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| Jóhannsson |
Arrival: (Jóhann Jóhannsson) When
confronted by constant stupidity in alien invasion films from Hollywood,
it's easy to be attracted to a philosophical exploration of sociology
and time in a movie like Denis Villeneuve's
Arrival. In the 2016
story, alien pods hover above the earth in nations across the world,
seemingly encouraging humans to work together to decipher their
complicated language and the meaning of their visit. An American
linguist makes the most promising breakthrough with the alien creatures,
determining why they have visited Earth and learning to view the future
with frightening acuity. While posing as a thought-provoking study of
humanity's capacity for understanding,
Arrival is also as naive
as it is depressing on both a global and personal level. The assumptions
and fallacies of the film betray its intellectual prowess and reveal it
to be yet another poor attempt to approach first contact with aliens
from a "realistic" viewpoint. Still, audiences and critics applauded its
stab at originality, earning it significant box office returns and
awards nominations. Those who roll their eyes at the forced
intellectualism of the story's premise will find equal exacerbation when
hearing the film's music. Icelandic composer and sound designer
Jóhann Jóhannsson reunites with Villeneuve for
Arrival after the composer's oddly respected music for 2015's
Sicario laid waste to that picture. By comparison to the
composer's
The Theory of Everything, which brought him his
mainstream international recognition, both
Sicario and
Arrival are primarily sound design scores, an extension of sound
effects editing but with rhythmic and tonal inclinations. Positive
reviews awaited Jóhannsson once again for
Arrival, and yet
the score suffers from the same badly disillusioning tendency towards
over-thinking that plagues soundtracks for dramatic films attempting to
make a statement through creatively ambient minimalism. While the likes
of Michael Nyman or Philip Glass could (and have) pulled off this kind
of smart introspection without sacrificing the primordial connection
that viewers make with their film scores, Jóhannsson strives to
drop all conventions and instead present what he must consider a
psychologically alien score, one meant to play upon the linguistic
themes of the film through highly unusual, vaguely musical textures of
sound.
Themeless, ambient scores like
Arrival cater to
those who adamantly reject the suckers claiming the greatness of every
Hans Zimmer superhero film score, and yet the end result of the music is
no more satisfying in any context. Jóhannsson has combined an
orchestral presence with highly manipulated voices and other effects to
produce a droning environment of dread and somber pontification that
only occasionally expresses a change in emotion to denote the typical
ups and downs of any story. Notably, the music represents hopelessness
until its final two Jóhannsson cues, developing a series of
cyclical vocal edits to suggest the circular language of the aliens.
Aside from "Rise" and "Kangaru," there exists no musical journey in
Arrival, no intelligent alternation between the known musical
universe and this clearly foreign one generated by Jóhannsson.
The latter really doesn't make any appreciable impact without first
deconstructing the former, so the composer is in fact erroneously
suggesting that all of human reality is actually in a dream-like trance, a
dazed stupor that is incapable of processing even the expected fear and
excitement of an alien visit. There will be listeners who appreciate the
extent to which Jóhannsson recorded and manipulated various
voices to represent the encounter, and that's great. But what about the
humans of the story? Our planet? Our society? Are we really that devoid
of outward emotional impact? Is it really sufficient to address the
gravity of a potential alien invasion with only a couple of cues that
adequately utilize the bass region? Is the concept of character
development through motific suggestion impossible simply because we
cannot communicate with or easily understand the alien entities? Is the
story merely one big hallucination? Or is the score for
Arrival
simply another attempt by a sound designer-turned-composer to suggest
intellectualism by striving to be different? Bingo! The entire score
reeks of forced creativity, compelling listeners to "try harder" to
unlock its mysteries. Most of the time, folks, life isn't that
complicated. Ultimately, the score for
Arrival is an immense
underachievement and tiresome bore masquerading as finely tuned
artistry. Not surprisingly, the most noteworthy music in the film is Max
Richter's 2004 string quartet "On the Nature of Daylight," opening and
closing the movie elegantly and representing the family element in ways
Jóhannsson's sound design clearly could not. The laborious album
experience, which doesn't even include the Richter piece (seriously?),
is as depressingly maddening as any in recent memory. May the therapists
rejoice!
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
