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| Beck |
Free Guy: (Christophe Beck) With elements of
The
Lego Movie,
The Matrix, and a number of other reality-bending
concepts behind its distinct universe,
Free Guy is a remarkably
unique look at life inside a video game. Shawn Levy's film postulates
about what would happen if a non-player character in a video game like
"Grand Theft Auto" gained sentience and started manipulating the game
from within. Meanwhile, the code behind that game is the subject of a
battle of intellectual rights between people in the real world, setting
up a scenario in which characters in the game become self-aware just as
their creators wage a battle to keep their code in existence. It's a
rather convoluted idea that allows the real-life coders to interact with
the sentient versions of their creations within the game, and everyone
must come to peace with their existence by the end. The film, delayed
like much of everything else for a year because of the pandemic, became
one of 2021's more popular theatrical and streaming hits, flush with
video game humor and a multitude of cameos to support its satirical
comedy. The soundtrack is a bit of a conundrum, for the production
logically applies a series of songs for the gaming sequences that one
might expect to hear when playing it themselves. Mariah Carey's 1995
song, "Fantasy," is also referenced as a recurring identity. Because the
studio obtained rights to borrow a number of pop culture references from
famous franchises, movie themes from
The Avengers and
Star
Wars also waft through in parody form. The original score becomes
rather marginalized compared to the song placements, but it still plays
an important role in the emotional side of the story. Levy had
collaborated with many of the industry's top composers over the previous
ten years, including Danny Elfman, Alan Silvestri, and Michael
Giacchino, but for
Free Guy he turned back to his trust comedy
collaborator, Christophe Beck. While the length of his output is rather
minimal for this project, Beck was tasked with conjuring the music meant
to accompany the relationships, mystery, and action from the perspective
of the main characters, both digital and real, while the songs are
placed for the benefit of the audience and gamers in context. Since
self-discovery is a vital aspect of these main characters, Beck takes it
upon himself to score mostly this portion of the plot, though he does
get some blazing game action cues to himself as well.
The demeanor of Beck's music for
Free Guy is
airy, comedic, and unsubstantial on one hand but surprisingly beefy in
the action and fantasy modes on the other. The resulting whole is well
crafted but not entirely memorable, striking a generic tone for each
emotional appeal. The personality owes much to Mark Mothersbaugh's music
for
The Lego Movie, though you can hear Beck attempting to
emulate rambling synthetic propulsion from Patrick Doyle's
The Emoji
Movie and approaching but never reaching the dissonant challenges of
Don Davis'
The Matrix. The ensemble consists of a full orchestra,
generic choral tones, electronic accents, and modern rock elements, Beck
applying them tonally for almost his entire runtime. His use of rhythmic
devices is notable, for most of the cues relating to characters or
action within the game are accompanied by repetitive structures or
rambling synthetic rhythms to denote the formulaic ways in which that
universe works. The themes are all kept anonymous as well, using
simplistic phrasing and rarely realizing truly outbreak performances
that would keep them in mind. In essence, Beck's job here was to provide
a wallpaper of appropriate background music rather than define
characters that don't necessarily deserve it. One could argue that's a
rather cheap way to handle both a sentient artificial intelligence and
the real-life characters, but it allows Beck to do his job without
competing with the song placements. Interestingly, the themes also
frequently exist in two-note phrasing, almost as if to recognize the
binary aspect of programming and life versus death. Foremost among the
themes is a chipper, harmless idea for Guy himself, the lead game
character who causes all the fuss. His carefree existence is espoused by
this optimistic string theme at the start and end of the film, debuting
at 0:24 into "Have a Great Day" and wrapping at 0:37 into "Life Itself."
A redemptive, ascending interlude sequence at 0:24 into the first cue
becomes a recurring source of hope. The theme turns progressively more
mysterious by 0:17 into "A New Day" and shifts into James Bond mode at
the start and end of "Two Glocks," the score's upmost moment of brazen
coolness. It opens "This Ends Now" on solo horn, shifting to sensitive
woodwinds, and the interlude sequence informs a later, optimistic, James
Horner-like passage. That interlude returns at 0:56 into "It's Go Time."
This theme is displaced during the midsection of the score by a handful
of other motifs that Beck emphasizes as Guy's existence becomes more
complicated.
Beck's discovery theme in
Free Guy is built upon
descending pairs of notes over repeating synth figures in rhythm. It's
foreshadowed by light choir at 1:06 into "Sunglasses" before asserting
itself for the full ensemble at 1:41. A variant using the same chords
follows at 0:28 into "Stash House Fail," and most listeners may recall
it best from its mystical, revelatory moments starting at 0:17 into
"It's All a Lie." It strives for the finale of
The Matrix at 1:39
into "Rebooted" and turns defiant in awing action mode at 0:16 into "On
Strike." It exits at 0:56 into "This Ends Now," the theme's progressions
shifted towards an ascent. More prevalent a theme in
Free Guy is
a mystery motif likely representing the real-life aspects of the story
and how they affect the game's universe. This four-note motif debuts in
suspense at 0:33 into "A New Day" and builds a greater but still subtle
presence at 0:27 into "Stash House Fail." It's faint at the start of
"Two Glocks" but reforms with menace at 0:51 into that cue. Light
keyboarding offers suspense for the theme at 1:23 into "Guy's Guise,"
and a glimmer of hope starts to show in the idea's manipulated
progressions at 0:34 into "Rebooted." The idea reassumes its subtle
stance at 0:24 into "I Remember Everything" and 0:31 into "Getting
Hectic," moving to slight string relief at 0:09 into "Reunited" before
turning big and redemptive for full the ensemble at 1:22. A love theme
carries over from Beck's music for the 2012 animated short film,
Paperman, by Levy's request. Here, the composer really fails to
make the most of the identity's potential, the plot's main relational
twist not matched well in the score. The idea is pretty for piano and
strings at the start of "Ice Cream" and is reprised with a bit more of a
hip personality on strings and synth keyboarding at 1:17 into "I
Remember Everything." But Beck underplays the idea in "Reunited," the
cue developing the theme throughout but never allowing it to flourish
with any necessary depth; the composer instead returns it to the domain
of the piano at 1:34. The final identity in
Free Guy is a series
of ascending figures that serves as an action and fantasy motif for
heroics in the game that are not serviced by songs. Its straight fantasy
mode can be heard at 1:50 into "About to Get Shot" and is reprised late
in both "It's Go Time" and "Hitman's Beach" before blending in with the
action in the latter half of "Getting Hectic" and middle of "Tables
Turn." Together, these themes are not particularly memorable, leaving
Beck's competent execution of the parody sound as the music's main
identity. The 42-minute score on album is smartly effortless but wholly
anonymous, just like Guy, and casual listeners might be better served by
the film's song compilation album containing four assembled tracks from
Beck's score.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For Christophe Beck reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.06
(in 16 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.06
(in 4,982 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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There exists no official packaging for this album.
