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Review of Fantastic Voyage (Leonard Rosenman)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... only if you are already explicitly aware of Leonard
Roseman's score for the film and, like many collectors, waited decades
to hear its alternately challenging and revolutionary techniques on
album.
Avoid it... if you don't care for the consistently messy layers of atonal dissonance that Rosenman can often produce, especially considering the relative rarity of the album releases for the score.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Fantastic Voyage: (Leonard Roseman) When 20th
Century Fox debuted Fantastic Voyage in 1966, it was a
technological triumph on film. Its ingenious sets and special effects
brought immediate box office success and the film's visuals were so
stunningly accurate in their portrayal of the insides of a human body
(physiology experts were brought on board the production to advise at
every turn, literally) that some of those depictions would later be used
in documentaries. The purpose of the film is to show a crew of
scientists and their submarine shrunken to the size of a molecule and
put into the body of another important scientist who needs a blood clot
removed from his brain (from the inside, of course). After being
attacked by the patient's natural inner defenses (and a saboteur amongst
the crew), some of the protagonists survive and are blown back up to
normal size. But it's the journey that counts, and the process of
showing the navigation within the body compensated for obvious and
painful leaps of logic in the both the scientific and basic elements of
the story. For instance, the crew has 60 minutes to operate before
expanding to normal size, and along their trek, they abandon their
submarine because it comes under attack by the body. It seems that
nobody stopped to think of what a 42-foot submarine would do to a guy if
it expanded from within his own body, whether it was manned or not. Some
of the dialogue is laughably hideous but perhaps appropriate when
spawned from a movie industry that gave viewers notions about giant
radioactive creatures. At any rate, Fantastic Voyage went on to
be nominated for several Academy Awards in the technical realm, winning
for visual effects and art direction. One of the "love it or hate it"
aspects of the film that wasn't nominated but received a loyal following
from collectors was Leonard Rosenman's score. The filmmakers originally
sought a James Bond-like jazzy action score, and Rosenman quickly
dispensed with that idea. The composer made the decision not to score
any of the film before the crew actually enters the human body,
essentially identifying the music as a sound effect element of the
environment within the surrounding biology. Rosenman also approached the
scoring process from the perspective of the unknown, using the score as
an element of both curiosity and suspense. To do this, almost the entire
score is extraordinarily atonal and dissonant.
Whether or not the atonality of the score actually aids in the suspense of the journey and the strange visuals we see along the way is open to debate. But one thing is definitely clear about the music for Fantastic Voyage: it's either a score you had been waiting for decades to hear, or it sounds like every other atonal Rosenman score and has no significance (or enjoyment quotient) whatsoever. Rosenman had been experimenting with the effects of atonality and dissonance for over a decade, and Fantastic Voyage exhibits this approach with a full orchestral ensemble. The score is led by an often-referenced, four-note motif that is varied significantly in tone and instrumentation throughout. Rosenman's off-pitch woodwinds wail in the upper regions while low brass offer the usual ominous notes down below. Piano and percussion are not used to set rhythms, but to play the role of sound effects in and around the lengthy notes of atonal strings and brass. Dissonant layers of strings often culminate in uncomfortable crescendos of sheer noise, always boosted in power from the brass. At the very least, Rosenman is very consistent in this approach, and it can very easily get under your skin after twenty minutes. The only notable track is ironically the final one, in which a tonal thematic statement heralds the successful return of the crew, and you can't help but wonder if the fantasy of the story would have been served equally (or better) by this more readily accessible writing. Succinctly put, whether you will enjoy Fantastic Voyage or not depends on your opinion of the use of the kind of uncomfortable dissonance and atonality that Rosenman (and, more prominently, Alex North) used throughout their careers. On album, Fantastic Voyage will be extremely difficult to enjoy for most digital age listeners, especially with the fact that Rosenman doesn't make much of an effort to provide distinguishing cues or individual ideas to take with you from the score. Still, fans of the film and composer were elated by the first ever release of the music on CD in 1998, when the new Film Score Monthly Silver Age series released Fantastic Voyage as their third entry. Mixed from stereo master tapes, the score sounds decent, though the heinously dated, opening sound effect track will add to the annoyance of people who aren't fans of the film or scoring approach. The same contents were re-issued by La-La Land Records on a limited product in 2014, satisfying demand after the FSM album sold out in the 2000's and fetched surprisingly high prices for such a challenging listening experience.
TRACK LISTINGS:
All Albums:
Total Time: 47:21
NOTES & QUOTES:
The 1998 album contains the usual excellent quality of pictorial and textual information
established in other albums of FSM's series, with extremely detailed notes about the film
and score. Similar depth of notation exists in the 2014 La-La Land album's insert.
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1998-2024, Filmtracks Publications. All rights reserved.
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 Fantastic Voyage are Copyright © 1998, 2014, Film Score Monthly, La-La Land Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 12/27/98 and last updated 2/6/15. |
