: (Brian Tyler) Good, old-fashioned
monster movies are hard to screw up. Their stories usually aren't that
great, their scares are cheap, and they overflow with campy silliness.
But their charm rests in the suspense of all logic for the thrill of
monstrous fantasy. No matter how hard audiences tried to forgive the
fallacies of 2017's reboot of the "Mummy" concept on the big screen,
they apparently could not overcome the total incoherence of its plot.
The Alex Kurtzman film,
, barely scratched back its
costs in earnings, scorned severely by critics and jeopardizing
Universal's "Dark Universe" series of movies meant to resurrect the
nastiest, most famous monsters of yesteryear for renewed profit-taking.
Perhaps some of the blame for the frightfully poor storyline of
rests on the shoulders of star Tom Cruise, who apparently
wielded an inordinate amount of influence on the post-production of the
movie. A significant step behind everything from the 1932 to 1999
versions of roughly the same tale, the 2017 retelling ties plotlines
together that involve ancient Egypt, the knights of old England, and
modern-day Iraq and London, the titular character seeking revenge upon
the contemporary world for her incarceration 2,000 years earlier. While
the evil Egyptian bitch may be the glitzy showcase of
,
the movie's actual purpose is to establish the now 55-year-old Cruise as
an undead franchise action star, ready and willing to join with hunters
of the paranormal to thwart the monsters inevitably unleashed upon the
land by the studio. Film score collectors have held a soft spot for the
music from the prior mummy-related movies, the more recent entries by
Jerry Goldsmith and Alan Silvestri remaining fan favorites for decades.
Some measure of relief was expressed when Brian Tyler was hired to
handle the score for
, as he leads the younger
generation of composers in championing a traditional orchestral approach
(sometimes blended with electronic accompaniment) akin to Goldsmith's
later style of writing. As a topic best addressed musically by a
swashbuckling flavor of old-school orchestral pomp,
was
treated appropriately by Tyler, who prides himself as being both
cognizant and respectful of film score legends. His affinity for
Goldsmith is particularly notable, though the subtle references in
instrumentation and style in his music here intentionally emulate many
generations of the concept's music.
Aside from a few seeming embellishments of the synthetic
sort at times,
The Mummy is a purely orchestral romp, though
Tyler has succumb to the self-preserving notion of enhancing the bass
region of his action scores to test your subwoofers as needed in the
Hans Zimmer era. At times, as late in "Harem," the thumping of those
deep base tones nearly overwhelms the remaining elements in the music. A
wide array of worldly specialty instruments is employed as per usual by
Tyler (he has a tendency to infuse Middle-Eastern tones into scores
unnecessarily at times, though it certainly makes sense here), but
contributors like a ney flute can get lost in the testosterone-defined,
beefy environment sustained in a streamlined idea like "The Call of the
Ancients," in which Tyler references churning lower string rhythms and
deep brass assistance in much the same way that John Ottman handled the
story of the giants in
Jack the Giant Slayer. The handling of the
orchestra is still quite impressive in
The Mummy, a large team of
orchestrators plastering layers of complexity pleasing to more
intellectually inclined listeners. The influence of veteran Elliot
Goldenthal orchestrator Robert Elhai is especially redemptive, and,
together with Dana Niu, it's not surprising to hear shades of Tyler's
vintage horror work, particularly
Darkness Falls, in full force
again. Full-throated discord like this has been absent from Tyler's
recent career, the last equivalent score of such menacing force and
extreme length being 2005's
Constantine. While such scores have a
niche following, more casual listeners continue to listen for exotic
action music closer to the epic romanticism of Tyler's pinnacle,
Children of Dune. Interestingly, that romantic element is not a
major player in
The Mummy, even the stereotypical female vocal
mixed only marginally into a few places into this work. With the exotic
contributors also marginalized in the mix, you receive a rather
standard, albeit impressively intelligent, action-horror score. Tyler
has a tendency to write music that hits all the right notes with all the
right instruments, but the sum remains lacking of a soul. There are
enough brazenly bombastic highlights of
The Mummy, including some
John Williams nods in "Liberators of Precious Antiquities," to pardon
this tendency of the composer in this instance, but some listeners will
continue to feel that nagging sense that this music is extremely
proficient but aimlessly disconnected from the listener's gut.
The narrative of Tyler's music for
The Mummy
must be praised despite the damage done to it by the composer's
insistence upon badly rearranging his presentations on album, a
persistently obnoxious habit that plagues this score more so than most
of his. The composer provides three major themes in the score and allows
the two primary identities ample development solo and in deconstructed
forms against each other. A series of suites consolidates the main ideas
into easily identifiable form, and it's no coincidence that Tyler
included a significant arrangement of the main theme from
The
Mummy in a concert he conducted right at the time of the film's
debut. The assembly of all the major themes and underscore highlights
into a ten-minute suite for the end credits is quite remarkable, and
Tyler opens and closes the film with cues that nicely bookend the two
primary themes. Leading the charge is a progression of five notes that
churns in ways that Goldsmith might have done with the picture, vaguely
reminiscent of
Poltergeist if not for its rather blatant
resemblance to David Arnold's instrumental adaptations of the prime
Tomorrow Never Dies theme. This Tyler idea attempts to match the
pomp of a classic Arnold fantasy affair and features all the
instrumental and choral ingredients to make that happen, but there is a
touch of arresting, stomping style missing. Maybe it's the campy
personality that's somehow gotten lost. Still, the main theme is an
enjoyable diversion, expressed in full in "The Mummy" before Tyler
adapts it better into the Egyptian chord progression stereotypes of "The
Secret of the Mummy." The presentations of the idea as one of lost
elegance, as heard in "Egypt's Next Great Queen," or eerie seduction, as
in "Power and Temptation," are very commendable. In the former, the
tragic, contemplative nature of the latter half of the cue is perhaps
slightly underplayed in its attractiveness, however. If ever there was a
place for a duduk or oud in duet with mournful female voice (think
Children of Dune again), this would have been it. The theme does
receive some mid-stream expressions of grandeur worth exploring, the
chime-aided pronouncement late in "She is Risen" straying towards the
over-the-top Christopher Young style that may have better suited this
movie. The villain's use of sand as a weapon allows her theme to exist
above pounding percussive and choral rhythms in "Sandstorm" and "The
Sand of Wrath," though don't expect to hear the idea layered clearly in
the purely atmospheric horror cues.
The other main theme in
The Mummy exists for
Cruise's hero, Nick Morton. Not surprisingly the subject of the suite
called "Nick's Theme," this idea resides a bit closer to the higher
nobility end of the spectrum, but it addresses the heroics of the
character with the same gravity and bass-happy presence with which Tyler
entered the Goldsmith
Rambo franchise. The theme's rendering in
the suite has more in common with the chugging brass and snare
combination that opens Zimmer's
The Rock than anything you'd
expect from Silvestri for an action hero. A secondary suite for the
theme is offered up in "A Sense of Adventure," where Tyler opens the
rhythm of the idea a bit, allowing the theme to flow far better in
spirit. After a few coolly distant cameos, as in the last moments of
"Haram," Tyler returns to the idea more vitally in "Between Life and
Death," when the character's theme valiantly sends the film off into its
possible sequel-dwelling future. The final theme of
The Mummy is
secondary and represents the institution of supernatural hunters led by
Russell Crowe, and it's in "Prodigium" that a touch of Danny Elfman
enters the equation. The quirky movements of the theme's major
performances are a bit demeaning to the organization, perhaps, but the
underlying rhythmic drive and bass progressions return importantly in
"World of Monsters." The aforementioned suite for "The Call of the
Ancients" could be considered another theme, but don't expect it to
inform the score much beyond its confines. When not melodic,
The
Mummy is at its weakest, Tyler's suspense music functional but not
engaging, his stock action material equally functional but once again
easy to forget. Highlights outside of the suites definitely exist, but
they have difficulty sustaining, especially in the second half of the
score. Where is the pizzazz? The campiness? The zeal? This issue is
compounded by an outrageously long album presentation of 124 minutes,
lengthier than the film itself. This download-only product was released
before a shorter CD offering that does indeed feature all the best
highlights outside of the neat assembly of "The Mummy End Title Suite."
On one hand, it's fabulous to have essentially the entire score,
including alternate cues, up front for fans to enjoy. On the other hand,
Tyler continues to drive some fans nuts with his album arrangements. Two
hours of music from
The Mummy is simply unsustainable, exposing
too many of the score's weaker filler cues, but the CD, which you will
want for the sound quality anyway, is highly recommended. This score
isn't Tyler's best, but it resides in that higher echelon for him, and
the suites at the very least make for some of the most entertaining
fantasy music to come from the composer in years.
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For Brian Tyler reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.2
(in 41 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.13
(in 19,694 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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