Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,909
Written 9/9/09
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Buy it... only if you are confident in your curiosity about John
Ottman's most avant garde score to this point in his career, a
challenging blend of carefully rendered electronics and dissonant
orchestral textures.
Avoid it... if you are typically lured to Ottman's scores by his
lyrical tendencies or his ability to narrate the story of the film
through his music, for nether trait is utilized whatsoever in The
Invasion.
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| Ottman |
The Invasion: (John Ottman) What could be more
frustrating than having a major studio tell you that you are going to be
replaced at the end of the production of the first American feature
you've directed and replaced with a clan of pyrotechnic junkies
determined to take your arthouse film and add some massive explosions to
it? That's what happened to Oliver Hirschbiegel on his 2007 film, The
Invasion. The fourth adaptation to the big screen of Jack Finney's
"The Body Snatchers," The Invasion turned out to be too cerebral
for Warner Brothers, and in their post-production desperation to
transform the picture into something they saw as more palatable for
mainstream audiences, they brought in the Wachowski Brothers of The
Matrix fame (Warner favorites) and those two, in turn, applied
director James McTeigue to parts of the film to spice it up.
Unfortunately, they made no real attempt to shoot adequate transitions
between Hirschbiegel's original film and their own ridiculously
preposterous additions, leading to several awkward transitions and no
cohesive flow to the entire picture. Also a major detriment to The
Invasion is the total waste of its ensemble cast, both Nicole Kidman
and Daniel Craig accomplishing nothing outside of their autopilot
ranges. The story is all too familiar, too, a reference to Cold War fear
involving paranoia towards the government and other forces perceived to
be from the darkness. Once again, clones of people are killing their
real counterparts, sleep being the key to the pandemic-like infection's
conquering of its victims. Mixed into the tale is a mother-son bonding
plot that attempts to give The Invasion some appeal to the heart,
but by the time Kidman is dragged around through the revised sequences
of outrageous special effects, all credibility is lost. Not immune to
the post-production madness of The Invasion was composer John
Ottman, whose music also suffered from a lack of clear direction given
the last-minute changes in cue editing and the addition of scenes late
in the process. The assignment was always intended to be one to avoid
convention for Ottman, who at the start agreed that the approach of a
traditional orchestral score for this remake would be too dull. His
attempt to take the sounds of Bernard Herrmann into electronically avant
garde territory was a consistent push in this recording, despite the
many unexpected twists that the post-production rearrangements created.
The tone of Ottman's original ideas seems to play intact, even if the
score is completely devoid of narrative development.
Despite whatever instrumental or synthetic creativity
he aspires to generate for an assignment, Ottman is the type of composer
to always provide his scores with at least some redeeming lyrical
element to salvage the listening experience for those not interested in
the challenging, usually dissonant and unpleasant material. It was his
intent to do this with
The Invasion as well, addressing the
mother and son line in the story with a redemptive, harmonious theme.
Ultimately the filmmakers insisted that the theme be whittled down to a
single chord of resolution, best heard in the dying moments of "Final
Escape." Another minor string and celesta theme is used sporadically,
but has little impact. The end titles sequence tacked on at the very
conclusion of post-production forced Ottman to ad-lib the "Dance of the
Cells" piece that ultimately gives the score its most memorable identity
despite having no real structural connection to the rest of the work.
The greatest asset of this score is also its greatest weakness. Its tone
of instrumentation guides its personality, but as many suspense and
horror scores with non-descript structural development have proven, the
unique sounds of that tone can only take a score so far. Ottman
seemingly spent more time developing interesting synthetic sound effects
to be manipulated in
The Invasion rather than utilize them with
the orchestra to create a dynamic whole. The synthetic sounds, perhaps
best summarized in "Hit and Sit," are both interesting and omnipresent.
They effectively convey the prickly sting of malicious micro-organisms
and the other science-fiction aspects of the tale. The orchestral
handling, in a secondary role, is not as devious as in Ottman's other
works. Cues of action requiring sustained rhythmic motion are limp, too,
with "Carol's Wild Ride" making the listener long for the days when
Jerry Goldsmith could merge strange synthetic tones with a muscular
meter and roaring brass. Unlike the mass majority of Ottman's scores,
The Invasion is one that has no collection of five to ten minutes
to place confidently on a compilation of his music. It functions in his
career the way
The Happening does for James Newton Howard,
admirable but too disorganized on the whole for continuous appreciation
on album. It's tempting to say that the wild post-production panic
forced Ottman's score into a configuration it was not meant to exist in,
but there aren't even coherent fragments in
The Invasion that
could conceivably be rearranged to form a decent narrative. Some will be
impressed by Ottman's avant garde approach for this assignment, but it's
doubtful the score will find much of a loyal audience even within his
own collecting base.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:
For John Ottman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.17
(in 35 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.06
(in 21,480 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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