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| Howard |
I Am Legend: (James Newton Howard) Few original
stories have fascinated screenwriters as much as Richard Matheson's 1954
"I Am Legend," and while dozens of such toiling scribes have attempted
to meet with studio approval in their efforts to adapt the concept for
the big screen, only three feature productions have resulted. Its
original premise involved a "last man alive" scenario in contemporary
Los Angeles, with one average man immune to a virus that has eliminated
most of humanity and turned the remainder into vampires that seek to
kill him during nighttime hours. His efforts to scrounge for food and
supplies during the day eventually lead him on a search for a cure for
the virus, one that he famously finds but is made somewhat irrelevant by
his discovery that it is he who is the ultimate monster in need of
execution. After the Vincent Price and Charlton Heston movies of 1964
and 1971 had faded from memory, Warner Brothers began the process of
producing another adaptation in the mid-1990's. Over the course of ten
years,
I Am Legend was a revolving door for directors, producers,
and screenwriters, the studio shutting down production several times due
to concerns about a budget that had bloated past $100 million. The
initial idea was for director Ridley Scott to direct Arnold
Schwarzenegger as the title character, Robert Neville, in a Houston
setting. By the time Schwarzenegger had become a producer of
I Am
Legend (just before his run as governor of California), director
Michael Bay and actor Will Smith were attached to the project.
Ultimately, only in 2007 did Francis Lawrence direct Smith in a New York
adaptation that was being violently rewritten even throughout its
filming. The inability of Warner and Lawrence to nail down a coherent
plot for
I Am Legend yielded much of the disdain the film
received from critics, a ridiculous action-oriented ending replacing an
alternative one that had originally done justice to Matheson's concept
by once again earning sympathy for the vampires and making Neville the
villain of the tale. Also extremely problematic for
I Am Legend
was the curious decision to render the vampires almost completely with
CGI, a choice that backfired when the effects were universally
criticized as being lousy. Still, the film grossed more than half a
billion dollars and remains one of the most successful December releases
of all time in raw box office performance. For film music collectors,
the score by the busy James Newton Howard was something of a casualty of
the perpetual, last-minute production changes.
Coming at the height of an extraordinary period of
quality production from Howard,
I Am Legend was an extension of
the composer's established mannerisms in the largely orchestral and
choral thematic arena. Two major challenges awaited Howard's recorded
music for the film, however. First was the director's affinity for
silence. One of the great assets of
I Am Legend is its balance of
sound effects and silence in its scenes with Neville coping with life
alone. As a result, Lawrence smartly limited the amount of music in the
soundscape to create as foreign an atmosphere as possible. The other
problem that Howard ran into was unfortunate changing of the ending of
the film. Some of the composer's most compelling summaries of his
thematic structures exist in ten minutes of music that was meant to
accompany the alternate scene. Even outside of these circumstances,
Howard's cues were often used only partially or in extremely low volumes
in the final mix. Thus, there really is no way to compare the score for
I Am Legend on album with what was employed in the picture. It's
hard to argue with the choice of silence for the vast majority of the
film, but Howard's score on album will be a revelation for those who
barely noticed any musical presence while watching it. Even on the
44-minute album, the majority of music applies to the third act of the
film, whether in alternate form or not. Howard essentially tackled
I
Am Legend from three directions. First is the pair of solemn themes
for the eerie, vacant setting and for Neville himself, the former
conveyed by solo trumpet and the latter by solo piano. Both themes are
summarized immediately in "My Name is Robert Neville," the trumpet
identity (which opens with a progression perhaps intentionally similar
to the American patriotic tune "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" by Samuel
Francis Smith) serving as a bookend to the score in its entirety. The
elimination of "I'm Sorry" from the final cut defeats some of the
purpose of using this theme in such overarching fashion. The Neville
theme is developed faithfully in almost all of the thematically-inclined
cues, varying tempo considerably depending on the amount of
contemplation or tragedy that befalls the protagonist. The theme's
somber identity inhabits "Scan Her Again," "I'm Listening," and "I'm
Sorry," the highlights utilizing conservative string accompaniment to
the reverberating piano performances. When the theme is broadened to
represent the anguish of the flashbacks and false hope of meeting other
survivors, along with the epilogue cue of uncertain hope, the score
enters its second phase: the overt, full ensemble melodrama.
From a listening standpoint, the melodramatic, sweeping
cues of orchestral and choral tragedy will be the album's highlights for
most fans. Some of the music in the monumental "Evacuation" was
deemphasized or seemingly eliminated from the picture, a questionable
choice given how moving the deliberate, harmonic minor-key transitions
of grandeur are in this cue. Of particular note is the expansive
expression of Neville's theme interrupted by a solo vocal rendition of
that idea, an ultra-beautiful technique reprised in "Epilogue." Howard
applies the same overwhelming sense of mourning to both that cue and
"Sam's Gone," and one could joke that the death of a pet has never been
so immensely earth-shattering in its orchestral majesty as in this
recording. Extremely heavy minor-third progressions on bass strings and
in the lowest octaves of the piano create a resounding foundation for
these cues. Unlike many of Howard's equivalent scores of this genre,
I Am Legend does afford these moments a significant amount of
development time, resulting in outstanding tracks on album despite their
fate on screen. The third and final aspect of the score in need to
mentioning is the action and suspense material, which is easily the
score's weakness. Standard loops and atmospheric, dissonant groaning are
a bit tired here, from the understated, primordial tones of "Deer
Hunting" to the technology-laced conclusion of "My Name is Robert
Neville" and the faintly ghostly vocals and synthetic mist of the second
half of "The Pier." The percussive slapping and generic symphonic hits
of "Darkseeker Dogs" and "The Jagged Edge" seem rather cheap, both when
considered in coordination with the thoughtful nature of the rest of the
score and especially given the eventually sympathetic identities of
surprising complexities that the film originally afforded the vampires
(which conceivably would have informed Howard's recording for those
cues). In the end, the album contains upwards of twenty minutes of
tightly cohesive music that will fit nicely on a compilation of Howard's
most easily digestible fantasy material. The vampire reunion and Neville
apology cues near the end will be hidden gems for those familiar with
only the ridiculous action-oriented ending of the picture. It's a
compelling score without a true home, and it's difficult to figure why
Howard and Lawrence could not have better planned the score to take
advantage of the sound effects and sequences of silence from the start.
Perhaps the two will get a chance to better plan the employment of music
in the announced prequel to
I Am Legend that was put into early
production not long after the fiscal success of the concept's
resurrection.
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For James Newton Howard reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.4
(in 70 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.36
(in 86,418 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes a list of performers, but no extra information about
the score or film.
