Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,734
Written 12/23/13
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Buy it... if challenging textures are your desire, newcomer Ryan
Amon proving his capability in providing every tone and emotion you
could imagine in this fascinating debut.
Avoid it... if you expect Amon, whose experience is largely in
trailer scoring, to be able to connect all of his brief ideas into one
cohesive whole, this working desperately lacking clear themes or
narrative flow.
Elysium: (Ryan Amon) Apparently, the futuristic
apartheid message seen in Neill Blomkamp's highly acclaimed 2009 film
District 9 wasn't enough to satisfy the director's need to
inflict leftist political agendas upon the world. In 2013's
Elysium, he takes that anti-apartheid idea truly global and
further out in the future, making the entire planet of Earth into the
sub-class and the people in the massive Elysium station orbiting the
planet into the elite tormentors. Never mind the fact that such a
societal arrangement and its technological manifestations are not
possible by the year 2154, when the movie is set, but then again,
Blomkamp's intent was to unmask current inequities through this giant
fantasy metaphor, admitting his political goal. For those who don't care
about immigration, health care, and other class-related issues,
Elysium is a glittery enough science fiction/action spectacle to
suffice for those with less thoughtful brains out there. Featuring Jodie
Foster as a vicious political force of evil is always destined to be a
benefit as well. After rounding up reasonably positive critical reviews,
the film went on to a decent worldwide gross. While most of the crew
from District 9 was retained by Blomkamp for Elysium, he
went a most unconventional route when selecting a new composer for the
2013 project. The story of this score, in fact, is a truly remarkable
fantasy in and of itself, the dream of countless film music fanboys who
conduct along with orchestral scores in their apartments and basements.
Blomkamp, quite remarkably, had heard young trailer music writer Ryan
Amon's product in a trailer online and decided to hire him based solely
upon his impression of that material. The young Amon had minimal
experience in the scoring industry and had never completed a full score
for a television, video, or cinematic film in his career, the bulk of
his output resulting from his trailers and some minimal ghost-writing
for reality television. The American had no famous mentor in the
industry and had begun his trailer music work while living in Bolivia,
of all places. Kudos have to be given to Blomkamp for this kind of risk
(with such a large budget, he could have brought in a famous composer,
or even a lesser known fantasy expert like Andrew Lockington, with
ease), and Amon handles his debut with surprising competence. His score
for Elysium is both brilliant and frustrating simultaneously,
expressing remarkably inventive instrumental and manipulative techniques
while failing to bring the whole into focus with any type of
developmental flow. Each cue in this score sounds as though it was
constructed as a separate piece of trailer music, a fascinating glimpse
into the man's capabilities without knowing if he can string together a
theme or develop a coherent thought over the course of an entire
picture.
The reason the music for
Elysium is so
fascinating is because it is truly an odd juxtaposition of the styles of
Elliot Goldenthal and Hans Zimmer, two composers at opposite ends of the
scale that measures intellectual orchestral mastery. Amon has seemingly
taken the wildly creative symphonic sensibilities of Goldenthal and
given them a shot of Zimmer bravado and sound design, yielding some
occasionally incredible results. Granted, you have to survive the
initial twenty minutes of this score to find these moments, for Amon
opens the work with anonymous muck akin to bad sound design that riddles
too many films of this sort. Once you arrive at "You Said You'd Do
Anything," however, you begin to hear Amon's best experimentation with
the manipulation of voice, instruments, and sound effects, ranging from
throat singers to screaming monkeys thereafter. Unconventional brass and
string techniques, some altered electronically while others seemingly
not, are where the Goldenthal references enter the equation. A handful
of the action sequences near the end of the score are so uniquely
textured that you can overlook the fact that the cues are largely
droning on key and utilizing Zimmer's proven ostinato techniques. If
these portions are too challenging for you, then three cues feature a
female voice applied very similarly to Lisa Gerrard's in the early
2000's Zimmer efforts, highlighted by "Breaking a Promise." Also from
the Remote Control guidelines are the solo cello portions, which are so
omnipresent that they even worked their way into Zimmer's concurrent
Rush. There's absolutely no subtlety in the emotional responses
elicited by this score, a likely result of Amon's confinement mostly to
the trailer industry, where the obvious is always stated. The area of
Elysium devastated by Amon's lack of full feature experience is
in the narrative portion. This a score with absolutely no evolutionary
development whatsoever, playing on album like one of those collections
of trailer music that emanate from the industry on a regular basis, but
often without the cue length of those better library selections. There
are thematic fragments that are explored throughout
Elysium, but
Amon never allows them to congeal into an actual identity. They're
mostly minor third-related, as one would expect in this context, but
otherwise, there is absolutely nothing to connect this entire score
together in obvious fashion. As such, this music features fragments of
melodic beauty and ballsy might without actually making any kind of
narrative statement. Individual moments of full ensemble action
grandeur, as in "Heading to Elysium" and "Kruger Suits Up," are
phenomenally entertaining, but only as standalone highlights. The tepid
early portions of sound design make the 71-minute album an arduous one
in need of significant rearrangement for an enjoyable presentation. That
said, any composer could hope for this kind of debut effort, and given
its diversity of textures and emotions, it will likely serve as an
excellent survey of Amon's capabilities for future employers.
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