Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,824
Written 10/20/10
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Buy it... only if you can satisfy yourself with about five minutes
of deeply engaging, full ensemble heroism with an effective, propulsive
touch of dread.
Avoid it... if an otherwise mundane, ambient environment for basic
gravity threatens to bore you as thoroughly as the plethora of similarly
conservative scores for television documentaries and second-rate
dramas.
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| Powell |
United 93: (John Powell) In the aftermath of the
terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, mainstream entertainment
avoided the topic of airplanes, terrorism, and the attack itself for
fear of repelling audiences. Five years seemed to be the right amount of
time for serious cinematic explorations of 9/11 to begin to appear, and
before too long there were action films with crashing planes and crazed
terrorists sprouting up as before. Both Paul Greengrass' United
93 and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center opened the wounds of
the events in 2006, the former taking a partially fictionalized look at
the actions aboard the fourth and final plane to be hijacked that day.
Like the previous television film Flight 93, a merging of
documentary format and personalization gives United 93 as much
credibility as possible. Nobody knows the exact events leading up to the
nosedive of the flight into a Pennsylvania field that day, but
Greengrass uses all the available known facts and fills in just enough
necessary fiction to make a coherent and plausible narrative. Conspiracy
theorists have long claimed that the plane was hijacked as part of an
elaborate scheme by the American government, but the evidence in the
case of this particular flight is too significant in quality and
consistency to doubt anything that Greengrass recreates. The film
performed extremely well with critics, eventually earning two Academy
Award nominations (for direction and editing), and it doubled its $15
million budget domestically and tripled the investment elsewhere. There
were no particularly big names associated with United 93, despite
Greengrass' involvement with The Bourne Supremacy. Still, he
choose to continue his collaboration with composer John Powell, who had
officially arrived at the forefront of the composing industry with
multiple major blockbusters just prior to United 93. The musical
needs of the film were relatively minor; unlike Jerry Goldsmith and John
Williams, Powell seemed to have no need to write an emotionally
overflowing requiem for the event. Instead, United 93 required
little more than the type of generic, minimally rendered ambience that
you typically hear in cheap, second-rate television documentaries
involving character struggles. And while it has been mentioned many
times that United 93 was not meant to be a documentary, the score
that Powell assembled for the production really does fall into the
aforementioned category of mundane background noise.
Powell's merging of a moderately sized orchestral
ensemble, occasional vocal contributions from his young son, and
dominant electronic atmosphere for
United 93 is adequately
conservative but also largely inconsequential on album. The structures
in the score are extremely basic, until the final moments intentionally
vague and gravitating towards somber whole notes on key. The most
interesting aspect of the score is Powell's ability to begin cranking up
the tension in this environment through the alteration of tempi and
harder performance emphasis on the instrumentation (beginning in "The
Pentagon"). By the highlight cue, "The End," the bland whole notes for
strings or French horns begin to shift in key and form chords that some
might interpret as thematic. There really is no defining motif in
United 93 outside of its pulsating whole notes, but "The End"
does bring satisfactory shifts of harmonious fashion to suggest (still
in restrained tones) the heroic actions of the passengers aboard the
plane. The cue opens with an accelerated presentation of the usual whole
notes and ends with the album's only really engaging expressions of
harmony. At about 1:35 into that track, the suggested snare applications
of previous cues begin to denote the passenger uprising in earnest, and
Powell's usual knack for percussive creativity adds another few layers
to the steady drumbeat towards death. Outside of this morbidly
attractive cue, there are really no highlights worth extended mention.
The "Dedication" cue at the end reprises the boy vocals that opened
"Prayers" and "Phone Calls," but these moments are so infrequent and
barely developed (probably in an attempt to avoid religious cliche) that
they don't resonate in memorable ways. The instrumentation alone in
United 93 can't carry the remainder of the score; in the cues of
better depth, Powell collectors will recognize elements carrying over
from his scores for Jason Bourne, especially in the combination of
percussion and electronics. The synthetic bass thumping in the latter
half of "The End" is successful in both its expression of dread and
completion of the harmonic spectrum for a heroic deed. The first twenty
minutes of this score are about as bland as one could imagine, however,
and you would be best served if you can find "The End" on a compilation
(Varèse Sarabande unfortunately included "Dedication" on their
30th anniversary box set instead). Otherwise,
United 93 is a
competent and functional score. It simply doesn't merit a 43-minute
presentation on album, however, not a surprising opinion given the
film's need for a starkly ambient emotional connection in its music.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:
For John Powell reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.31
(in 51 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.16
(in 52,894 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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