: (Jerry Goldsmith) Excessive gore,
nudity, and profanity: the trademarks of almost any Paul Verhoeven film.
All of these were on display in 2000's
, but the gore
stole the show. With nothing resembling the original H.G. Wells
"Invisible Man" concept,
instead takes an hour
introducing the audience to a team of scientists making a top-secret
effort to shift a person "out of quantum synch with the known universe"
and thus turn him (or first, some animals) invisible. The latter half of
the film dissolves into an
-like horror bonanza of extreme
violence because, of course, the human subject of the invisibility test
loses his mind and alternates between inclinations to rape and kill. (It
would have been more interesting if the maniac was somehow deposited
into the Miss America pageant.) The only aspect in the film's favor was
its incredible visual display of living anatomy, using visual effects to
brilliantly show both a gorilla and human in the process of shifting
transparency, layer by layer. But other than those effects and Kevin
Bacon's obnoxiously capturing performance,
was a
disappointment. Despite failing to recover its budgetary costs in its
domestic showing by drawing only $73 million,
surprisingly inspired a terrible straight-to-DVD sequel starring
Christian Slater in 2006, which says more about that actor's career than
anything else. Verhoeven had a long-standing association with Jerry
Goldsmith, and
represented the composer's only score
of 2000. Extensive reworking of the film required Goldsmith to write a
massive amount of music for the project, providing countless alternate
cues as the director was refiguring the final cut to appease the studio
and ratings censors. In fact, this film ultimately represented one of
the composer's longest. At its release, the score was much hyped and
anticipated with great expectations by Goldsmith collectors who defended
the score to a fault. In retrospect,
remains a
disappointment compared to the composer's fantastic output in 1999
because it represents some of Goldsmith's least engaging work in the
latter stages of his career.
The music for
Hollow Man is intellectually smart at
many levels, and there's ample keen strategy to consider in how the
composer tackled the film, but the end result is, like several of his
later scores, disconnected in quality from his prior output. Sometimes,
even the best laid plans for a score can yield unsatisfying results, and
such is the case here. You get a distinct sense that everything
contained in the work is pieced together from other Goldsmith scores,
the recording comfortably predictable in style and execution despite not
containing the "it" factor from any particular genre to elevate its
status. The film's story is perhaps to blame for this lack of
distinction in the music, because you can hear that Goldsmith struggled
to determine how much fantasy, eroticism, and horror to infuse into
several of the cues, attempting to devise a suspenseful balance that
ultimately doesn't allow any of his best tactics in those genres to
succeed. The loss of the fantasy element is particularly acute, as the
scenes involving transitions to transparency and back needed a more
religiously tonal sense of majesty (and preceding anticipation) without
losing the precision of science and creepiness factor. The eroticism
carrying over from
Basic Instinct isn't convincing, either, as
it's meant to be scary and perverted rather than sexy. The composer's
challenge in determining the right tone for
Hollow Man is clearly
evident in the wayward thematic attributions in the work. These themes
and lesser motifs are smarty planned and placed throughout, but how they
are expressed is not convincing, neither entertaining nor narratively
illuminating. To even appreciate how complex Goldsmith's applications of
these motifs truly are requires significant attention to detail, and
such careful appreciation by the composer's enthusiasts may be fine on
album, but such opaque execution doesn't serve the film particularly
well. Some of the thematic disconnect in the score was purely
intentional, as the plotline involves a dissolved romance and a main
character who loses his mind. But the general musical concepts
representing the mere presence of the lead character in his invisible
state and the science surrounding invisibility technologically and
morally could have been far more clearly defined musically, even if the
former was indeed supplied a pulsating synthetic effect early on.
Among the frustrations about the score for
Hollow
Man is that Goldsmith was allowed an overture of sorts in which the
main title cue could occupy space alone. He used the opportunity to
develop a pleasantly mysterious but rather unexciting main theme for
Bacon's lead, Sebastian. Goldsmith could have really accentuated the
action, the science, or the suspense of the film with a memorable cue
that plays without interference over the opening titles. Unfortunately,
his piece is a lazy recapitulation of both
Basic Instinct and
The Haunting, using the pulsating piano, woodwind, and electronic
rhythm from the former underneath a meandering, disembodied theme for
high strings not much unlike the latter. While definitely a recognizable
Goldsmith product, this theme, despite some outstanding, delayed brass
counterpoint in its final statement over the titles, is far too
incongruous with the demeanor of the film overall and the rest of the
score to really make sense. The lack of regular use of the theme in the
score is a significant but predictable problem; it is explored in early
cues like "Not Right" and "What Went Wrong?" but otherwise diminishes as
the eerie romanticism in the story dissolves and horror reigns. One
might assume that the underlying, undulating rhythmic motions of this
theme might persist as a suspense tool in the rest of the work, but
Goldsmith opted to replace it with other ideas instead. There is no
solid secondary character theme in
Hollow Man, with "Linda &
Sebastian" declining to rekindle some fire in a relationship that no
longer existed in the film anyway. The composer instead offers
intentionally lukewarm pleasantry with no connection to the rest of the
work. Likewise, the sensuality of "The Buttons" (and others) doesn't
explore any meaningful thematic extensions. There are two rhythmic
motifs at work in the film that are both, ironically, more effective.
The first is the "transitional motif," which is heard in the cues
"Isabelle Comes Back" and "This is Science." As the gorilla appears or
Sebastian disappears, the awesome, lengthy special effects sequences are
treated to a bass thumping and array of prickling electronic effects
that slowly increase their pace and volume as the scenes progress. There
is little sense of genuine anticipation as needed in these cues, though,
and there were even better sound effects in Goldsmith's library that
could have been used to foreshadow the idea of invisibility.
While the transitional motif of scientific mystery is a
meager representation of the fantasy element in
Hollow Man, it
does at least evolve into the score's other prevailing motif by the
latter half. This idea builds out of the transitional motif and becomes
a rambling piano and bass-element ostinato heard for the violent chasing
in "The Elevator" and "The Big Climb." Its foreshadowed moments in
"False Image" and "Hi Boss" could be effective if not so tired by this
point in Goldsmith's career. There is also another idea of heroic
inclinations introduced in "Linda Takes Action" (or the sixth minute of
"Bloody Floor" on the original album's merging of cues), but this
material is largely orphaned in the narrative. It's surprisingly tonal
and upbeat given the nature of the scene, and it stands apart on the
album. Otherwise,
Hollow Man is devoid of really interesting
narrative development, especially by the action cues in the middle of
the film. Much of this music is as generic to Goldsmith's career as the
mundane parts of
Chain Reaction or
Executive Decision. By
the fourth minute of "Isabelle Comes Back," we hear familiar shades of
The 13th Warrior, with zapping sounds from
Star Trek:
Insurrection abounding. The action bursts, especially with the drum
pad and synthesizer combos, owe much to
Total Recall but lack
that score's distinct direction. By
Hollow Man, the techniques of
slurred brass, screeching and cascading strings, and an array of timpani
to shake the floors was simply too rusty to carry the score on "that
Goldsmith sound" alone. Because the score was recorded in London, the
original Varèse Sarabande album ran 50 minutes and contains all
meaningful highlights for casual Goldsmith listeners in the first third
of its running time. A 2022 2-CD set from Intrada is intellectually
intriguing but overkill as entertainment, exposing no better narrative
and languishing in redundancy but offering extensive alternate takes for
devotees. The long presentation teases curiosity but exacerbates
Goldsmith's pull towards several genres without truly satisfying any.
The quality of the mix, while still very clear, is not as resoundingly
wet and well balanced as his scores of the previous few years (from
Small Soldiers to
The 13th Warrior), marking an end to
that era of terrific-sounding Goldsmith music. No matter the mix,
Hollow Man is both derivative and unexpectedly timid, a
surprising way to reach the failure that the film was always tempting.
@Amazon.com: CD or
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- Music as Written for the Film: ***
- Music as Heard on All Albums: **
- Overall: **
| Bias Check: |
For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.26
(in 124 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.29
(in 153,454 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
