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Review of RoboCop 2 (Leonard Rosenman)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... only if you are able to separate the merits of an
admirable composition from the concept it accompanies, Leonard Rosenman
providing impressive but outright wrong music for this movie.
Avoid it... if you have never been able to connect with Rosenman's often challenging musical constructs, this score a bafflingly complex parody of the comic super hero genre.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
RoboCop 2: (Leonard Rosenman) Bankruptcy was the
central theme of 1990's RoboCop 2. Its studio, Orion Pictures,
was desperately trying to push this movie as means to avoid it, the city
of Detroit is predicted in the plot to suffer its own (which actually
happened in 2013, amazingly), and the graphic violence shown on screen
is morally bankrupt to the extent that the movie was received as a
parody of its predecessor. Lead actor Peter Weller had to be dragged
back into the famed metal suit for this wretched sequel, while director
Paul Verhoeven and most of his crew abandoned the effort. Whereas the
original RoboCop was a serious study in identity and sacrifice,
the sequel was a simple good-versus-bad gunslinger fantasy with even
more gruesome killings and ridiculous caricatures appropriate for a dumb
comic book. With Detroit indeed on the verge of bankruptcy and owing
everything to the corporation that actually runs the show, society is
plunged into deeper drug-related crime as warring factions struggle to
control the city's dark fate. Inevitably, a crime lord's brain is
removed from his body and put into a mechanical form to battle the
titular hero, but not before people are vivisected and mutilated in
other ways for the pleasure of the audience. Unlike the famously popular
melting bad-guy scene in RoboCop, the sequel's depictions were
not as well received, and the film's only lasting distinction is that it
isn't as horrid as RoboCop 3. With veteran director Irvin
Kershner closing out his career with RoboCop 2, along with him
came his friend, composer Leonard Rosenman, by the director's absolute
insistence. Basil Poledouris' score for RoboCop was by no means a
classic, a rather brutally toned approach to the grim subject of the
film and one that espoused the composer's raw edge. But it worked.
Rosenman was not impressed by Poledouris' score or by Poledouris
generally as a composer, however. While Rosenman was known for having an
insufferably high opinion about his own musical prowess, his comments
about RoboCop remain astounding. He said at the time, "I thought
the score for the first film was so absolutely dreadful. There was no
sense of the orchestra, no sense of drama. It was just a dopey, lousy
score and it just didn't work. I'm not a fan of Poledouris. The end
credits, which is the best opportunity for any composer, was just pasted
together. My end title is a real piece of music, and the middle part is
something very different from most film scores."
There is tremendous irony in Rosenman's comments about Poledouris and RoboCop, of course, stemming from the fact that while the sequel score's composition may be technically superior at every level, it's far worse as music for this concept. There is mastery to be heard in Rosenman's thematic constructs for RoboCop himself, and even some of his secondary ideas are frightfully overthought. The way Rosenman shifts effortlessly between four motifs for RoboCop and adapts these ideas throughout the score is extremely admirable, and the writing is a feast for musicians looking to study music theory. Sadly, however, Rosenman's music, while impressive, is absolutely misdirected, and it only worsens the film's major problems. The score is one of pure parody, abandoning all seriousness conveyed by Poledouris and instead producing a brightly exuberant and outright stupid musical demeanor for the lead character. For listeners with little exposure to Rosenman's long, highly awarded career, thoughts of the overly cheery Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home are apt here, because the composer infuses the same sense of playful silliness into the world of RoboCop, with even darker portions for the villains never achieving any sense of gravity. The composer's array of orchestra and synthesizers is too ponderous, the application of an electric guitar to the main villain because of that character's affinity for Elvis music worthy of an eyeroll. Erratic infusions of jazz in "City Mayhem" are annoyingly disjointed. The use of four soprano female voices nestled in the woodwind section is highly interesting, especially when they emphasize the fantasy of brain transplants, as in "Creating the Monster." (Rosenman's application of dissonant woodwind layers and synthetics to this scene are humorously inferior to Poledouris' use of synthetics to represent the machines involved.) The absence of a string section for much of the score, causing Rosenman to lean heavily on brass and woodwinds, causes an odd disconnect in the music to enhance the future dystopia. But all of these intriguing choices are rendered moot by the composer's failure to capture any seriousness of consequence during his music. Moments of fright, like "Monster at Meeting," are supplied music with the pomp better suited for a Godzilla movie. A four-note pulsating growl for the villain's suspense passages, as in "Goodbye Angie," is a strangely simplistic diversion from the otherwise intelligent constructs. The composer amazingly throws atonal elements and unpleasant polychords at the movie while still managing not to achieve convincing horror. Perhaps the greatest weakness of Rosenman's approach to RoboCop 2 is his terrible handling of action sequences. It's astonishing to behold how such cues could have so much musical complexity but still fail at their task. The composer relies heavily upon the three main portions of his RoboCop theme here, and they are summarized well at the outset of the "Overture: Robocop 2" suite. The first of these is a repetitive burst of five notes mostly on key, appropriate for a cheesy 1970's television cop show and adapted liberally. After that, Rosenman launches into his "call and answer" pair of motifs that emulates urban Bill Conti heroics, the first an ascending six-note phrase that also repeats like the initial rhythmic device preceding it. The "answer" portion of this duo is three notes that forever doom this score, as Rosenman could not resist asking his sopranos to sing "Ro-bo-Cop" to these notes in an insipidly asinine tone. (It doesn't help in retrospect that the "Captain Underpants" franchise used those same three notes for the "Underpants!" lyric.) In most of the score, this "answer" motif is instrumental only, but the effect is the same. Rosenman goes further, developing a fourth section of the main theme that is a lyrical bridge with glorious harmonies that belong absolutely nowhere in this movie, raising the closest bad memories from similar jubilance in Star Trek IV. The general idea might not have been so repugnant had Rosenman not made this material sound like a cheap knock-off of a heroic John Scott identity. These four motifs would be perfectly placed in one of Conti's Rocky scores, for they treat RoboCop as if he's a one-dimensional boxer with none of complexity of his identity issues. Rosenman betrays seriousness even further by placing a few source-like parody cues directly into the score, including "Robo Fanfare" and "Fanfare Suite," which are so obnoxiously riddled with bad humor as to drive a person insane. Along the Godzilla line of thought, he also recorded "Monster Theme Stings" for the movie. Those are obvious flaws however; perhaps the biggest tragedy outside of the main theme in this score is the complete lack of engagement in the cues meant to address Alex Murphy's agony, a cue like "Robo Memories" totally failing to register any emotional response. Overall, RoboCop 2 is a fascinating work but a horrifyingly inappropriate one for its film, the "Ro-bo-Cop" female vocals alone disqualifying the whole. As the composer would say, "it just didn't work." A standard 30-minute album from Varèse Sarabande in 1990 was followed by a limited, "Deluxe" edition in 2019 that expands the misery to 70 minutes. Appropriately, Rosenman's superior skills were replaced by the "dreadful" Poledouris for RoboCop 3, yielding the best score of the trilogy. *
TRACK LISTINGS:
1990 Varèse Album:
Total Time: 30:15
2019 Varèse Album: Total Time: 69:58
* previously unreleased ** contains previously unreleased material
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert of the 1990 album contains cue-by-cue notes from the composer. That of the 2019
album offers extensive information about the film and score.
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