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Review of Transformers (Steve Jablonsky)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

Buy it... if every variation of Hans Zimmer's proven summer blockbuster sound pumps you up, for Steve Jablonsky's Transformers score is built on that extremely familiar foundation.

Avoid it... if you expect any connection between this music and the theme song and associated motifs heard in the classic cartoon and 1986 film score.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Transformers: (Steve Jablonsky) One of the greatest success stories for Hasbro in the 1980's was the Transformers cartoon and line of toys, spanning a short, but bright few seasons on television before an ambitious animated film in 1986 killed off too many of the show's beloved and most interesting characters to sustain fan interest (Marvel's comics would live on, though). The much hyped 2007 live action adaptation of the concept, created in a joint venture between Dreamworks and Paramount, met and exceeded everyone's expectations, drawing massive financial returns both in the theatres and on DVD. Identified by critics as a guilty pleasure due to its technical prowess and a relatively unique concept (20 years removed from its last gasps on television), Transformers gained new fans despite the film's long list of shortcomings. For casual viewers, the presence of the ridiculous humans in the story is likely an annoyance, for their contrived characters only serve to take attention away the alien robots; rarely has character development been so transparently forced. For fans of the original show, the legendary voice of Peter Cullen returning for narration duties and the role of Autobot leader Optimus Prime could be one of the only redeeming aspects of the film. Attempts by the scriptwriters to drop pieces of dialogue from the original show and movie into this adaptation, including the show's original taglines, will cause the rolling of eyes. So many of the characters have been altered from their original forms, now transforming with such frighteningly complex mechanics that the robots really don't resemble their machines of deception, that purists of the show are bound for some head-scratching. The blatant promotion of the upcoming Chevy Camaro, along with a slew of other General Motors products, caused significant dissatisfaction as well, proving like always that secretive governmental agencies drive black GMC Yukons. At least Megatron had the opportunity to tear the Pontiac Solstice, with its politically incorrect (but stereotypically correct) African American voice, into two pieces. Unfortunately, the Decepticon leader no longer transforms into a handgun... After all, we're trying to avoid promoting violence to our kids, right?

The music for the new Transformers adaptation has, like most aspects of the film, caused quite a stir. The 1986 film allowed composer Vince DiCola to extend the synthetic themes and motifs from the animated series into the feature, augmenting those familiar sounds with a memorable, octave-skipping theme in the bass region for the planet-eating villain Unicron. DiCola's hip, electronic score, along with an outstanding ensemble of vocal talents for the robots, helped Transformers: The Movie exude enough character consistent with the show to squarely place it in the concept's universe. The catchy title theme from the series was integrated, along with several consistently utilized motifs, directly into the underscore. And, as expected for the audience, a selection of rock songs was inserted as well. For the 2007 vision of Transformers by Michael Bay, the director would turn once again to composer Steve Jablonsky for the score, and every musical element you remember from the 1980's would be abandoned. Unlike the scriptwriters, who toyed with audiences with their inside jokes relating to the original series throughout the film, Jablonsky apparently took absolutely no inspiration from the franchise whatsoever. Instead, he obviously is a big fan of the career of his mentor, Hans Zimmer, whose music may as well have been temp-tracked into Transformers and left there. Rather than hearing some creative variants of the original show's main theme and related motifs, Jablonsky provides an intellectually deficient recapitulation of ideas heard in Zimmer's Batman Begins, Pirates of the Caribbean, Crimson Tide, and The Peacemaker, as well as Trevor Rabin's National Treasure, Deep Blue Sea and Armageddon, among others. With his solo career still undefined, Jablonsky owes most of the skepticism about his abilities to his collaboration with Media Ventures and Remote Control, with which he had been a Zimmer ghostwriter for several of the composer's major scores of the early 2000's. His score for Bay's The Island in 2005 closed with a version of Gladiator's "Now We Are Free" so similar in sound that Lisa Gerrard must have thought she missed a party at some point. And while even the most avid fans of Jablonsky's Transformers score will readily admit that the music is derivative of all the ones listed above, the problems with it are far more significant.

You can sum up Jablonsky's work here by making the following two conditional statements: if this score had been written for a Transformers film in 1996 and if the franchise had never existed before on television or the big screen, then this would easily be a four-star score. As it's heard in a 2007 film adapting a beloved concept, however, it's only half as good. You simply can no longer accept these "rehash" scores on the grounds that their "sound" is commonly acceptable as "expected" in a current, testosterone-driven "blockbuster." The minute you accept a score like Transformers as a praiseworthy piece of musical artistry is the same minute you accept the perhaps inevitable fact that modern audiences are either intrinsically dumb or have dramatically lower expectations in the music they hear in theatres. What kind of smart, creative thought process went through Jablonsky's mind when he decided to compile a series of tired Media Ventures/Remote Control musical ideas and repackage them into Transformers? Maybe he can blame his own pair of ghostwriters on the project. This score is like seeing the "Limited Edition" box of Post's Alpha-Bits cereal on supermarket shelves in 2007. You know that the original sugary form of the cereal went mostly extinct a while back, but now it's been repackaged as a "Limited Edition"... And you know what you get inside the box? The same old flavor in much smaller letters, not to mention more air space. So, in the end, there's something remotely satisfying about going back and enjoying those old days of Alpha-Bits crunching, but you can't shake that feeling like those times are definitely gone and you're only getting ripped off nowadays. Jablonsky's Transformers score gives you the same feeling. He wrote several themes for the film... Too many, in fact. Outside of the primary ideas for the Autobots and Decepticons, the remaining subthemes simply fade into the murky shades of Zimmer that prevail through most of the score. The fact that there exist more than a half-dozen unique themes in the new Transformers film is largely irrelevant because almost all of them use the same Trevor Rabin-inspired series of ultra-pleasant and masculine chord progressions that Rabin had originally learned from Zimmer. Most of these subthemes can be referenced to Armageddon, especially when they're performed by the same exact instrumentation.

The themes aren't alone what kill this score's hopes of surviving the wrath of intelligent listeners, however. The Autobots theme, while simplistic in all the expected ways, functions better than all of the other themes in the film. Its noble horns, ripping snare, and mixed chorus provide all the traits of Zimmer's best anthems, with a twist of Rabin's Deep Blue Sea for good measure. In the last few seconds of the theme, you finally hear some counterpoint to this presentation; unfortunately, it's essentially the Maximus theme from Gladiator. And even if you can forgive all of those "inspirations," you still have to deal with the simple minor key alternation of rhythm in the strings that is a disturbingly blatant copy of Batman Begins. That one's the killer of this score. Far more interesting is the staccato chanting for the Decepticons, staggering the Batman Begins-style of ostinato into a truly menacing choral performance that accompanies the exploits of Megatron and associated villains throughout the film. Otherwise, themes for the All Spark and Optimus Prime, among others, are lazy variants on the style prevailing in the Autobots theme. The "Optimus" cue is yet another uplifting variant of Armageddon, especially in its instrumentation. Between the electric bass, guitars, and woodwind solos, you'd think that the Autobots were trying to blow up a space rock and return to earth to rekindle a relationship with an Elvish-looking woman. Jablonsky reprises the primary two themes most often in the score, though without the distinct pacing of the Decepticons' theme, you'd hardly notice it over the sound effects. One of the highlights of the score for fans of the Zimmer "sound" will be "Arrival to Earth," which essentially takes all the associated, various thematic and instrumental tendencies (even down to the electric strings that seems to define a true Zimmer imitation score) and merges it into a climactic anthem of epic proportions that pays tribute to The Peacemaker,Crimson Tide, and all the early, influential Zimmer scores at once. As the Batman Begins rhythms continue in this and other cues, hints of King Arthur's choral majesty shine through. A light, plucked subtheme for the primary (and idiotic) human character, "Witwicky," changes the pace of the score, but only to remind us of the better moments of Rabin's National Treasure.

The action music in Transformers is less descript except in the moments of fierce bass pounding, such as the irritating, slower, electric version of the Batman Begins ostinato heard at the start of "Scorponok" that actually instills a minor sense of dread in the film. A bold variant of this rhythm for the American military, alternating between minor and major keys, serves the members of the audience who get erections while seeing American aircraft fly around and use their weapons (there's even a hint or two of Black Hawk Down in the on-again, off-again style of volume in this cue). The majority of action music late in the score simply takes the ideas already stated early in the film and amplifies them with additional layers of electronic noise. At some point, the woodwind-less orchestra, even with enhanced mixing of its brass section, simply loses out in their mix with the electronic and choral elements. Like Zimmer himself, Jablonsky mixes his orchestral recording in such a way as to make them sound synthetic; part of this phenomenon is due to the incredibly simplistic progressions, which tend to define synthetic recordings, but some of it is done to give the score a bigger bulge in the groin region. By the time you hear the closing "No Sacrifice, No Victory" cue, the Autobot theme is restated once again without much variation, showing that Jablonsky had little intent in actually providing some developmental depth to the musical ideas he adapted. Overall, the score works sufficiently in the film, which moves at a pace so fast that you hardly notice the score's weaknesses. In essence, a dumb eye-candy film has received its due Zimmeresque action score. The score was neglected on album for several months despite the film's success; during that time, a bootlegged version of the score was leaked to the incessant fanboys signing petitions for its official release. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of this entire situation is just how readily scores by the Media Ventures/Remote Control crowd get leaked to the public. Blame the huge crews for these recordings... seriously. Interestingly, when Warner Brothers did eventually release a score-only album for Transformers (absent those awful songs over the end credits, thank goodness), the product offered alternate, non-film versions of most of Jablonky's music. Thus, those die-hard fanboys couldn't sit only on their bootlegs. It was quite a creative move by Warner, acknowledging the leakage of the music and compensating by offering varying mixes that would still entice hardcore listeners. Unfortunately, those alternate versions aren't any more intelligent, and the album could really have used some of Cullen's narration at the start and end. As is, there truly isn't more than meets the eye.  **

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 59:45

• 1. Autobots* (2:33) • 2. Decepticons* (3:52) • 3. The All Spark* (3:35) • 4. Deciphering the Signal* (3:09) • 5. Frenzy* (1:57) • 6. Optimus* (3:16) • 7. Bumblebee* (3:58) • 8. Soccent Attack (2:07) • 9. Sam at the Lake (2:00) • 10. Scorponok* (4:57)

• 11. Cybertron (2:46) • 12. Arrival to Earth* (5:27) • 13. Witwicky (1:57) • 14. Downtown Battle (1:33) • 15. Sector 7 (2:05) • 16. Bumblebee Captured (2:17) • 17. You're a Soldier Now (3:28) • 18. Sam on the Roof* (2:03) • 19. Optimus vs. Megatron (4:00) • 20. No Sacrifice, No Victory* (2:58)

NOTES & QUOTES:

The insert includes extensive credits, but no extra information about the score or film.

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