 |
| Powell |
Evolution: (John Powell) The idea of combining Ivan
Reitman, the reliable director of
Ghostbusters, with the comic
book, alien appeal of
Men in Black must have seemed like a winner
before production began. Billing itself as the biggest alien invasion
comedy film of the summer of 2001,
Evolution unfortunately failed
because of its poor casting and jokes that weren't funny enough to
sustain the picture. Reitman's attempt to substitute a group of
professional ghostbusters with a group of professional alien
investigators fell flat, greeted with half-hearted enthusiasm by
audiences and generally poor reviews. The film features a John Powell
score that slipped below the radar of most film score collectors who
looked upon the predictable music with much of the same indifference.
The previous summer's major film score surprise was the wild
Chicken
Run, which Powell co-authored with Media Ventures associate Harry
Gregson-Williams. With addictive enthusiasm,
Chicken Run offered
a glimpse at a maturing composition style that combined the traditional
electronic and mixing elements of a Hans Zimmer-student score with a
more energetic and fuller orchestral sound. Powell alone continued to
elaborate on this evolution of his scoring techniques, utilizing both a
very reasonably sized orchestra and his typical synthesizers in an
extension of that same sound for
Evolution. While this score, in
the coordination of its parts, may not be as refreshing or impressive as
Chicken Run, the two scores could easily function as companion
pieces for one another in your collection. The music for
Evolution is a less complicated effort, catering towards three or
four basic kinds of scenes in the film with workmanlike efficiency. It
can easily be divided into cues which accompany chases, awe-inspiring
revelations of alien life, and the pseudo-scary scenes of close-up
investigations of those creatures.
Everything else in
Evolution is somewhat
incidental, with the exception, perhaps, of the heroic finale cue. While
Powell uses three distinct themes in the score, only the title identity
hinted at after about a minute in "Cells Divide" is memorable. It takes
so long to develop to satisfaction that only in "The Mall Chase," "The
Fire Truck," and "Our Heroes" is it employed with any distinction. The
chase sequences present the best of Powell's ideas for the film, with
"The Mall Chase" representing the finest assembly of performance and
theme that the score has to offer. These cues allow the composer to do
what he does best: carry hopping rhythms and continuous, elaborate
themes of harmonic clarity with the orchestra through multiple minutes
of nonstop aural ruckus. Absent a cue such as "Building the Crate" in
Chicken Run, Powell's
Evolution never pulls a lengthy
enough performance of such attractive cohesion to really elevate this
score's memorablity. Most of the cues in
Evolution are too short
for such development to take place, likely due to the frenetic pace of
the film. Outside of the thematic statements, Powell does well in making
the scarier moments sound comical at heart. The opening tracks present a
few cues that might frighten young children, but they do so in the same
overly dissonant fashion as the slapstick portions of Danny Elfman's
Men in Black. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that the
Evolution is a true blend of the music from
Men in Black
and
Chicken Run, with the former really showing up in the first
half of the score and the influences of latter emerging later. Powell
seems to have a Western spirit built in to the rhythms of his action
writing of this variety, portraying the main group of characters in this
film as faux cowboys on the Western frontier. It wouldn't be surprising
if some listeners considered this spirit to be swashbuckling.
On the other hand, the use of heavy bass elements for
many of the cues is a clear hold-over from
Men in Black, for
which Elfman's thumping bass was a primary resource. The chorus is used
very sparingly in
Evolution, with no real thematic accompaniment
and definitely no finale cue like that which blessed the end of
Chicken Run. Muted trumpets create mock suspense that pulls,
perhaps, from the Bernard Herrmann classics of the genre. Powell employs
a waltz rhythm for a short minute in the middle of the score, and it
would have been interesting to hear him elaborate on this flavor to
represent the aliens as they grow throughout the film. Overall, the
boldest statement made by
Evolution is that
Chicken Run
wasn't a one time fluke. You could already tell at the time that Powell
was indeed branching off from the typical Media Ventures/Zimmer sound
into a new area of style that others in that group (with the exception
of Harry Gregson-Williams) had yet to readily explore. His collaboration
with Gregson-Williams for the concurrent
Shrek was one last
hurrah for that duo before Powell's solo career truly took flight. The
integration of vibrant orchestral elements into the synthetic base at
the core of these artists' work was an experiment that Powell was
beginning to excel at beyond most others. This recording of
Evolution serves its purpose with a sense of exuberant style, and
although the Los Angeles performing group wasn't as crisply mixed for
Evolution as it had been for
Chicken Run (which features a
sound quality far superior to nearly every other score in the composer's
career), this performance still exerts enough energy to capture more
fans of this music. The one problem with
Evolution is that it
lacks a cohesive overarching personality or the consistent thematic zeal
that it really needed to maintain interest outside of its obvious ten
minutes of highlights.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For John Powell reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.28
(in 50 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.16
(in 52,492 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
The insert includes a list of performers, but no extra information
about the score or film.
