some unnerving dissonance in the middle of that aforementioned track and an omnipresent organ in Towards the Unknown, but the only real minus - at least on album - is the seemingly random bleeps and bloops that dominate the later portions of And Afterwards?, the composer’s occasional penchant for the avant-garde resulting in a truly intolerable two minutes of retro sci-fi sounds.
Mission to Mars came out on CD in the U.S. nine months before iTunes launched. It currently has no presence on U.S. digital / streaming services, though it is relatively straightforward to find uploads on YouTube. Even by Morricone’s standards, the album arrangement is a bit maddening and will likely necessitate some rearranging for most listeners. The program frontloads the more wondrous tracks and ends not with the spectacular finale piece Where? but instead the more subdued sax tones of All the Friends which is the first track sequentially. Stranger still is that the evolution of Morricone’s ascending three-note motif from one of danger amidst a meteor strike (Towards the Unknown) and subsequent spaceship evacuation (Sacrifice of a Hero) to something more serene when the astronauts enter a projection of the solar system (A Martian) is jumbled because the latter track appears on the CD first.
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Ok…but what about how it functions in context? Answering that question required a rewatch of what I think I can safely say is the worst film I’ve ever watched based on a desire to understand the role of the music in the movie.
A Heart Beats in Space occupies the film’s end credits, though in my opinion it works better as an album opener. The film’s lengthy opening tracking shot at a cookout is accompanied by a blues accordion piece and a later bit of camera trickery features a Van Halen song, meaning it takes a while for the score to make a notable impact. The first 40 minutes of the movie have what seems like 5-6 minutes of Morricone’s contributions in total, a mix of bits of All the Friends, A World Which Searches, And Afterwards?, and A Wife Lost or unreleased variations on their ideas (plus one brassy piece which didn’t make the album) likely thrown around by a music editor. Once the ship is struck by meteorites, Towards the Unknown and Sacrifice of a Hero play in full; this escape sequence is often praised as the only part of the film that works well (if at all), and Morricone’s music is often an asset when it comes to ratcheting up the tension.
An Unexpected Surprise covers the crew’s reunion with Don Cheadle’s stranded character (the actor saying he said yes to doing the movie because of THE SCRIPT might be the funniest thing I’ve read this year). Much of Ecstasy of Mars and And Afterwards? play during the subsequent scenes on the red planet, though the random bloops of the latter track don’t appear in the film (neither do the synth vocals from A Wife Lost). A Martian, A World Which Searches, and Where? cover the film’s climactic sequences of revelation and departure - a limp and lifeless finale, but the composer’s music is so good that he almost manages to ring some genuine cosmic pathos out of it.
In short, the movie Mission to Mars is abysmal to the point that even the greatest score of all time couldn’t have salvaged it. But Morricone wrote some spectacular pieces for the film, enhanced a few sections of it, and didn’t make any of it worse. It’s not the most wretched movie the maestro ever worked on, all thanks to the existence of Exorcist II: The Heretic, so perhaps it’s more fair to say it’s the worst movie to ever produce a great Morricone score.
*****
Album - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjFfveBCdIKN1twKShz7MP3_aqGYJfk8Z
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Next time: 2003
