: (Danny Elfman) In the film
that confirmed Tom Cruise as an international action star, director
Brian De Palma revises the classic
television
series and produces a hit on screen that would spawn two sequels. In the
world of techno-gadgets, the computer has revolutionized the world of
espionage, and the 1990's were the time to take advantage of that
excitement in De Palma fashion; the lives of super-agents and
double-agents benefit well from De Palma's sense of style-over-story,
though despite the film's spectacular visual elements, the somewhat
incomprehensible story caused many movie-goers to scratch their heads.
The labyrinth of character relations, sub-plots, and technological ideas
do thankfully yield in the end to sensational chase sequences that saves
the film. The emphasis on style over plot is one that would seemingly
have translated easily into the musical underscore for the film, but it
didn't. Originally writing and recording a score for
was Alan Silvestri, whose action music is typically
strong, though his work for this particular project would turn out to be
underwhelming to say the least (some have said that it is among the
composer's most mundane works). With Silvestri's score rejected, Tim
Burton collaborator Danny Elfman would take his first crack at a
full-fledged summer blockbuster score outside the darkness of Burton's
cover. His replacement score would reflect a general turn in the
direction of his own maturing style, with 1994's
serving as the final classically beautiful piece of his early career and
1995 yielding the more electronically unpredictable and stylistic
It's no surprise that the rather elusive, rhythmically
ambient music that Elfman produced for
Mission: Impossible was
originally considered a significant disappointment to collectors of his
work. The degree to which those collectors still consider the
Mission: Impossible score a disappointment depends on their
opinion of the direction that Elfman's career continued to take into the
late 1990's. A restrained and percussive work,
Mission:
Impossible dwells on significant use of inglorious percussion, light
bass, dense orchestral accompaniment, and relatively little thematic
development. Elfman seems to have been undecided (or perhaps under
conflicting orders) regarding the use of his own thematic materials
versus Lalo Schifrin's highly recognizable material from the original
television series. In the end, the main Schifrin theme would receive one
full, stylish performance at the outset, but disappear for most of the
remainder of the score. In attempting to adapt the Schifrin theme with
more pizzazz than Silvestri's bombastic recording had been, Elfman
achieves the right amount of snazziness in the theme... but then
blatantly changes the mood for the remainder of the score. For a concept
made so memorable by a jazzy title theme, Elfman (and, to a lesser
extent, Hans Zimmer and his hoard of ghostwriters in the first sequel
score) would completely abandon that style in the rest of the work. This
is despite Elfman's adaptation of a "plot" subtheme from the television
series. Elfman's own thematic ideas are present, but become lost in the
largely unfocused plethora of rhythmic underscore.
The most curious aspect of Elfman's score is exactly
the lack of "style" throughout the work; for a De Palma film especially,
which relies on style over substance, Elfman's score is a largely dull
and functional piece. If you think of the wildly snazzy sections of
Ennio Morricone's work for De Palma's
The Untouchables, you get a
better picture of what Elfman's score could have used to some extent.
Instead, when you hear the
Mission: Impossible score apart from
the film, even in its climactic train chase sequence (existing in the
final cues of the album), the score is clunky, lifeless, and muted in
its recording and mixing quality. A return to Schifrin's theme at the
end of "Zoom B" is a welcome, overdue reunion. The one standout cue for
Elfman is ironically the one that features the strongest connection to
his previous works. For the crucial "Betrayal" sequence at the heart of
the film, Elfman sets a melancholy choir over a stark electric bass
rhythm and provides a nearly gothic interlude amongst all his percussive
meanderings. While it may not be an absolutely crucial cue for Elfman
collectors to have (though it is included on the second "Music for a
Darkened Theatre" compilation album), it is a remarkable return to the
mysterious music of
Batman's roots, and stands out as a very
awkward departure in
Mission: Impossible. With bland action music
and style-deprived suspense and mystery cues, this score is a
surprisingly strange and disappointing miss for Elfman. The album
situation for
Mission: Impossible is also remembered as one of
the early instances in which the studios strongly pushed a song
compilation album for a summer blockbuster and held a score-only album
for possible release at a later date. You hit some, you miss some...
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Danny Elfman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.23
(in 75 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.25
(in 130,563 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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