Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,230
Written 6/16/03, Revised 2/18/09
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Buy it... if you still have a soft spot for Howard Shore's tense, brooding
thrillers, in which the orchestral ensemble is used as a blunt tool for rumbling
ambience for much of the scores' duration.
Avoid it... if a mostly themeless, gut-wrenching underscore of thirty
unmemorable minutes on album isn't your cup of tea.
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| Shore |
Panic Room: (Howard Shore) Let's start by asking this
question: if you're looking at purchasing a home that comes with a panic room,
isn't that some kind of indication that you're moving into the wrong neighborhood?
A novelty item that was strangely becoming popular in upscale homes at the turn of
the century, a panic room was the defining subject of the 2002 thriller named, not
surprisingly, Panic Room. David Fincher's suburban tale pits a homeowner
(Jodie Foster with just enough skin showing to attract more fantasizing criminals)
and her daughter against a gang of ruthless burglars. The tension is a high as it
can be, with the threat extending from the sexual domain all the way to one of life
threatening proportions. Needless to say, it's an unpleasant concept for a film in
every regard. It's also the kind of production for which an orchestral score could
serve its duty as a footnote for whatever composer was involved, though the
footnote in this case is more interesting than in most other cases. The continuing
collaboration between Fincher and Howard Shore meant that Panic Room was
sandwiched in between the first two scores for Peter Jackson's trilogy of The
Lord of the Rings, for which Shore was in the process of winning an Oscar when
he recorded Panic Room. The genre of films that these two bring to life are
trademark modern thrillers, with The Game and Seven offering bleak
scores for troubling films. The amount of psychological trauma that is often
inflicted upon the viewer in these productions is something that Shore seems to be
able to understand and perpetuate, because the composer has had a knack for bucking
Hollywood trends and providing equally disturbing music for these projects. Whereas
a composer like Jerry Goldsmith often preferred to score his horror assignments of
the time with a more extroverted stylistic and thematic identity, Shore was content
to travel closer to the Bernard Herrmann route, occasionally using the orchestra
like a blunt tool with which to draw out the primordial emotions of the audience by
making an underscore that sounds more like noise rather than music. If not for its
accomplished textures, the work would indeed exist in the realm of ambient sound
design. Shore specifically responds to the gloomy suspense of Panic Room
with an equally abrasive, difficult, and tense orchestral score that shatters
whatever comfort you might think exists in suburban lifestyles.
Employing a nearly a full orchestra (minus trumpets), Shore uses
the ensemble as a noise-generating machine to create a range of sounds from spooky
ambience to grinding horror. He never unleashes the ensemble into a distinct or
crashing motif, but rather instructs his beastly creation to simmer underneath the
surface for the entire film. Instead of allowing an array of synthesizers to
produce largely the same effect, Shore uses the ensemble's size in its lower
regions as an even more gut-wrenching instrument of terror. The constant bass
strings, low woodwinds, and brass produce a sinking feeling in the stomach of the
listener from the start to end. Some of this material will remind listeners of the
tone for Isengard in the famous Tolkien adaptations, especially when Shore adds the
element of clanging percussion (as in "Zone 19 Disabled"). If you want to look for
even more similarities between the two works, you'll hear a faintly heroic motif in
"Castle Keep" that sounds like a merging of the Isengard and Rohan themes. Such
slight similarities are understandably inevitable. The score lacks a strong
thematic identity in traditional respects, although the main title sequence offers
a Herrmann-like plucked and chopped string idea that only resurfaces with any
significance in "Fourth Floor Hallway." Despite the slightly more harmonic nature
of this title cue, the attitude of the chopping violin motif is a prelude to the
prickly sense of unease that would inhabit the mood for the rest of the score. The
closer danger comes to the homeowner and her daughter, the more pronounced the
single strikes of these strings become. Still, while the texture is intriguing in
parts and the ominous tone of the work is effective in a functional sense, Shore
leaves little memorable material to occupy an album. To some casual ears, the score
for
Panic Room will seem (from beginning to end) to be an exercise in sound
design. And acknowledging what Shore enthusiasts attempt to say about the
development of complex layers in this score, there is something to be said about
using the rumbling power of an unguided ensemble to raise fear without overtly
sophisticated measures. On album,
Panic Room doesn't offer much for the
listener, and the choice to release the score at all was likely a reaction to the
composer's popularity immediately after his Oscar win (and continued success) for
the first
The Lord of the Rings entry. Even for the sake of mood-building,
the score's presentation on album is too short and underdeveloped to translate into
a substantially interesting listening experience.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:
For Howard Shore reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.56
(in 25 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.33
(in 101,293 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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