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Written 5/18/12
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Buy it... if you've always dreamt of hearing the excruciating sound
of an MRI machine translated into music, in which case Steve Jablonsky's
score will pierce your head with equally mind-numbing pain.
Avoid it... unless you crave the harsh, mechanized sound design
that defines the most grating portion of the Hans Zimmer generation of
muscular bombast and you have no issue with 87% of all the score's notes
being pounded with ensemble unison on key.
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| Jablonsky |
Battleship: (Steve Jablonsky) Don't be fooled by
the attempts by Universal Pictures and filmmaker Peter Berg to attach
their 2012 fantasy action movie Battleship to the classic board
game. While there are basic similarities between some of the combat
sequences and number of opposing vessels involved in the story,
Battleship is little more than another pointless alien invasion
film glorifying American military might. A small fleet of hostile alien
ships lands near Hawaii and engages the terrestrial naval forces in
combat, rendering some of their targeting systems useless in ways that
require the hit and miss firing approach of the game. When exhausted of
destroyers and other vessels, the humans have to resurrect the American
Iowa class battleship Missouri (surely thrilling Japanese audiences) and
use yesteryear's flagship and its ultimate phallic weapons to screw the
aliens out of existence. Never mind that the USS Missouri and its three
sister ships were decommissioned in the early 1990's; the movie would
have been more interesting if the humans had lost the battle because of
the kind of turret-exploding mishap that occurred aboard the USS Iowa in
1989. Naturally, the movie leaves open the possibility for a sequel, so
perhaps someone can raise a Yamato or Bismark class battleship from the
bottom of the ocean, scrub off the rust, put it back together, and
continue blasting away at alien ships with other giant phalluses of the
past. Hell, even something from the Dreadnought era of the 1900's would
suffice, as long as it has appropriate phalluses in the form of 12-inch
guns. Let's not forget some wretched characters and inexcusable dialogue
for the concept, too, an aspect of Battleship clearly deemed
unimportant by those who awarded the movie over $200 million in grosses.
Berg's opinion of movie composers is poor ("They're difficult and
pretentious"), but he loves Hans Zimmer and was handed Steve Jablonsky
as a consolation prize for Battleship. The director had worked
with other Zimmer-associated composers in the past, including Harry
Gregson-Williams and John Powell (guess which is "pretentious"?), but he
was thrilled by the workmanlike effort of Jablonsky. A veteran of the
Transformers franchise, Jablonsky could handle an assignment such
as Battleship with his library of discarded ideas from prior
projects. From the sounds of it, he did precisely that. But having
recently experienced an MRI for medical reasons, Berg instructed
Jablonsky to sample the sound of an MRI machine for use as the musical
identity of the aliens in this movie. The composer gladly did so, and
for those of you who have been unfortunate enough to tolerate the
excruciating sound of an MRI, now you have the pleasure of appreciating
that terrible memory as a film score!
If you thought that Jablonsky had reached the pinnacle
of masculinity in his
Transformers work, then you are wrong. He
infuses that sound with Zimmer's
Inception to set a new world
record for the most notes pounded on key during one score. It wouldn't
be surprising if Jablonsky's software revealed that 87% of the notes in
Battleship exist on key. When in doubt, stomp broadly on key just
to make sure the audience understands the gravity of the situation...
hundreds of times. The orchestral ensemble consists of strings in the
usual "chop here for urgency" mode, brass in the "play in unison to
imitate a synthesizer" mode, and percussion in the "pound repeatedly to
induce a headache" mode. No need for dainty woodwinds. Electric guitars
and rock percussion are unleashed in several cues, guitarist Tom Morello
laying waste to a couple of late scenes. The synthetic manipulation of
the MRI sound and other nasty and nightmarish electronic noises grace
the score, sometimes emulating the famed "wrong answer" sound from
"Family Feud," applied here for the battle-station alarm notification
("It's Your Ship Now"). The MRI noise is truly hideous; the fact that a
person has now made music with that sound is testimony to how far some
people will go to try to innovate. Unfortunately, there's nothing
innovative about Jablonsky's actual structures. A noble theme for the
Navy ("The Art of War") is also obsessed with notes on key. He has a
secondary idea that owes mostly to Gregson-Williams but has a little
Gladiator in it. The actual theme for the villains also revolves
around the key on low strings before resorting to its pounding ("Regents
Are on the Mainland"). These ideas are lacking any novelty in their
progressions or statements, "We Have a Battleship" revisiting
Crimson
Tide and elements of finesse like counterpoint and complex meter
adjustments totally absent. In fact, the intellectual highlight of the
entire score could be the single note at 4:19 into "Objects Make
Impact," when the brass actually split to perform a minimally complex
chord. Most of the score is content to click, grind, and thump away in
sound design methodology, shifting between notes in predictably
melodramatic minor-key fashion. The pair of "The Aliens" and "Planet G"
is a total waste of eight minutes of air time with its wobbling
electronic effects and generic string ostinatos. Only slight redemption
comes in the heroes' sendoff in "Silver Star" and with bagpipes in
"Hopper." Otherwise,
Battleship is an intellectual wasteland of
rehashed action for mechanized situations from previous movies. The
77-minute score-only album is an extremely arduous prospect, especially
for MRI sufferers. And for anyone who argues that brainless movies
deserve brainless music, recall the late, legendary Jerry Goldsmith and
imagine what he could have conjured for this context. Chalk up another
loss for the Zimmer generation.
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Bias Check:
For Steve Jablonsky reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.2
(in 15 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.47
(in 11,924 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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