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| Elfman |
Darkman: (Danny Elfman) Long before composer Danny
Elfman would team with director Sam Raimi for the highly successful
first two
Spider-Man films, there came the very early Raimi film
Darkman, the start of the director/producer's fascination with
comic book heroes. After the massive success of
Batman in 1989
--for both the fate of comic book characters on the big screen and for
Elfman in that genre-- a significant number of other adaptations began
to flow into theatres throughout the 1990's. Interestingly,
Darkman was one of the few not to be based on a historical
character. Instead of adapting an existing character, Raimi and a host
of writers concocted the story of Dr. Peyton Westlake, a talented
scientist experimenting with synthetic skin who is left for dead (and
badly mangled) after hitmen destroy his lab. In the process, Westlake's
nerves are altered by doctors and he achieves both superhuman strength
and uncontrollable rage. Obsessed with the destruction of his enemies,
as well as the lost love of his girlfriend, the Darkman goes about his
revenge while using his synthetic skin to assume multiple characters,
including his former self. A nightmare of a picture,
Darkman is
as much a product of its Gothic surroundings as
Batman was, and
it's no surprise whatsoever that Danny Elfman would agree to score the
picture. At that period in Elfman's career, the composer couldn't get
enough of tragic characters, and his music for those characters was
usually as consistent in its symphonic depth as it was in its success.
While
Darkman is not as well known as
Batman and
Edward
Scissorhands, it contains many of the same basic structures that
Elfman fans have come to love from the morbidly tragic scores from that
period of Elfman's work. Unfortunately,
Darkman also suffers from
the effect of using the table scraps from those other scores.
Everything about
Darkman is saturated with the
same dense, dark, and determined styles that made
Batman a
classic the previous year. But like
Dick Tracy, another 1990
comic-style score from Elfman,
Darkman is less coherent and more
heavily reliant on overbearing style over the substance of its thematic
ideas. Much of this phenomenon relates to the underlying rhythmic
movement of the march that Elfman utilizes for the "Main Titles" theme
and the waltz, which becomes more evident in "The Plot Unfolds." The
title theme offers all the fascinating desolation and hopeless suffering
that we can hope for in the story, and Elfman weaves this theme into his
score with dexterity, especially in the short, but haunting "Julie
Discovers Darkman" cue. The underscore is highly reminiscent of the
motifs used throughout
Batman, with "High Steel" combining the
bubbling timpani, rapid trumpet blasts, and abundant cymbal crashes and
snare rips together with rolling bass string motifs very similar to
action sequences in the earlier work. While this music is entertaining
at a basic level, its continued obvious use here makes
Darkman
the most blatant re-hash score of Elfman's career. The best arrangement
of this music exists in "Woe, The Darkman... Woe," the concert piece
from the score. Two standout cues distinguish themselves from the
continuous re-use: both "Rage/Peppy Science" and "Carnival from Hell"
play to the carnival atmosphere in the film, with the latter cue serving
as an almost intolerably sick interpretation of kiddie carnival music by
Elfman (though he predictably lets the chaos of the full symphony eat
away at the barrel organ until we're in full horror swing). The score
ends with one of Elfman's weaker finales, lacking in any ambitious
crescendo or ultimate act of futility. In retrospect, it's very easy for
Darkman to slip through the cracks in Elfman's career; there's
just so little original material here that the score leaves you seeking
its close cousins, all of which are superior to it.
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| Bias Check: |
For Danny Elfman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.22
(in 73 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.23
(in 129,865 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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