: (James Horner) Reportedly delayed for
as many as seven months due to the attacks of September 11th, 2001,
was slow in recovering its publicity and eventually
faded without much hype. Famed Hong Kong director John Woo proved with
this film that he is indeed skilled with graphic depictions of violence,
but his talents in the heavier dramatic genres are severely lacking. The
long delay in post-production unfortunately didn't yield a reworking of
the script to shift the pieces of the film into a more coherent whole,
leaving it instead as a story with little audience engagement or depth
in characters. The plot of the gory Woo film deals with the use of
Navajo American Indians as a source of military encoding through their
native language in World War II, a code that the enemy could not break.
The film's handling of the various facets of racism was criticized
heavily for being too simplistic. The extra time in post-production was
also not kind to James Horner's score for
, which Woo
rearranged mercilessly so that very few of the composer's cues were
eventually placed in the proper location. He often chopped them into
pieces and fit them in like library samples, yielding an unsatisfactory
aural experience in the film to accompany the equally messy visuals.
After several years of writing music of a smaller scope, Horner had
returned to weighty genres of drama and war in the year he wrote
. His scores for
represented a movement in Horner's
career back towards heavy orchestral projects. Understandably, when
Horner's name was mentioned as a candidate for assignment to
, for which Horner took a
minimal ensemble and created a hauntingly effective Native American
score. The use of ethnic instrumentation, experimental or native, had
been declining for Horner in the years in between, so
offered him a chance to reassert those characteristics from an era that
many argued to be the prime of his career.
For the most part, however,
Windtalkers follows
more of a familiar pattern of generic Horner action and drama material
rather than pulling the best from his earlier works for a more engaging
listening experience. As an accompaniment for war, Horner's composition
for the film is powerful, brooding, heroic, and somber all at once. Its
functionality should not be doubted; while some people have inevitably
documented the similarities between this effort and
Enemy at the
Gates, the mass of music for
Windtalkers makes for an
adequate war score, even if it doesn't test new grounds in Horner's
career. At least this work doesn't step on the toes of so many classical
composers and the cliches from Horner's own works (which essentially
ruined
Enemy at the Gates for many listeners). Unfortunately,
that does cause
Windtalkers to be significantly more generic in
its sound. Along these lines, the major detraction from
Windtalkers for most fans of the composer will be the obvious
underplaying of the Native American elements. Horner utilizes a very
restrained combination of ethnic vocal chants and a single native flute
to constitute the Navajo story, and while both efforts succeed to the
extent to which they were used, the majority of the score invariably
suffers without them. Collectors know that Horner is more than capable
of using Native American voices, drums, and other instrumentation to an
incredible effect (due solely to the existence of
Thunderheart),
but he didn't do that here, and the score for
Windtalkers cries
out for more of the same kind of ethnic magic that Horner used to go to
extremes to include in his works. Some might argue that the film
demanded a straight forward score for the wartime situations that, on
the whole, had little to do with Native Americans in a broader sense.
But Horner doesn't even interpolate these ethnic elements in subtle ways
throughout the work, choosing instead to apply them in an almost token
formula. There are more than a few rousing action cues in
Windtalkers that could have benefited enormously by the
harmonious integration of the American and Najavo elements.
Unfortunately, Horner's 2000's career was not emphasizing the same
distinct instrumental colors of his 1990's works, and this score is some
of the clearest evidence of that change.
The action sequences involving battle, such as the
lengthy "Taking the Beachhead," are very effective in their purity of
American bravado. Horner even tries to manipulate the four-note "danger
motif" from his previous works by appending two additional notes that
give it a slightly less ominous personality. The use of the usually
tender title theme with full snare rolls and trumpets blazing is among
the most explosive material that Horner had put out in years. It's not
as dramatically significant as, say,
Glory's beachhead cue, but
it is much more inspiring in effort that much of Horner's other action
material from the era. There was a substantial number of early comments
claiming that
Windtalkers contains no satisfying theme. These
accounts are simply inaccurate at every level. While the score on the
album does not introduce the theme in full until the end of "A New
Assignment," the score quickly establishes and ends with the uplifting
and elegant theme representing the Navajo Americans. It's an inverted
form of the controversial love theme from
Enemy at the Gates,
rising in its progression instead of falling. In the softer moments, the
native flute performs the theme with the same delicacy heard in the
somber sequences of
Casper. Fuller expressions of theme by the
entire orchestra are satisfying in "Taking the Beachhead" and "Calling
to the Wind." If the score for
Windtalkers is criticized for its
flaws (which it has to be) it certainly won't be because of the lack of
theme. There are three or so tracks on the album that are less than
inspiring work for Horner, featuring the composer meandering on
auto-pilot, but the majority of this music is at least interesting
enough for a second listen. The flaws of
Windtalkers all come
back to the mysterious lack of ethnic integration throughout the mass of
the orchestral material. While the score as it stands is a strong
three-star entry, it could very easily have been a noteworthy four-star
score if Horner had simply approached
Windtalkers with the same
kind of personal intensity as he had with
Thunderheart. A simple
repeat of
Thunderheart would have been inappropriate, of course,
but to hear the same powerful ethnic work combined with the orchestral
might of wartime heroism would have been a great pleasure, and
undoubtedly an effective sound for the film.
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| Bias Check: |
For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.16
(in 103 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.26
(in 193,642 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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