: (David Arnold) There was a law
in Montana that was just recently repealed: "Seven or more Indians are
considered a raiding or war party and it is legal to shoot them."
Perhaps the people who still believed in the validity of that law in the
1990's had seen the movie
, though even they
should have figured out just how far-fetched the plot of the film really
is. Writer/director Tab Murphy's 1995 film presents the idea that it's
possible that a handful of Cheyenne dogmen survived the 1864 Sand Creek
Massacre and were still miraculously living hidden from modern-day 1995
life in the treacherous mountain regions of Montana. Anyone who's lived
in Montana (as of 1995) knows that hippies have hiked into every last
square mile of the Rocky Mountains and hugged their trees, not to
mention geologists and forest rangers that survey all that territory
every day. In short, in an age when there exist little airports and
portable toilet cabins in even the most remote regions of the Bob
Marshal Wilderness, the very notion that there could be unaffected
Native Americans someplace in the mountains is utterly ludicrous. Never
mind that it's only reality that's lost in
,
however; the discovery of the remote Cheyenne tribe is made by an expert
tracker hired by a local sheriff to locate three escaped convicts. He
takes a leading Indian expert (and natural love interest) with him to
communicate with the Cheyenne he suspects as having killed the convicts,
and once they find the tribe, they're conflicted about how to protect
them.
The film's cinematography is sharp, even offering the
juxtaposition of Montana's remote scenery with a high-flying airplane
overhead. For critics, an uncredited narration of the story by Wilford
Brimley nearly ruins the picture, for his voice interrupts several
scenes without good reason. Also of note in the picture is David
Arnold's score. A budding British composer who had just been discovered
with
Stargate the previous year, Arnold was flown to Los Angeles
to write
Last of the Dogmen in, of all places, a hotel room. The
result of Arnold's efforts are either plagiaristic or brilliant,
depending on your opinion of John Barry and James Horner in the same
genre, and, to a lesser extent, Arnold's own narrow style of the period.
Despite the modern setting of the film, Arnold wrote an old fashion
Western adventure score of the highest dramatic style. He takes Barry's
Dances with Wolves (it's perhaps ironic that Arnold keeps
seemingly borrowing inspiration from Barry in so much of what he does
for the blockbusters) and Horner's
Legends of the Fall and
produces an extremely heavy and dense title theme that repeats without
fail throughout the picture, and it's hard to figure whether this overly
melodramatic touch was the idea of Murphy and Savoy Pictures, or if
Arnold was simply so eager to impress everyone with his second major
score that he went over the top in his composition. The music really is
impressive, merging the modern dramatic classics mentioned above with a
preview of his own immense action music for
Independence Day that
would explode onto screens the next year.
Without a doubt, film music fans weary of Arnold's
post-2000 return to the electronica styles of his pre-scoring years
point to
Last of the Dogmen as one of his great, unexplored
triumphs. Performed with phenomenal power by the London Symphony
Orchestra (another reason, by no coincidence, that the orchestrations
sound similar to Horner's in the less bombastic cues, such as "Cheyenne
Valley"), the score is rich with harmony and bass-heavy grip, relying
significantly on the percussion section to propel its strong, slowly
developed rhythmic pace. Timpani pound, snares rip, and triangles clang
with great energy, turning the latter half of the score into an action
piece worthy of
Independence Day, if not better in its
consistency. Arnold's thematic presentations are saturated with layers
of activity; his counterpoint was always a strength in his orchestral
efforts through
Tomorrow Never Dies. There could be a downfall to
this monumental scale of performance, however, for the density of the
music can also become burdensome by the end of the album's short running
time. As beautiful as it is,
Last of the Dogmen is a tiring
listening experience, and with only 36 minutes of music from the
two-hour film represented on the album, it's hard to imagine the scope
of the entire project. In the end, though,
Last of the Dogmen is
just more proof as to why film music experts predicted in the mid-1990's
that David Arnold would be the next John Williams. It's also evidence of
why many collectors claim great frustration in Arnold's career choices,
because there's so much potential in
Last of the Dogmen that has
since gone underdeveloped.
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For David Arnold reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.47
(in 15 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.28
(in 43,440 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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