The Dish: (Edmund Choi) Few people know that Australia played
a pivotal role in the broadcasting of live images during astronaut Neil Armstrong's
historic step onto the moon in 1969. The film
The Dish is the story of the
Australian satellite complex, located on a sheep paddock, which served as the
backup transmitter for the live images from the moon to reach the rest of the
world. When the primary NASA satellite in America malfunctioned during the mission,
the Australians served a silent, heroic part in the adventure by ensuring that the
iconic imagery from space could be seen. A character drama with a decent cast, the
film is a lightweight tale that received primarily positive reviews from critics in
2000 but failed to win the hearts of audiences. Director Rob Sitch was familiar
with the music of composer Edmund Choi, who had been director M. Night Shyamalan's
first collaborator on two projects and had worked to re-score a Sitch film a year
before. With Choi's career still in its fledgling stages, his music for
Wide
Awake had been heard on an album circulated around the film score community at
about the same time. For
The Dish, Choi would be given the task of writing a
friendly, patriotic score for the hometown Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and a local
choir. He indeed accomplished this feat, but at a cost. Every once in a while,
there are productions that rely so heavily on their temp tracked music (usually at
the hands of the director) that it cripples their finished products. This is a
picture-perfect example of this phenomenon. The temp track influences in Choi's
work for
The Dish are so pronounced that the score translates into something
of an oddity. Choi's finished score, albeit pleasant and undemanding, is a mirror
image of those temped scores: James Horner's
Apollo 13 and, to a lesser
extent, Bill Conti's
The Right Stuff. While Conti's work was a well-known
staple of 1980's cinema,
Apollo 13 remained NASA's musical calling card
throughout the 1990's and into the 2000's. The combination of nobility and yearning
in Horner's Oscar-nominated 1995 score has proven to perfectly encapsulate the
spirit of space flight, and it's obvious that Sitch (or someone else on the
production team) agreed.
It is difficult to say where a project like this goes wrong, if
even at all, but the music is common enough in its genre to slip past 90% of the
film's general viewership without much notice. The other 10%, the film score
enthusiasts, will either cry foul immediately or scratch their heads in amazement.
If a professor of film music composition at the college level wanted to choose a
score as part of an exercise identifying the close adaptation of existing material,
Choi's
The Dish would be a perfect specimen. The themes, motifs, and
instrumentation are just varied enough to avoid potential legal troubles, and yet
the similarities to
Apollo 13 in particular are a textbook study. The solo
trumpet, tolling chimes, rolling snare drum, anxious piano, light choir, and
stylish solo voice are all employed in very similar fashion, ensuring that every
aspect of
Apollo 13 was adapted into
The Dish in some form or
another. As blatant as it may be, the interesting aspect of the adaptation is that
the music stands strongly as a coherent score, which perhaps serves as testimony to
the strength of Horner's inspiring material. Despite the troubling structure of the
score in several very short cues, few of which able to develop their own
individuality, the listening experience is still quite stable. On the whole, with
each passing cue, you hear another snippet of a Horner lovefest, culminating into
the score's most blatant and massive
Apollo 13 borrowing at the climax of
the film. With the help of Tina Arena's voice, an angelic choir, and a rich,
harmonic orchestral performance, Choi manages to completely recreate the Annie
Lennox end titles cue from
Apollo 13. In its own right, this piece, "The
Day the World Stood Still," is an easy highlight of the score. Whether the average
Horner collector can get past the similarities at the root of the problem is
another issue. Those who despise Horner's tendency to lift his own material will
find
The Dish to be an ironic and potentially obnoxious twist on Horner's
own habits. The album, which fell out of print quickly, contains less than 30
minutes of score and is tuned towards a collection of 1960's source songs in its
first half. Probably for financial reasons, they are not songs from the era that
you will likely recognize, but there will be a gem in the selection for any
listener. Overall,
The Dish is a bizarre listening experience, one that
didn't help catapult Choi's career onto bigger and more original assignments.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
The insert includes a note from the producer of the score and film.
