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FILMTRACKS.COM
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VIEW 
Review of The Revenant (Ryuichi Sakamoto/Alva Noto/Bryce Dessner)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you enjoy needless suffering, this score accentuating
the bleak despair on screen with equally dispiriting and dreary,
atmospheric music.
Avoid it... if you expect the album release to provide the full breadth of licensed music for the film, the product instead concentrating on the frightfully dull ambience helmed by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
The Revenant: (Ryuichi Sakamoto/Alva Noto/Bryce
Dessner) If you want to feel better about living in the 21st Century,
then behold the savagery on display in Alejando González
Iñárritu's exceedingly depressing 2015 awards spectacle,
The Revenant. Based loosely on the story of frontiersman Hugh
Glass in 1823, the film takes an intriguing concept of hardship on the
dangerous plains and turns it into Hollywood fiction, shifting the
setting from Missouri far north and adding much more death than there
ever was in real life or the inspiring novel. The brutality of the
alterations disqualifies The Revenant as a serious picture,
Iñárritu's need to expound upon grisly death and rape
proving why modern audiences require totally degenerate behavior to be
displayed when cultural complexity and the adverse natural conditions no
longer suffice to maintain attention. In this ridiculous version of the
story, Glass is injured during an escape from a Native American raiding
party seeking to rescue one of its own women from the invading whites,
prompting the group to debate Glass' fate. One of his comrades stays
behind with Glass to bury his body, only instead to kill Glass' son and
bury Glass alive. The remainder of the film depicts Glass' journey to
health and plight for vengeance, all the while striving to salvage some
morality in how he deals with the rest of his encounters. The story is
overwhelmingly distressing and unnecessary, and Iñárritu's
insistence upon traveling to the edges of the planet to shoot the
project in natural light caused a fair number amongst the crew to quit.
Nevertheless, the film cleaned up at many of the annual awards
ceremonies and became a box office success. The director had been
smitten with the work of Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto for years
after having utilized some of his music in Babel, and he sought
the veteran to write original music for The Revenant even though
Sakamoto wasn't scoring films at that time. The composer's respect for
Iñárritu caused him to make an exception.
Of course, with Iñárritu, the situation with the soundtrack is never that simple, as the man has a tendency to fall in love with temp tracks. As such, this movie ended up with a significant amount of other ambient music that was ultimately licensed and included in the final cut. A sizable chunk of that temp score was music by German electronic music artist Carsten Nicolai, otherwise known as Alva Noto; fortunately, in this case, Noto and Sakamoto had collaborated on non-film projects several years before, so Sakamoto formally asked Noto to join him a co-composer. This decision was also in part due to Sakamoto's recovery from chemotherapy treatments for his throat cancer, and he was fearful that he would not be able to compose all the music for the picture himself. Iñárritu wasn't finished building his musical ensemble, however, approaching American composer Bryce Dessner, a guitarist in the rock band The National, after utilizing some of his music in the temp track as well. Sakamoto and Noto never collaborated directly with Dessner, but the former ultimately sent him his material to help coordinate the sound of the two. While Sakamoto conducted his contributions with a larger ensemble in Seattle, Dessner did so with a 25-member string ensemble in Berlin. Among the more notable licensed music in The Revenant includes three pieces by John Luther Adams and one by Olivier Messiaen, exposing the director's obsession in this case with the ondes martenot instrument. All of this material does manage to form a rather cohesive emotional tone for the film. Noto's contributions often involve the remixing or reimagining of Sakamoto's ambient material, while Dessner handles the bulk of what might be considered the "action" music. The combined score for The Revenant is immensely dispiriting and dreary, careful to address the vastness of the scenery with an excessively muted and dull personality, as if to almost define the location and the people in it as insignificant and doomed. Undoubtedly, with Iñárritu demanding input on every little aspect of the recording, the decision to apply colorless and wearisome music to this story was intentional. Iñárritu's philosophy towards music suggests that a sustained understatement of the soundtrack accentuates the hardships on the screen and, for some listeners, that appeal may exist. There's also the "less is more as an artistic choice" strategy at work as well, and some very casual listeners may perceive this score as being like an atmospheric Hans Zimmer entry but without that composer's trademark, 5-minute crescendos. The hype machines of the media tell listeners that the music for The Revenant is "revolutionary" when, in reality, it is overwrought ambience with little purpose other than to fill space and claim greatness. The instrumental palette for the recording is restrained to strings and synthesizers for most of its substance, with occasional percussion elements added by Dessner for some semblance of force. Expect the tempos to be extremely slow. In fact, a listener may not even be able to discern Sakamoto 's main theme for the film unless he or she accelerates it by two or three times, by which point it actually reveals itself to have an insipidly cyclical melody of despair. The theme's very slow structure consists of a two-note phrase followed by three-note phrase, with an interlude that follows the same five-note overall sequencing with varying tonalities. The composers never achieve any meaningful alteration to the purpose and tone of this theme, leaving it as sparsely pointless in its final performance as it was in its first. Still, one must give credit to Sakamoto and his team for repeating the theme frequently throughout the score, if only to break up the otherwise monotonously faceless material in between. The idea is introduced in "The Revenant Main Theme" and becomes more pronounced and accessible in "Hell Ensemble," a performance reprised with eerie sound effects in the background during "The End." The theme's default string meanderings turn synthetic and even gloomier in "Glass and Buffalo Warrior Travel" but shift to more expressive tones in "Church Dream," its lines smoothed out a bit. A variation on the idea's progressions is explored in "The Revenant Theme 2." Solo cello and piano await the theme in "The Revenant Main Theme Atmospheric" (this track title is one of the funniest of any score for the year, because every performance of the theme is atmospheric, this one no more so than the others), and additional synthetic manipulation is afforded the idea in "The Revenant Theme (Alva Noto Remodel)." Outside of Sakamoto's main theme and related brooding for The Revenant, Dessner's more diverse material does spice up the experience a bit, but his music's dissonance is no more pleasant than the other composers' music is boring. The lengthy "Cat & Mouse" and "Final Fight" cues are truly awful; his percussive layer is inconsistently applied. The synthetic sound effects sometimes distract so badly from the organic recording that they make you think there is a problem with your music player. A hissing background noise sounds like static interference in "Carrying Glass," and "Final Fight" has unnecessary cricket noises that beg for evaluations of your sanity. A little more palatable for most listeners will be the solo ondes martenot in "Out of Horse" and a notable cello solo in "Arriving at Fort Kiowa." Overall, don't believe all the promoters and listeners who claim that the score for The Revenant is high art. It may function well in the film because that product is extraordinarily bleak and depressing and this music is equally bleak and depressing. For that triumph of matching alone, the score avoids the lowest rating. But this music is so devoid of emotional variation that it forfeits its role as a functioning film score, once again postulating that sound effects utilized as music could someday replace functional film scores and still please a minority of listeners. The score was deemed ineligible for an Oscar nomination because of the collaborative nature of its construction (this despite Sakamoto unsuccessfully appealing to AMPAS to reconsider their decision), but it was exactly the kind of morbidly futile artistry that would have won such an award. On album, The Revenant is a yawn-inducing affair not even suitable for an effectively gloomy mood, as too much of it annoys. Out of sequence, the presentation is also missing a significant amount of music by all three composers, as well as the licensed remainders. Two cello recordings performed by Hildur Guðnadóttir, the piece by Messiaen played when Glass emerges from the dead horse, the Adams material for the Arikara ambush scenes, and a slew of Noto augmentations are absent, too. These tracks enjoy prominent placements in the film, so the score's album isn't even an adequate representation of the more general soundtrack. But does that really matter? Climbing into the carcass of a recently dead animal might be preferable to this listening experience. At least the carcass might be warm. *
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 70:31
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert includes notes about the score and film from the director and producer.
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