Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,866
Written 11/13/09
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Buy it... only if you appreciated the ridiculously brutal tone of
the film and have a taste for extremely difficult, heavily metallic
industrial scores.
Avoid it... if you understand the meaning of the word
"empathy."
Saw: (Charlie Clouser) It's always funny to watch
and read the reactions of people who think films like the 2004 gore-fest
Saw have some kind of artistic merit when you use such films as
examples of why every successive generation of kids is growing up more
aggressive and violent. If you denounce Saw as being not only
repulsively violent but also a detriment to society, these people cry
foul and claim that despite its plethora of fallacies of logic and a
total lack of moral integrity, the film is still entertaining because of
its unique concept and plot twists. Ironically, the only way their point
is valid is if you accept the basic premise that the general movie-going
population has indeed degenerated in its integrity. Make no mistake
about it, Saw is a film that glorifies torture. It takes David
Fincher and Seven as inspiration and hammers the concept into
even more grotesque, NC-17 territory. The entire Saw franchise is
built upon the fact that audiences like seeing other people tortured in
ridiculous fashion. They liked it so much the first time that they
rewarded novice director James Wan and his $1.2 million creation with
over $100 million in worldwide grosses, spawning a franchise that
included a sequel in each successive year for the rest of the decade.
The first film, even if you set aside the gore and logical
improbabilities (which is practically impossible), suffered from really
wretched acting performances (Danny Glover was inexcusably bad and Cary
Elwes was only tolerable because his career's evolution) and an
obnoxious visual style that clearly indicated that the young director
was trying far too hard to make an impression. Equaling the film's faux
sense of intelligence was its soundtrack, which divides audiences along
the same lines as the film itself. Essentially, if you thought that the
film was a brilliant spectacle of horror, then the grinding, industrial
score and similarly heavy songs will seem equal in both quality and
emotional response. In reality, though, Wan's film received a score that
functions primarily as unnerving sound effects, only developing any
distant sense of compelling depth in the final few minutes. That was
perhaps all that could have been expected of Nine Inch Nails keyboardist
and producer Charlie Clouser, for whom Saw was a surprising
launching pad into a career of trashy, low budget horror scores that
included the aforementioned sequels to this mainstream feature debut
(each increasingly difficult for his collectors or Saw
enthusiasts to find on album).
Not to sound repetitive, but it's also funny to watch
and read the reactions of people who think films like
Saw have
some kind of artistic merit when you take the next step and refer to
their scores as mindless noise. There is a place for industrial metal in
the film scoring industry. For years, now, Paul Haslinger has perhaps
proven himself the most accomplished in this art. But all to often,
scores that rely upon their industrial textures to create an atmosphere
desired by a director or producer don't make any significant attempt to
apply any really intelligent structure to that environment. Composers
like Graeme Revell have attempted such feats. Sometimes, especially when
involving former rock musicians, the industrial tone is interspersed
with ass-licking hard rock passages. For
Saw, Clouser waited
until the final two cues to even attempt any kind of musical complexity
befitting a character as complicated as Jigsaw in this franchise. In
these cues (which are attributed to the character of Zepp but in all
reality refer to Jigsaw for obvious reasons relating to control), he
uses a small string section to convey a simple, cyclical motif that
starts to define both the mechanized brutality of the torture scenarios
and the poorly rendered romantic elements meant to draw audience
sympathy. It sounds as though Clouser was trying to channel Clint
Mansell here. Otherwise, Clouser's material should be submitted to
Hollywood's vast collective library of sampled sound effects. The sounds
in this score were generated from a combination of keyboarded or
computerized droning and explicit effects, Danny Lohner's electric
guitars in conventional and non-conventional performances, and a handful
of awkwardly utilized specialty instruments or other items twisted into
musical employment. Tonality is rare and continuity from cue to cue is
only tethered to the limitations of the ensemble's abrasiveness. At
times, as in "Last I Heard," Clouser uses various edits of the sound of
a reciprocal saw blade as an appropriate accent. The unrelenting
metallic harshness of a cue like "Reverse Beartrap," edited like many
(including the songs) to distortion as though insanely high gains were
applied, matches the film's stark and hapless attitude. A slight
synthetic choral effect, as heard in "Fuck This Shit," cannot compete in
this soundscape. Overall,
Saw is a miserable experience on screen
and on album, barely avoiding the lowest possible rating due to its
basic effectiveness and marginal development at the end. Howard Shore's
score for the related
Seven is easily superior, as are half a
dozen Haslinger efforts. So while you shouldn't cut off your shackled
foot to escape Clouser's music for
Saw, it still contains
absolutely nothing redemptive enough to justify its existence.
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