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FILMTRACKS.COM
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VIEW 
Review of Die Another Day (David Arnold)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you applauded David Arnold's gradual shift of the
music in the James Bond franchise towards a harder, scrappier attitude
of abrasive techno and electronica style.
Avoid it... if you value any part of the heritage in the songs and scores of the franchise, for Madonna and Arnold's ultra-modern reconceptualization of its music remains a nightmare for many devoted Bond collectors.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Die Another Day: (David Arnold) With the entry of
Die Another Day in 2002, the James Bond series surpassed the
20-film mark, an extraordinary achievement considering that a handful of
those movies existed on many people's "worst films of all time" lists.
Unfortunately, this particular 007 adventure by director Lee Tamahori
proved to be among the worst of the worst, decelerating the franchise so
quickly that it concluded the Pierce Brosnan era and left a lengthy
break before Warner Brothers, MGM, and producer Barbara Broccoli, among
others, managed to reboot the concept with the help of Daniel Craig in
the far superior Casino Royale. That circumstance didn't stop
Brosnan, completing his fourth film as Bond, from teaming up with the
super-hot Halle Berry in an effort to thwart the world's newest big, bad
billionaire madmen who seek domination with special crystals, remote
fortresses, secret satellites, and other tired staples of the Bond
franchise. While the film was digging the concept into a bigger hole,
composers Monty Norman and John Barry were battling it out in court to
decide who exactly could claim the ownership of the infamous James Bond
theme. David Arnold, meanwhile, expanded upon his tenure with his third
and weakest score for the franchise. The news about Die Another
Day was nearly all bad, and for film score collectors, the
disintegration of Arnold's mastery in the Bond franchise was
particularly disappointing. He burst onto the Bond scene with the highly
acclaimed score for Tomorrow Never Dies in 1997, a work that
would lead to two albums and the rejoicing of fans of traditional Bond
music from the pen of Barry. His touch for capturing the spirit of
Barry's 007 music (and Norman's theme in particular) and merging it with
his own sensibilities had yielded an exciting and relieving sound.
Arnold's music for The World is Not Enough was a
techno/electronica experiment within the same vein, shifting the
emphasis of some of the action sequences from orchestral dominance to a
leading roll for synthetic accents, usually in the form of ripping and
slapping loops. This technique left many Bond collectors out in the
cold, and for those fans in particular, Die Another Day revealed
an even greater nightmare.
Before discussing the score for Die Another Day, however, the title song begs for its fair share of whipping. The songs in the Bond franchise are more important to the greater movie-going masses than the underscores, their legacy extending into nearly every generation of American culture, and many casual music buyers purchase the Bond soundtracks only for the title song. The songs since Brosnan's resurrection of the franchise in 1995 had been mediocre at best. From Tina Turner to Sheryl Crow and Garbage, the best of lot was ironically k.d. lang's title performance for Tomorrow Never Dies, which was rejected and sent to the end credits of its film. When Madonna was announced as the performer for the title song of Die Another Day, many Bond fans were cautiously optimistic. The female performers of Bond songs have traditionally featured a lustful, mature voice, and Madonna's tone had grown into exactly that type since her popular, slower ballads began to hit the air-waves in the mid-1990s ("Take a Bow," "You'll See," "Frozen," "The Power of Good-Bye," etc.). Additionally, her spectacular singing performances for the film Evita in 1996 exhibited a further ability to combine romance and pizzazz on the big screen. Breaking with tradition, however, the title song for Die Another Day was not written by the score's composer; instead, it was the result of Madonna, songwriter Michael Colombier, and producer Mirwais Ahmadzai, all of whom having collaborated on the singer's pop album releases of the era. Unfortunately, for the Bond franchise and all of its loyal fans, Madonna's "Die Another Day" is the worst disgrace ever to tarnish the opening credits of a James Bond film. It's even more insufferable than Jack White and Alicia Keys' dubious "Another Way to Die" for Quantum of Solace. There exists no insult that can adequately describe the hideous and inappropriate trash that Madonna and her partners smeared on Die Another Day. The most commonly cited problem with the song involves the fact that it ignores any tradition of the Bond franchise. The title song in Bond films is either a pop rock song or a love ballad, and there's no sense in trying to fix something that isn't broken by flailing around with experimental, heavily processed, genre-bending exercises. The songs submitted just prior by Crow and Garbage, while neglecting the romantic aspect of the tradition, at least played to the mainstream rock audience. Unquestionably, "Die Another Day" is an enormous leap out of the mainstream and utilizes a choppy techno and electronica style of editing and mutilation that renders it useless for both the film and for the average listener. Forget the longtime Bond fans who owned all the Barry LP soundtracks; the song in Die Another Day repulsed people well beyond that small group. The processing in particular is a fatal characteristic; the recordings of both the voice and the backing orchestra are digitally chopped into a nearly incomprehensible garble of noise that may honestly make a listener believe for a moment that there is a horrible problem with his or her stereo system. There is no flow to the song, which hides perhaps the total inadequacy of the song's melody (or lack thereof). That melody is a simplistic range of just a few notes, rendering it nearly impossible for Arnold to adapt it well into the score. Arnold, who was half-finished with his own song for the film, had no kind word for Madonna's song, admitting that it was a stretch to adapt any melodic influence from it into the score. And even though there is an overlap in the primary phrasing of the song's main verse and Arnold's primary theme, that adaptation yields one of the weakest orchestral themes in the franchise despite the composer's valiant attempts to twist it into something useful for a variety of emotional settings. The song remains proof that the composers of the scores for these films really do need to be involved in the songwriting, despite whatever territorial rights the performing artists hold over their own songs' writing. Finally, the lyrics for "Die Another Day" are even more ridiculous (or lame, if you want the common jargon) than those of other recent Bond films, making some of even the most flamboyant and embarrassing entries in the series seem like literary masterpieces by comparison. In sum, this song is painful to hear at the beginning of the film, an unequivocal disaster that some viewers joked as being appropriate for the scenes of torture seen over the rather unconventional opening credits sequence. Luckily, history hasn't been kind to Madonna's venture into the realm of Bond, aside, perhaps, from the display of her impressive biceps in her on-screen fencing cameo in Die Another Day. If you can manage to survive the song at the start of Die Another Day, the score by Arnold is a continuation of the style of thinking from The World is Not Enough rather than the true combination of orchestral jazz and electronic samplings heard in Tomorrow Never Dies. Arnold didn't really reach the same, strong merging of such sounds until Quantum of Solace, and the harsh, processed attitude of Die Another Day is alone a killing factor for a significant number of listeners. Arnold seems to have attempted to follow the same inspiration that guided Madonna's song, pointing to the artificially enhanced nature of the villain's body and his impressive science-fiction technology to justify the obvious technological abrasiveness to the music. (Never mind that Bond himself is the same hero, which seems to get lost here.) The famous hovercraft chase scene's music is chopped up with the almost identical, nonsensical editing that ruined the song. Portions of the orchestra are artificially cut to silence for a fraction of a second, causing a stutter-stop motion to the music that was probably intended to enhance the pace of the action in the film. Not surprisingly, the technique is nothing more than obnoxious. In fact, this same technique taints several cues throughout the score, though to lesser degrees. Arnold seemingly altered the natural reverberation sound of the orchestra and electronic programming as well. Notes begin normally, but end artificially and too soon, and this is continued for countless sequences in some action cues. The overall sound of the action cues is therefore defined by unnaturally abrupt edges that frankly sound dumb when involving a full ensemble in the mix. This ploy is particularly disturbing in the case of a handful of the larger orchestral cues, for the original unaltered studio performance has quite a vibrant sound to it. There are a handful of cues left untampered with, and you can really hear the orchestra's vivacious power in the percussion of "Some Kind of Hero?" and "Antonov." In other sections, the orchestra's solo performances seem to be edited not with cuts to silence, but rather with a simple removal of the reverberation, causing the score to sound as though it was recording in a tiny auditorium. Another major problem is Arnold's emphasis on sound effects in the high treble region; some of the zipping effects, likely to emulate a laser beam given this plot, are difficult to tolerate for any length of time. As these looped elements from Arnold progressively became higher in pitch through the years, the music became more unpalatable. If the destruction of the music's flow during the editing process doesn't bother you in regards to the Die Another Day score, then perhaps the imbalance between ensemble and synth array will put you over the edge. Arnold's delicate, but successful balance between Barry's traditional, orchestral jazz and his own electronica and techno tendencies in Tomorrow Never Dies is lost to the relentless slashing of the electronic programming here. He simply cannot shake the constant electronic looping for very long, and whenever he begins to adopt a purely Barry-like progression of strings or brass, the cue is cut short by electronic laser sounds or the mad pounding of tinny drum pad emulations. Absent from this score are some of the five or six minute juggernaut cues of orchestral and electronic mastery that Arnold has produced for his other scores in the franchise. Even the lengthier action sequences in this film switch stylistic genres of music with such frequency the listener can have difficulty adapting. A few cases of temp track influences contribute to this problem, especially in the lengthy finale sequence aboard the plane. The few moments of more low key character building, such as the Jinx-related cues heard during her introductory scenes, show hints of more readily accessible and engaging material, but Arnold never unleashes the full orchestra in these moments until the very last cue. In terms of creativity in its instrumentation and rhythms, the score is, in a word, uninspired. It is evidence of a composer simply going through the motions, and it's not surprising that many critics and fans were calling for a new composer to accompany the reboot of the franchise after Brosnan declined to return for the money offered. Arnold did, to his credit, insert a monumentally mixed choral sound into Die Another Day, a rarity for the franchise. The full, male choral performances are an interesting and perhaps under-explored method of handling a master villain, though critics still cite an over-reliance on Stargate-like sounds in the composer's career. The lengthy "Antonov" offers a solo female voice as well as an ensemble chorale, and these occasionally magnificent moments save the score from being a total waste. A cimbalom-like plucked autoharp is a nicely exotic touch for one of the villains, and a few stylistic references to Barry's material for On Her Majesty's Secret Service (descending baseline in action cues) and You Only Live Twice (flowery string romance for the Jinx theme) are cool, but usually lost in the overall equation. Thematically, despite introducing two recurring major themes, Die Another Day seems like a one-dimensional score because of Arnold's almost constant exploration of his main theme loosely tied, perhaps by coincidence, to Madonna's song. This theme makes a compelling appearance during the prisoner exchange sequence and is woven into the fabric of many of the subsequent action cues. Lighter shades are rare but outstanding when explored, including the fuller secondary lines exposed beautifully by piano and other softer performers in "Peaceful Fountains of Desire" and "A Touch of Frost." In its most ominous applications, mostly in relation to the villains, the theme faintly foreshadows the deep brass treatment that Arnold would provide for the Quantum organization a few films later in the franchise. The score's most interesting specialty instruments are devoted to the villains, including the use of the accelerating autoharp motif for the North Koreans. The composer also offers the Norman theme a significant roll in Die Another Day, ranging in incarnation from loyal solo electric guitar strumming to wildly frenetic techno variations. Both this classic theme and the main theme for the film were arranged into an intolerable electronic mess for a rejected end credits suite, "James Bond Will Return," which seems like mostly a regurgitation of the obnoxious parts of "Hovercraft Chase" repackaged a second time. A heavily Barry-like, descending string theme for Jinx, introduced in "Jinx Jordan" and "Jinx & James" before mostly disappearing until "Going Down Together" at the end, is not as well adapted into the mass of the score's material, diminishing her character's impact on the music. A few other secondary themes, some of which quite noble in intent, peek through in Die Another Day, sometimes mingling with themes established by Arnold in previous films. The bass plucking from the start of the Goldeneye song is reprised. A descending piano motif for danger carries over to late action cues. The main theme for Tomorrow Never Dies is heard on subdued horn at 1:35 into "Kiss of Life" as a clever reference to Bond's jeopardized career. The pretty love theme from The World is Not Enough, reduced to only its secondary, ascendant phrasing to eliminate that movie's main theme from it, is heard in this score's final two cues, especially wrapping the Moneypenny story arc well. Arnold's massive, general villain theme from the prior two scores returns, exploding at the end of the full version of "On the Beach" and heard several times thereafter for moments when villains are shown in their fully overblown, badass mode. Joining the references to other Brosnan-era scores in the music for Die Another Day are several nods to Barry's general style at specific points, including the well known snare rips that Barry loved to use while the villains were describing their nasty plans and the descending baseline of On Her Majesty's Secret Service under some of the main theme performances. The problem with these subtle references, however, is that they were drowned out in the film and mostly missing from the woeful commercial album released at the time of the film's debut. Both Tomorrow Never Dies and The World is Not Enough were badly represented by their initial commercial album offerings. In the case of the latter score, no bootleg was quickly forthcoming to appease angry collectors. The same was not the case with Die Another Day, which was spread around in 2-CD bootleg format within just a few years of its recording. In 2017, roughly the same film-order presentation of the score as heard on the bootleg was cleaned up and offered officially by La-La Land Records, which also added a variety of alternate mixes to its product. The two previous Bond scores really did have significant, lengthy, and superior material missing from their initial commercial albums. While the double-CD presentations of Die Another Day will offer some material that will clear up Arnold's thematic intents and include some of the less irritating action material, they really don't improve the appeal of the score by great margins. There are interesting, short cues that will be worthy of an Arnold/Bond compilation, but nothing of absolute necessity. The "Kiss of Life" cue, which includes the keen Tomorrow Never Dies reference, builds off of the score's earliest suspense moments with a few minutes of melodramatic conversational backing. The main theme's elegant translations onto solo piano in "Peaceful Fountains of Desire" and "A Touch of Frost" are required listening. The strong action cue "Jinx, James, and Genes" contains outstanding fragmentary development of the main theme against the best homage to On Her Majesty's Secret Service and finishes with a great performance on trumpets of Norman's theme at the end; this cue, from 1:42 onward, is undeniably attractive and often drops the electronic loops to leave the ensemble alone. A traditional guitar performance of the Norman theme in "Gustav Graves' Grand Entrance" is interrupted by a terrible, stuttering performance of Arnold's recurrent villain's theme, this time overwhelmed by frantic overlays in this performance that are totally ridiculous and unnecessary. The cue for Madonna's conveniently sleeveless cameo in Die Another Day is surprisingly lush and contains no eye-winking hints of the song. Both "Blades" (alternately "Sword Fight") and "Bond Gets the Key" use the main theme extensively, the former with the usual wailing brass and the latter with the autoharp. Arnold gets cute with "Virtual Reality," ending the cue with an intentional shutdown of declining pitch and one last guitar strum to show a sense of humor. It's funny but unlistenable. The subsequent and short "The Vanish" features an ultra cool blend of the orchestra and techno elements performing the Norman theme. The glory of Goldfinger's wailing brass figures explodes in the shamelessly flamboyant "Bond Goes to Iceland." The major action piece missing from the original commercial album is "Ice Palace Car Chase," a generic blend of the difficult action material heard before (and again in "Switchblades"). All the albums unfortunately include the preceding "Iced Inc.," which could have been used as a sonic torture device at government detention camps worldwide. The concluding, symphony-only action cue, "Antonov Gets It" (mislabeled "Going Down Together" on the bootleg) deconstructs the recurring villain motif and concludes with a snazzy tribute to the Norman theme. That classic tune is offered on both albums in two versions of "Wheelchair Access," the rejected one with tapped cymbal at the outset a clearly superior recording. The swagger of this cue is saturating, fragments of the main theme calling out on flutes and trumpets like a siren against Bond's confident coolness. The longer albums will also please listeners seeking sentimental endings, the love theme from The World is Not Enough finally represented in the longing "Moneypenny Gets It" and Bond's affair with Jinx in "Going Down Together" (alternately "Diamonds") with true You Only Live Twice intentions. The La-La Land product also features a number of other alternate takes, highlighted by a smoother conclusion to the romantic "Peaceful Fountains of Desire" and a pair of softer cues with the already-minimal synthetic elements removed. It's unfortunate that some of the action cues could not have been featured with the loops stripped. Hearing a major cue like "Ice Palace Car Chase," for instance, with the synthetic elements reduced by 50% to 75% in the mix would have been a tremendous treat to hear, and there was room on the album for at least one such inclusion. The remaining film versions of the cues on the La-La Land album are moderately interesting by comparison but certainly not vital. Overall, the expanded presentations available for Arnold's Die Another Day are interesting in the whole and redemptive to some degree, but they ultimately expose the reality that the music is still the weakest of the composer's five consecutive Bond scores. The commercial product remains a clearly miserable experience to suffer, however. Several aspects of the album are unsavory, starting with the inconsistent mix of the bass elements from track to track, with gain levels also not normalized. A comparison with the 2017 expanded set will reveal very different sound quality in certain cues as compared to the 2002 original, and it may be of interest to die-hard fans that even the bootleg contains a unique and sometimes superior sound quality. In terms of contents, there are pieces of the commercial album that are almost laughable in the context of a Bond franchise that had seen better times. The Paul Oakenfold remix of the classic Bond theme is sadly predictable and offers nothing of substance. There is the absence of any conclusive end credits song or suite on the product. The Cuban-flavored source cues are barely tolerable; they were rolled into a distinct, alternate version for that album whereas the actual cues heard in the film waited for the longer albums. The consistently jarring stutter-step editing in the early cues will end the listening experience for some enthusiasts. The album is surprisingly brief, continuing a trend at the time of shorter albums for each successive Bond film. But it did contain Madonna's song, which is absent from the 2017 set for licensing reasons. While such omissions are usually unforgivable, the loss of that song is a benefit here; there's a reason why people stand around texting and journey to the lines at the toilets whenever that particular song begins during Madonna's concerts. Its total disregard for the franchise's heritage and its unlistenable editing is a waste of Madonna's mature voice and reduces her to an inflective tone as mousy as that of her hits of the mid-1980's. In its condensed presentation, and to a lesser extent on the longer albums, this score has no cinematic sweep, no consistent action material worthy of the character, and no melodic love theme to mark the film's place in the rich history of Bond music. It is a sickening listening experience for which Tomorrow Never Dies is the only antidote and, fortunately, the pursuit of a strikingly modern and edgy attitude for the Bond songs and scores was finally balanced peacefully in the subsequent Casino Royale. When soundtracks need an antidote, you know it's time for them to die on any day.
TRACK LISTINGS:
2002 Warner Album:
Total Time: 55:01
2004 Bootleg: Total Time: 106:14
(The above contents are only a sample of the most common of bootleg variations) 2017 La-La Land Album: Total Time: 148:05
* Previously unreleased ** Contains previously unreleased material # Contains the "James Bond Theme" written by Monty Norman
NOTES & QUOTES:
The 2002 Warner album's insert contains but no extra information about the
film, score, or song. That product has enhanced CD features, including a movie poster gallery
from Bond's history and content mostly related to the song. The bootlegs feature a wide range
of fan-created art. The insert of the 2018 La-La Land album contains extensive notes about
the score and film.
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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Die Another Day are Copyright © 2002, 2004, 2017, Warner Bros. Records, 2-CD Bootleg, La-La Land Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 11/12/02 and last updated 2/23/19. |
