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| Jablonsky |
Transformers: The Last Knight: (Steve
Jablonsky/Various) As longs as these wretched live-action
Transformers films continue to draw meaningful profits, Hasbro
and Paramount will endeavor to confound critics with their persistence.
The human actors may change, the Chevrolet product placements may be
subsumed by Mercedes-Benz placements, and more of the original animated
show's concepts may be mangled, but director Michael Bay, who continues
to insist with each entry that this "Transformers" film is his last,
once again perpetuates a terribly mismanaged overarching storyline
involving the famed robots. In Filmtracks' review of 2014's
Transformers: Age of Extinction, it was postulated that the only
way to kill off this brainless franchise was if the planet-eating
Transformer named Unicron decided to make Earth his next lunch. Wouldn't
you know, actually, that 2017's
Transformers: The Last Knight
reveals that Earth actually
is Unicron, and that the battle
between our world and the robots' Cybertron is more complex than
originally thought. Somewhere, Orson Welles must be pleasantly
surprised. Of course, this movie has to throw in some knights of the
Arthurian age and merge the tale of Merlin and Excalibur with all of
this nonsense involving ugly, indistinguishable robots, an excuse to
allow Sir Anthony Hopkins to explain the whole franchise to us with
delicious distinction. Despite its incomprehensible conceptual ideas,
Transformers: Age of Extinction did, at the very least, offer
enthusiasts the opportunity to hear the two lead actors from the
original cartoon, Peter Cullen and Frank Welker, reunite once again, the
latter belatedly allowed to reprise his role as Megatron while the
former has always remained the indisputable Optimus Prime. Despite all
its ills, the music for the
Tranformers film franchise has
remained relatively consistent in tone, and something must be said for
composer Steve Jablonsky's ability to offer the same general sound for
all five films thus far. His contribution was stunted in the fourth film
by Bay's insistence that other contributing artists lend themes to
certain scenes and ideas, and that technique is fortunately abandoned
for this fifth entry.
Jablonsky returns with his stable of Remote
Control-related crew and inevitable ghostwriters to provide a
significant amount of music for
Transformers: The Last Knight,
including the seemingly prerequisite half a dozen or so suites of
generic thematic pontification to be edited (read: butchered) in the
film itself. Perhaps the greatest and most senseless choice involving
Transformers: Age of Extinction was the abandonment of the
franchise's primary power anthems in the score, and
Transformers: The
Last Knight does rectify that issue to an extent. The ensemble for
the fifth score is as expected, strings and brass joined by the usual
organic and electronic percussion techniques and not a woodwind in
sight. Choral effects are pretty generic throughout, lacking
individuality. Solo strings are en vogue in the Remote Control universe,
of course, and the historical British element to this score funnels the
two major new themes to those violin and cello performers. There's
nothing revolutionary about these attractive, classically inclined
performances, as the composition is too simplistic for really stress the
players to any great degree. Like the fuller group underneath them, the
soloists typically perform the same lines over and over again in a
slowly ascending crescendo format, the Hans Zimmer procedure that has
apparently bitten Jablonsky quite thoroughly. Those new themes are
assigned to the order of knights that carry the legacy of the robots
history on Earth, and Hopkins' character, Sir Edmund Burton, is the
beneficiary of the pleasantly elegant but rather passionless idea
explored in "Sacrifice" and "Sir Edmund Burton" bookending the score,
along with a few reprises in between. Related is an idea of similar
instrumentation and muted classicism introduced in "Merlin's Staff" for
that portion of the mysticism of the tale. A few other motifs pop up for
the human characters, including the Trevor Rabin-like coolness of "Izzy"
and a tame piano and cello-driven moment of contemplation for "Vivian"
that builds appropriately out of the Merlin identity. These cues are
all organic and easy on the ears, and, in the context of a
"Transformers" score, that's saying something. But they also lack any
significant gravity in any cue, Jablonsky's own piano performances
containing no warmth in their deliberate plodding. Fortunately for
listeners expecting to eject some semen in their britches while
listening to this franchise's music, the power anthems do exist to save
the day.
While the main anthems were never the best of themes to
begin with, hearing the identities for the Autobots, Optimus Prime, and
the franchise as a whole in
Transformers: The Last Knight is a
surprising relief. Short reprises of these ideas litter the first
two-thirds of the score before the return of Optimus Prime really forces
the original themes back to the forefront in "Your Voice." That cue, "I
Had My Moment," and "Calling All Autobots" offer the three themes
(alternately known by their original track titles: "Autobots," "No
Sacrifice, No Victory," and "Arrival to Earth") just enough presence to
really satisfyingly bring this soundtrack home. Don't expect the anthems
to really change shape too intelligently; the pronouncement in "Calling
All Autobots" announcing the Autobot and Prime themes without much
intellectual evolution. The lack of returning ideas for the Bumblebee
and Megatron robots may remain an issue for some listeners, though.
Unfortunately, the rest of the score is largely forgettable. The action
sequences, while not completely intolerable in their synthetic grinding,
have become completely interchangeable and anonymous by this point.
Jablonsky really does become tiresome when each cue features some
drawn-out crescendo format in the Zimmer mould; there really isn't any
smart pinpoint synchronization happening in this score. That provides
for a rather smooth listening experience if you separate out the several
melodic suites into their own 30-minute presentation. One of the more
muscular variants of these cues, the legacy theme in "Purity of Heart,"
is not contained in the movie. Otherwise, stripped of the suites, the
excruciatingly long album presentation is offered in chronological
order. As with the prior score, the score for
Transformers: The Last
Knight was offered first in the digital realm and then later
provided on CD in a 3,000-copy pressing by La-La Land Records. Having
over two hours of music from this work is truthfully unnecessary,
especially as so much of the suspense and action material, not to
mention some of the classical material, is similar to the point of total
redundancy. Still, the product, once culled down, is far more thoughtful
and appealing than its predecessor. For those still fondly recalling the
original cartoon, it remains a shame that nothing from that generation
of the concept has carried over to these scores. A little hint of Vince
DiCola's cool, rhythmic theme for Unicron in the 1986 animated movie
would have been a nice nod that goes missing here. In the end, Jablonsky
and his team earn their pay with their incarnation of the "Transformers"
musical representation, but they accomplish nothing more than that.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Steve Jablonsky reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.2
(in 15 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 2.47
(in 11,924 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes a list of performers but no extra information about the score or film.
