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| Zimmer |
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| Powell |
The Thin Red Line: (Hans Zimmer/Various) Terrence Malick's
brilliant imagery was absent from Hollywood for the twenty years prior
to 1998's
The Thin Red Line, a film loosely based on the same
1962 autobiographical novel by James Jones that inspired a more faithful
and traditional 1964 adaptation to the screen. The story of one moment
in the World War II battle at Guadalcanal is painfully explored by
Malick with his typical sense of intellectual contemplation and visceral
stimulation. Above all,
The Thin Red Line is a beautiful film, as
are most of Malick's visions. Unfortunately, in the process of bringing
his glorious imagery to a story, he typically bundles many of his films'
other attributes, and his editing has always been suspect. Nobody doubts
the quality of the first two hours of
The Thin Red Line, but
after the battle for the hill central to the film's plot is finished,
Malick's plotline loses all cohesion. A series of cameos by major stars
distracts from the power of the film's message. The frantic battle
sequences and ultra-realistic displays of nerves and bravery differ from
Steven Spielberg's
Saving Private Ryan from earlier in the same
year, inferior in a brutally honest and technical sense, but the same
lack of romantic gloss permeates both films. One other aspect of
Malick's films that typically suffers is the original score, which more
often than not is badly rearranged or replaced by the director without
much logical thought. To tolerate Malick's methodology, a composer has
to be prepared for this eventually and write music according to the
anticipatory chopping that will commence in the days just before the
film's release. James Horner learned this lesson the hard way with
The New World in 2005, with much of his superior work replaced
nonsensically by classical music. In retrospect, Hans Zimmer handled
Malick in a much better fashion for
The Thin Red Line, despite
the fact that the director predictably rearranged Zimmer's work up to
the last moment. "I'm always surprised by the reaction I get to
The
Thin Red Line," Zimmer said in 2001. "I know it's good, but not many
people have heard it."
As a composer, if you approach a Malick film with hard
synchronization points in mind, you're doomed to frustration. Studio
chairman Mike Medavoy said of Zimmer's contribution, "It's not a
traditional score," however, and that's why it worked. Zimmer instead
scored
The Thin Red Line loosely, composing between three and
four hours of music for the film and allowing Malick to have a field day
with the recordings. "A musician has a very good sense of rhythm and
sometimes of the lines, the voice of a line, the narration should be
like a song," Zimmer stated. "Terry sees himself very much as my lyrist.
When you don't have the mortar shells going off, I create this sort of
sense of silence and in a peculiar way I've been trying to create normal
silence or started something that you can just observe and maybe you get
drawn in." Some of the scenes had particular cues written for them, but
these ideas were typically misplaced in the final edit of the film
anyway. The only reason this technique actually worked to a degree in
the film was due to Malick's need for music that was as visceral as the
film, conveying a consistent sense of brooding and gloomy atmosphere
that could be easily swapped between scenes. The many hours of music
that Zimmer wrote for
The Thin Red Line did contain motifs for
individual characters and overarching ideas for the soldiers' fight for
survival and uncertainty about their surroundings. The motifs for the
characters ultimately prevailed in the film, for the most part, but they
were completely lost on the original album for the score. Vice versa is
the main survival theme, which was not totally realized for the scene it
was meant for in the film but makes a grand statement in the track
"Journey to the Line" and supplies power to the broader marching and
battle sequences. The theme for uncertainty is a meandering set of note
pairs often accompanied by wishy-washy whole notes of despair on top.
It's a theme that permeates the score in full but never really evolves
to a greater purpose. The resoundingly growling bass theme for Nick
Nolte's commanding officer is perhaps the most memorable character idea,
only heard prominently once on the original album in "The Coral Atoll"
but revealed with several varying levels of animosity throughout the
first third of longer presentations.
Secondary motifs supplied by Zimmer for
The Thin Red
Line extended to Jim Caviezel's principal Witt character, whose
vaguely optimistic and steady theme is both soothing and maddeningly
static in development throughout the score. For Ben Chaplin's
reminiscing Bell character, Zimmer explores a more lyrical and romantic
period theme over a pair of major cues. Unfortunately, in terms of
definitive style, Zimmer's score has little focus and relies on purely
atmospheric meanderings to convey its sense of respect and fear. The
composer said, "This is literally about making a very clear statement.
It's more much along this sort of philosophical lines, actually."
Restrained in every cue except the famous "Journey to the Line," the
score differs from John Williams' similarly stark score for
Saving
Private Ryan in that it makes no attempt at patriotism or a noble
heart. It is a defeated, slow, and ambient expression of battered hope
and emotional trauma. The score's greatest weakness is its extremely
laborious, aimless pacing and extremely repetitive, simple structures,
and yet it is this exact set of attributes that made the music suitable
for Malick's alterations. The instrumentation and thematic structures do
carry some continuity throughout
The Thin Red Line, but not
necessarily to positive ends. A number of specialty instruments are
employed by Zimmer, though their roles are somewhat diminished in the
final mix. The Taiko drums are the most prominent of these, but their
mixing varies significantly between scenes within the film and on album.
The more surreal contributions by John Powell and Francesco Lupica,
which do punctuate key moments in the film, offer pronounced use of
Tibetan bowls and a deep electronic effect called a "Cosmic Beam." By
Malick's request, Zimmer's electronics are largely absent outside of
some droning textures provided by Jeff Rona, though it should be noted
that the French horns and strings in the popular "Journey to the Line"
are mixed with the same brash technique that tends to make most of
Zimmer's scores emphasize a sharp, synthetic edge anyway. String layers
are the most typical conveyers of emotion, dominating this score with
their very long-lined performances of extended notes, and the violins do
tend to present the score's few hopeful moments that do exist, as in
"Light" and late scenes of loss.
Some of the interesting moments of ethnic flavor didn't
even make it into the film, quantified by most of the second half of the
original album. The subtle drum and flute performances in "Air" are a
prime example of this omission by Malick. Also not used in the film is
the cue "The Village," a disappointment given that it's one of the
stronger representations on album. Thirty seconds into this cue, Zimmer
seemingly inserts a direct reference to the theme from John Williams'
JFK. For listeners who can't get enough of the main dramatic
theme in "Journey to the Line," a dissolving reprise is heard early in
"Silence." Of course, when you're talking about comparing the music on
the original album to that heard in the film, you're in for some
frustration. Very little of the music that Zimmer wrote for the picture
actually made the final cut, and what did is likely a different mix from
what you hear on album. As mentioned before, four major cues on the
album weren't even in the film. The famed "Journey to the Line" cue on
album marginalizes the Taiko drum rhythm to such an extent that it may
not satisfy some listeners. Compounding the problem is the fact that
many of these score cues were replaced by Melanesian singing that was,
admittedly, quite popular with awards voters when it came time to
recognize
The Thin Red Line. "Because it takes place at the
Solomon Islands, we caught a lot of Melanesian music," Zimmer stated.
"We have these wonderful choirs and we're using some of that because
there's a purity about it." The challenge that the Melanesian hymns and
chants cause is the complete disconnect between the native source music
and Zimmer's work. The innocence of the singing is so contrary to the
gloomy tone of Zimmer's score that it causes some difficulty with
continuity in the film. Listeners seeking more of this material rejoiced
in a separate soundtrack album devoted to these songs. In 2019, La-La
Land Records provided a 4-CD for
The Thin Red Line that could
finally replace the rather poor bootlegs long circulating for the
soundtrack. This presentation features Zimmer's intended recordings for
the film on the first two CDs before supplying the original album on CD
3 and the Melanesian songs on CD 4. The first two CDs are the main
attraction, and they do expose the extremely repetitive nature of the
work with better clarity. Be prepared for a very somber two and a half
hours of ambience.
The attraction of the 2019 set for
The Thin Red
Line is that the character themes enjoy better purpose as a result
of the full presentation, allowing their subtle variations in
performance to shine. Still, these variations are so minimally
distinguishable on the whole that the experience is one of substantial
tedium. The Tall character's menacing bass string motif really dominates
the first half hour or so of the score, reaching its most snarling
nastiness in "Tall Calls Staros." Two pivotal cues missing from the
original album grace the second CD of the set, and they show Zimmer's
careful technique at supplying lyrical grace to horrific losses in their
scenes. First is "Marty's Letter," a heartbreaking moment of love lost
in which the composer allows the uncertainty theme a moment to merge
with the sensibilities of the Bell character for a counterintuitively
lovely passage. Second, of course, is "Witt Killed," which doesn't
explicitly rely upon the character's theme but rather uses related chord
progressions in an ethereal, classically respectful expression of
release for strings. Some listeners will appreciate the composer's
application of muted pace-setting percussion to certain themes revealed
on the longer presentation, such as the journey theme set to clicking
and tolling chimes in "Cemetery." In the end, though, the weight of the
score's morbid, hazy personality really relegates the 2019 product to
established enthusiasts of Zimmer's brooding mode, intellectual
appreciation failing to dull the oppressive mood of the work. The sound
quality on the longer set isn't appreciably improved from the 1998
original, though with only occasional rattling of percussion to denote
suspense or attack in the work, you can crank up the volume on this one
without much worry. (The lack of actual action music or significant
dissonance in the score remains an intriguing point for debate.) The
power of the film's first two hours on screen will give the music more
gravity for viewers than those who approach it cold, but frustration
over the placement, rearrangement, and re-mixing of the music could also
result from viewing the film. This is one of the rare occasions when a
Media Ventures score from the 1990's was never satisfyingly circulated
on the bootleg market. The original recordings, upwards of four hours in
length, were not adequately leaked in the following ten years to eager
fans, causing the few bootlegs that resulted to feature only sixty
minutes of roughly compiled material heard in the film itself, and most
of these bootlegs suffered from varying levels of dialogue or sound
effects.
In October of 2000, however, at the Flanders
International Film Festival in Belgium, Zimmer coordinated live
performances of "Journey to the Line" and "Light" for the Flemish Radio
Orchestra. The former was pressed on Decca's "The Wings of a Film"
compilation while the latter has circulated on bootlegs. The legacy of
Zimmer's score improved over time, with a notable use of the score
during the 1999 Oscars' "In Memoriam" sequence and several connections
to Zimmer's later
Pearl Harbor. "You come back to your style even
though you try to surpass it all the time," Zimmer reflects after
Pearl Harbor. "I feel that
The Thin Red Line was a movie
about peace, brotherhood. And in a funny way I was working very hard at
trying to get some of that into
Pearl Harbor because I didn't
just want it to be another war movie. I think I might just have forced
this a bit too much." Not only were parts of "Journey to the Line" used
as temp tracks by Zimmer in the production, but the film's impressive
trailers coincidentally used the same cue as well to depict the
approaching Japanese planes. "The best publicity that
The Thin Red
Line ever got was when Jerry Bruckheimer put it in the trailer to
Pearl Harbor," Zimmer continued. "Everyone wanted to know what
that music was, and Bruckheimer did more for
The Thin Red Line
than Fox ever did for that movie." As a listening experience,
The
Thin Red Line requires the same context of thought and mood as
Saving Private Ryan. There are no cheap thrills and much of the
score can tend to be barely audible, themes challenging to ascertain.
Boredom could result for listeners not prepared for this atmospheric
touch, especially on the longer, 2019 album. This is a case in which
Zimmer's traditionally long format of arranged suites on the original
album may be preferable for listeners not seeking cortisol control, the
first four tracks arguably stronger than what follows because of their
accentuation of the sense of flow inherent in the music. Both mood and
functionality are the key here, making the score the polar opposite of
the dramatically transparent
The Prince of Egypt, Zimmer's other
Academy Award-nominated venture in 1998. As the composer joked in early
1999, "I am a double loser this time!" That may have been true of the
Oscars, but both his scores have much to offer in his career. It just so
happens that the animated musical genre makes for a far more
entertaining listening experience that won't, like
The Thin Red
Line, lull you to sleep.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.86
(in 118 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.01
(in 290,591 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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