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Red Planet
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Composed, Performed, and Co-Produced by:
Conducted by:
Nick Ingram
Orchestrated by:
Tim Simonec
Score Vocals by:
Emma Shapplin Melissa Kaplan
Chorus Led by:
Jenny O'Grady
Co-Produced by:
Paul Haslinger
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LABEL & RELEASE DATE
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ALBUM AVAILABILITY
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Regular U.S. release.
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AWARDS
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None.
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ALSO SEE
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Buy it... if you appreciate unconventional, crossover, and
postmodern film music, for Red Planet is a notably lovely merging
of opera and electronica.
Avoid it... if you expect to hear some of the best music from the
film on album (and vice versa, which is the truly curious aspect of this
flawed production).
BUY IT
 | Revell |
Red Planet: (Graeme Revell) The year 2000 saw two
high profile movies about Mars, and debates ensued about which one was
worse. Arguably, the earlier Mission to Mars loses the battle,
though Red Planet has its fair share of problems. The directorial
debut of Antony Hoffman proposed that a few decades into the future,
Earth's environment would be poisoned and humans initiate an attempt to
terraform Mars to give it an inhabitable atmosphere. A crew of six
astronauts is sent to the planet to determine what has gone wrong with
the remote process, and, after freak accidents and mutinous robots,
among other problems, only a couple of them survive. The film's
extremely poor character development, combined with ridiculously shallow
dialogue and logical fallacies, sunk its chances at the box office, and
it's no surprise that studios kept the topic of Mars at a distance for
years. Both Graeme Revell and Ennio Morricone's scores for the two Mars
films of 2000 were extremely unconventional. The Morricone work for
Mission to Mars is an interesting study apart from the film, but
is an absolute disaster in context. In fact, it remains one of the
poorest matches with its visuals of any score in the Digital Age.
Revell's work for Red Planet is much more difficult to evaluate,
because so little of it is actually used in the final cut of the film.
Like Morricone, Revell recorded his music in a concert-like format that
doesn't always follow synchronization points in the narrative. But
Revell wrote, performed, and produced extensive material that was not
heard in the film, making Red Planet a bit perilous to examine in
terms of its impact. Some of this material had carried over from his
score for Strange Days. Complicating matters is the fact that the
score fanned the flames of the debate about unconventional, crossover,
and postmodern film music. The issue of postmodernism in film scores had
come to the forefront in the 1990's thanks to Elliot Goldenthal and,
more popularly, Don Davis' The Matrix in 1999. Revell's
imaginative blend of opera and electronica is one of the most obvious,
vibrant, and beautiful entries in that field of experimental
sounds.
Because the film, while technically residing in the sci-fi
genre, is an existential thriller about the end of the world, Revell's
music reflects that disjointed emotional battle between fear and
salvation. He accentuates the precarious balance between the frail
characters and their overwhelmingly difficult surroundings by combining
the two seemingly unrelated genres of music. His use of opera and
classical chorus to represent the fantasy and human adventure of the
awe-inspiring journey is countered by his dance beats and hard
electronica tendencies, which very well capture the mechanized thrill
and fright of the technical side of the story. The latter side has some
of the characteristics of Paul Haslinger's work, which should come as no
surprise since he co-produced the score with Revell. At first glance,
it's difficult to figure out exactly what kind of contribution Revell
made to the film, for the movie fails to use the composer's work in many
places and the album from Pangaea Records doesn't advertise that it
features as much (unused) original score as it does. In fact, the
executive producers of the album arranged the text in the art direction
to make it look like the album is a typical song compilation. This is
not the case. Over half of the music on the album is original (or
semi-original) Graeme Revell material. Since he uses vocalists to
perform much of his score, the album incorrectly credits the performers
with the tracks, while placing the attribution for composition in tiny
print within the insert. In any case, Revell's music is extensively the
heart and soul of the soundtrack. Unprepared listeners could find it
unnerving on a first listen, especially given that most of it wasn't
heard in the film and won't be recognized. It's difficult to place
electronica rhythms and instrumentation in the context of this genre's
more serious side, but the when combined with the stunning operatic
vocals, the score takes on a new age personality that actually works. A
less serious combination of the same crossover effect was heard in Eric
Serra's The Fifth Element, but that score offers absolutely
nothing with as much raw power and resolute ambience as that which is
provided in Red Planet.
The duality of this score is truly fascinating. It has
a constant, electronically sampled or keyboarded presence, sometimes
with harsher guitar accents, and yet Revell never loses track of his
melodic harmony or the choral accompaniment that adds the sci-fi edge to
the music. The score doesn't exhibit a primary theme, though the
repeating idea heard in "Alone" and "Canto XXX" is the closet to a
central identity; this theme was translated into a song by Revell in
Strange Days, and while it's possible that the composer wanted to
combat his previous score's disenfranchisement by repeating its theme
here, the idea ended up playing a very minor role in Red Planet
as well. The secondary melodies simmer almost constantly as an auxiliary
element to the ambience of the electronics. There are only three tracks
of pure underscore by Revell to be heard on the album. The tone of "Mars
Red Planet" matches the vocalized score tracks in many ways, including
the mixing of massive choir with sampled rhythms. The "Alone" cue offers
an orchestral accompaniment to Revell's own heartbreaking piano
performances of the title theme. The frightful "Crash Landing" is the
score's only dissonant and noisy detraction. Some of the most compelling
orchestral cues recorded for the movie didn't make the album,
unfortunately, including the brass piece heard valiantly during the
rescue scene near the end of the film. The most intriguing cues in
Red Planet are, however, the four operatic electronica pieces.
Parisian opera star Emma Shapplin's 24-year-old soprano voice is simply
stunning in its clarity and appeal, singing in 14th Century Italian for
"The Inferno," "The Fifth Heaven," and "Canto XXX" (of which only "The
Fifth Heaven" is actually heard in the film, and unfortunately only at
its final moments). Her performances over the electronics are
accompanied by a deep male chorus singing in Latin, and the mixture is
so potent that it is easy to forget that the rhythms are those of a
potentially obnoxious dance song. These fifteen minutes alone are simply
fantastic, beautiful in their crossover construct, and featuring an
extremely wet mix that echoes across the soundscape. Melissa Kaplan's
voice in "Dante's Eternal Flame" is a less refined, harsher measure for
a more unnerving, yet similarly haunting vocal score track.
The entirety of the score is mixed as a dance or
electronica album would be: with very heavy bass. This album will rock
the walls of your room, and while there are points at which it would
have been nice if the bass had been toned back to better exhibit the
lovely vocals, the overall package still works. Speaking of rock, the
song inclusions on the album were so highly advertised by Pangaea that,
in much of the press material, Revell's name is nowhere to be seen
(that's not surprising for a label that didn't deal with score material
much in its soundtracks of the time, including the poor presentation of
Bill Conti's work in The Thomas Crown Affair). The Peter Gabriel
song and its remix are simply unlistenable in their incessant pounding
of brash 1980's-era synthetic sounds. The Sting (and knock-off Police)
songs are not of much consequence at all ("A Thousand Years" seems too
light for this album). By contrast, the Strange Cargo performance of
"MontokPoint" in the middle fits rather well with Revell's original
music. In the end, however, it is Revell's underscore which dominates
this album. Only "Crash Landing" resorts to unorganized noise-making;
his other score tracks are a risky, but interesting and rewarding
experience. Parts of "Canto XXX" are mixed with so high a gain that
there unfortunately exists some upper-range distortion in the soprano
vocals. At the very end of the album (after the conclusion of "When the
World is Running Down"), you hear a fading cry for help from Carrie-Anne
Moss' character as the landing vessel and orbiter lose contact and the
peril becomes most serious. It's a nice touch, though inconsequential.
Ultimately, the Red Planet score is a risk that most open-minded
score collectors should investigate, regardless of its substandard
album. In its presentation here, up to fifteen minutes of worthy
compilation material can still be gleaned. Still, no solid commercial
release of Revell's used and unused material has ever existed, and such
a product could easily earn four stars. For fans of the collaboration
between Revell and Shapplin, the composer would go on to produce the
singer's subsequent solo album "Etterna." In Red Planet, Revell
has brought us by far one of the most original, postmodern scores of
2000's.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
Bias Check: |
For Graeme Revell reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.74
(in 19 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.78
(in 17,123 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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Total Time: 56:26
1. The Tower That Ate People - performed by Peter Gabriel (4:05)
2. The Inferno - written by Graeme Revell/performed by Emma Shapplin (4:31)
3. A Thousand Years - performed by Sting (5:57)
4. Mars Red Planet - written by Graeme Revell (3:25)
5. The Fifth Heaven - written by Graeme Revell/performed by Emma Shapplin (4:53)
6. MontokPoint - performed by Strange Cargo (7:13)
7. Canto XXX - written by Graeme Revell/performed by Emma Shapplin (5:11)
8. Alone - written by Graeme Revell (2:13)
9. Dante's Eternal Flame - written by Graeme Revell/performed by Melissa Kaplan (3:40)
10. Crash Landing - written by Graeme Revell (5:13)
11. The Tower That Ate People (Remix) - performed by Peter Gabriel (6:27)
12. When the World is Running Down (You Can't Go Wrong) - performed by Different Gear Vs. The Police (3:35)
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film, with
only extensive credits and legal jargon.
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