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Review of The Day After Tomorrow (Harald Kloser)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you're looking for epic disaster music that serves as
an ironically pleasant listening experience for a bright, sunny day.
Avoid it... if you expect any semblance of sophistication, depth, excitement, or even any interesting bombast in what remains, despite its solemnly noble main theme, one of the most disappointingly generic disaster scores of all time.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
The Day After Tomorrow: (Harald Kloser) To
understand why ridiculous movies like 2004's The Day After
Tomorrow even get made, you have to look upon the fortunes and
personality of director/co-producer/co-writer Roland Emmerich, an avid
environmentalist who votes Green Party and has had an obsession with
worldwide disaster scenarios ever since his childhood. Thus, The Day
After Tomorrow is a culmination of everything that an obsessed man
like Emmerich could ever want: a story about impending environmental
doom, not-so-subtle attacks on the policies of the George W. Bush/Dick
Cheney administration in America during an election year (you just have
to love how much actor Kenneth Welsh looked like the equally
untrustworthy, corporate-bought Cheney), and, of course, spectacular
shots of immense destruction of the landscape. The city of New York in
particular, not spared a fiery demise in Independence Day and the
massive feet of a monster in Godzilla, wasn't even sacred for
Emmerich's in the post-9/11 era. Without a doubt, the filmmaker and his
crew are quite adept at showing the annihilation of cityscapes, but what
seems to escape these people is any sense of reality, logic, drama,
passion, emotion, tension, psychology, or even witty humor. As with
Emmerich's other disaster flicks, the highlight of The Day After
Tomorrow is indeed the 20 or so minutes of total chaos that ensues
at the sudden start of the next ice age. The rest of the film, dealing
with the smaller human dramas of the main characters, is bland at best,
and that distinction also applies to Harald Kloser's score. Emmerich's
previous disaster films had featured the popular orchestral action of
David Arnold, but a disagreement between them over the 2000 film The
Patriot ended their collaboration (Arnold's skyrocketing fees may
have prohibited him from this one as well had it not been for the
strained relationship). Kloser, who was widely known only for his
average score for 1999's The Thirteenth Floor, was at the start
of a transformation from composer to screenwriter and producer for other
like-minded films of minimal intellect in the 2000's. His music for
The Day After Tomorrow and the similar 2012 several years
later are considered subpar by most film score collectors, and 2004 was
a particularly missed opportunity for Kloser (with this scoring
assignment joined by the similarly numb Alien vs. Predator). As
expected, Kloser takes a mainly orchestral approach for this Western
human drama, though his result is far less inspiring than Arnold's early
music for the genre.
Like the film as a whole, the ingredients for a good score were in place. Kloser's music is basically sufficient in its length, attention to melody, and emotional development. Where it sadly lacks, however, is in its depth and level of enthusiasm for the massive scale for which it plays. The music takes no chances, slipping into the realm of cliches and stock sounds at times when a truly powerful score was called for. The opening of the score has the expected female vocal to represent either human vulnerability or Mother Nature (it doesn't really matter which it is) and presents a solid but uninspiring Hans Zimmer-light theme that ultimately dissolves into the use of a solo trumpet to salute the fallen. The progressions of this idea are about as juvenile and simplistic as one could get, earnest in its lack of sophistication and vaguely noble. The stereotypical tones continue as the action begins quickly; the "Tornado Warning" cue offers a tolling chime for humanity, deep bass strings foreshadowing death, and even a distant screeching sound effect for scary ambience. Kloser whips out a solo viola or violin for a stab at the sounds of persecution. Meandering notes at the very bottom of a piano mark another overplayed horror technique in "Blizzard." When waves are crashing and millions are dying, Kloser sets pounding percussion and various electronic clicking sounds to metallic rhythms that are a welcome spark of life, but they never sustain themselves long enough to generate much interest. The cues of subtle underscore are sensitive and plenty throughout The Day After Tomorrow, easy and tonal by nature, often repeating a secondary humanity theme in some long, drawn-out variation. The reprise of the main theme in "President's Speech" is yawn-inducing compared to Arnold's equivalent for Independence Day, perhaps even leaving the listener yearning for the emotional depth of James Horner's Deep Impact (no matter how unoriginal that score was). More frequent use of the female vocals by Carmel Echols could have injected this score with some additional life; she performs only four notes on the album presentation, a bizarre shame. In the end, you hear score like Alan Silvestri's Volcano: decent, functional, but not memorable by any stretch of the imagination. There's absolutely nothing here to match the engaging instrumental and vocal tones of Kloser's subsequent 10,000 BC. Ironically, the album for The Day After Tomorrow, while short and perhaps diminishing of Kloser's effort, is a generally consistent and smooth listening experience. It's a rare circumstance in which you have an epic disaster score that serves as pleasant atmosphere for a bright, sunny day. Unfortunately, that's not what Kloser was probably looking to achieve.
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 38:24
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert includes a list of performers but no extra
information about the score or film.
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