Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,876
Written 11/24/10
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Buy it... if you seek an adaptation of the Lisa Gerrard performance
of the Dead Can Dance song "The Host of Seraphim" that dominates the
soundtrack on screen and on album with its seven minutes of downbeat,
spiritual beauty.
Avoid it... if you expect absolutely anything remotely listenable
to come from Mark Isham's synthetic original music for this film,
because it functions as unnerving sound effects to maintain a horrific
ambience of dread for a small portion of the film.
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| Isham |
The Mist: (Mark Isham) Several directors have tried
to convincingly adapt Stephen King's straight horror stories through the
years, most of them failing to rise above the low expectations that
accompany cheap scare tactic flicks of the genre. Ironically, among the
best of them was Frank Darabont's The Mist in 2007, yet the
film's rather disappointing box office performance defied widespread
critical praise. While Darabont's previous King adaptations, The
Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, were targeted at
mainstream sensibilities, The Mist is absolute and pure horror.
The plot involves a government experiment to open a portal into another
dimension, and when a violent thunderstorm strikes the Maine community
(of course!) by which this experiment is in progress, a fog full of
terrible creatures is unleashed upon the region. Most of the
protagonists are trapped in a supermarket by the fog and are picked off
one by one by wretched monsters as they venture outside in a quest for
survival. The story concentrates mostly on the psychological changes
that ordinary people will experience in bizarre circumstances, yielding
predictable intrusions of religious zealotry that are inevitable in such
fearful situations. But Darabont's altered conclusion, made with the
approval of King, gives the film such a sour ending and defies all
realistic notions of parental love (the latter is truly inexcusable and
possibly proves that Darabont would make a piss poor parent himself)
that The Mist dissolves into a laughably melodramatic,
gut-wrenching "gotcha" type of dissatisfying story. The director had
been pondering the production of The Mist for many years, and he
had always known precisely what direction he planned to take with its
music. He wanted the film to have a documentary feel in many of its
parts, therefore opting to leave the mass majority of The Mist
without any music at all. "Sometimes movie music feels false," he said
in 2007. "I've always felt that silent can be scarier than loud, a
whisper more frightening than a bang, and we wanted to create a
balance." The only musical aspect he had long sought was the inclusion
of the Dead Can Dance song "The Host of Seraphim" for the devastating
moments of revelation in the picture. The song's downbeat religious
aspect, courtesy Lisa Gerrard's resoundingly spiritual but eerily
otherworldly vocals, is so strikingly different from the otherwise low
key musical approach in The Mist that it can't help but make a
profound impact. Whether or not it can salvage a troubling album for the
original score is another matter.
Although Darabont had collaborated with composer Thomas
Newman with impressive results for his first two King adaptations, the
director chose to extend his collaboration with Mark Isham from 2001's
The Majestic. Isham's ability to generate disturbing electronic
textures proved fruitful for this assignment, because his synthetic
performance (credited to "The Sodden Dog Electronic Arts Society")
functions more like vaguely rhythmic sound effects rather than actual
music. What little material Isham wrote for
The Mist doesn't
really exhibit any normal characteristics of music, instead using a
variety of extremely unpleasant sound effects to punctuate
synchronization points and maintain an ambient level of anxiety. There
are moments, as in "Mist," when the ghosts of a melodic line are slowly
explored over a minute or two, though these sequences never congeal into
anything resembling an organized progression of musical identity. That
three-note idea in "Mist" actually has origins in "Won't Somebody See a
Lady Home?," but if you're not listening specifically for connections
between cues, you're likely going to miss the similarity. The
"Explation" cue sounds like samples of various power construction tools
in states of malfunction, saw blades and motors running and failing
amongst watery percussive slaps and thuds. The three cues for the awful
creatures, "Tentacles," "Bugs," and "Spiders," are unlistenable in their
dull pounding of metallic objects, groaning and whining tones that defy
pitch, and buzzing randomness. The only redemptive aspect of these cues
is the occasional use of vocal effects, either in whispered warnings in
"Tentacles," synthetic choral effects in "Bugs," or Celtic-sounding solo
female chants of "hell, hell, hell" in "Spiders." After twenty minutes
of this extraordinarily difficult Isham material on the album release,
"The Host of Seraphim" is a welcome dose of redemption. The piece is
popular (it was also used in 2010's
Legend of the Guardians: The Owls
of Ga'Hoole) and Gerrard's voice is a lovely as it was when she hit
the soundtrack mainstream with
Gladiator. Isham made some
alterations to the piece in the form of overlays to better connect it to
the score, though it's still far more palatable than any of his original
material. As a source piece, the 1994 Isham cue "The Vicious Blues" from
his score for
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle adds some vintage,
early 20th Century small band blues to the end of the album as must be
completely dismissed for the sanity of any listener. That said, only the
adaptation of "The Host of Seraphim" is really worth hearing on the
album for
The Mist. Even at seven minutes, however, it has
difficulty supporting a 32-minute album of otherwise very disturbing
"music."
** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
Bias Check:
For Mark Isham reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.84
(in 26 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.88
(in 9,975 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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