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| Powell |
Ice Age: Continental Drift: (John Powell/Various)
For some critics and audiences, the allure of the
Ice Age
franchise melted away sometime over its first decade, leaving the 2012
entry,
Ice Age: Continental Drift, a tiring exercise in
redundancy. Still, the fourth film charmed audiences out of hundreds of
millions of dollars and was immediately deemed successful enough to
warrant yet another sequel. The leading trio of a mammoth (Manny), a
sloth (Sid), and a sabre-toothed cat (Diego) continue their unlikely
friendship and once again discover themselves in a predicament that
requires a perilous journey. In this case, they find their civilizations
threatened by the breakup of the continents, a circumstance caused by,
without fail, the squirrel named Scrat who has spent the entire
franchise chasing allusive acorns in a parallel storyline. The shattered
ice sheet causes various bizarre animals to team up, build ice-ships,
and become prehistoric pirates, a variety of antagonists blocking the
returning characters from reuniting with their friends and family. The
story is indeed redundant and thus vacuous, but the appeal of the
returning cast and 3D imagery will keep nine-year-olds entertained while
parents seek something more substantive to digest. The vocal talents for
Ice Age: Continental Drift include a number of great singers, but
don't expect their contributions to influence the soundtrack outside of
the end credits and, by consequence, in John Powell's original score.
Powell needs no introduction to those familiar with either the
Ice
Age series or animated films of the 2000's. He has written the music
for so many of these types of films that they have come to dominate his
career and possible cost him his sanity. If you believe that a healthy
sense of humor is a mask for the loss of one's mind, then perhaps Powell
has already gone around the bend. With each successful animated effort
(at least for the silly side of the genre, which represents most of his
output), he meanders with even less focus through musical genres that
have nothing intuitively connected to the subject at hand. For
Ice
Age: Continental Drift, he infuses the Latin, bluegrass, pop, and
classical genres into a frantic mixture that is so wild that it
surpasses the most schizophrenic nature of his prior assignments. Yes,
it's still an
Ice Age score in line with his previous efforts for
the concept, and it's better than its immediate predecessor, but expect
a greater range of pizzazz and heroism in this choppy ride. That also
means a return of the impressive constant in Powell's music for these
films: the unnecessary intelligence of his compositions.
While some of the technically outstanding material in
these scores is farmed out to Powell's ghostwriters, their entireties
are usually interesting to appreciate on album... once. Some listeners
have built up a tolerance for the composer's frenetic sense of movement,
both rhythmically and through genre switching, and
Ice Age:
Continental Drift will appeal to precisely this crowd. The
exhausting experience does base its foundation on Powell's score from
Ice Age: The Meltdown, and loyalists will be pleased to hear that
work's range of themes developed to a greater degree here than in
Ice
Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. The primary idea still recalls
Chicken Run more than anything else, unfortunately. There sadly
exists no explicit suite of themes in
Ice Age: Continental Drift,
though Powell does wrap up the ideas from
Ice Age: The Meltdown
in a nice summary in "Herd Reunion." The themes for the trio, Scrat, and
the concept in general mingle extensively with Powell's new material,
which includes a love theme for Diego and a theme for the evil pirate
gang. To be expected, of course, are a fair number of outrageously dense
and hyperactive action cues, another highlight for Powell collectors.
The mix of the orchestra doesn't seem to be as dynamic this time around,
though most of the individual attention is afforded to guitars and other
specialists. A handful of unique assets do grace
Ice Age: Continental
Drift, ranging from the absurd to the cool. For the pirate element,
Powell decided to replace the bass trombones with a collection of 20
accordions playing at their lowest reaches. While an intriguing idea,
the execution ends up not being as obvious as one might expect in "No
Exit Gutt" and "Pirating the Pirates." Far more entertaining, and
arguably a highlight of the new original material, is "Sirens," in which
innocent 1950's-styled vocals rotate between each of the three
characters in their seductions. The lyrics and retro-pop mangling are
not be missed, especially as the cue becomes more urgent when it passes
Diego and goes from Manny to Sid. Finally, you have the tribute to
"Symphony No. 9" by Beethoven in "Scrat's Fantasia on a Theme by LVB,"
an admission by Powell that he could not best "Ode to Joy" for Scrat's
adventure and thus did not try. This track, with "authentic" lyrics
credited by Powell in part to Hans Zimmer, is among the most disgraceful
mutilations of Beethoven that a person could imagine. And that's the
point, of course. Let the siren voices, accordions, and sleazy lounge
specialists destroy the piece, why not? Anyone who listens to that track
for mere enjoyment is as demented as Powell himself. Overall, there's a
point at which the composer's sense of humor in this kind of assignment
ceases to appeal to anyone outside of his dedicated fanbase, and
Ice
Age: Continental Drift is straddling that line.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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The insert includes a list of performers and a note from Powell about the
origins of "Scrat's Fantasia on a Theme by LVB."
