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War of the Worlds: (John Williams) Fifty years
after its initial appearance on the big screen, H.G. Wells' novel "The
War of the Worlds" receives a $135 million Steven Spielberg facelift
with megastar Tom Cruise as the heart of its people story. Written just
before 1900, the story is best known for the historic 1938 Orson Welles
radio broadcast in which Welles deviously convinced much of the nation
that our planet was actually under attack (it really is too bad the
media can't get away with such a thing today). Spielberg's adaptation of
the story, with the help of
Jurassic Park screenwriter David
Koepp, forgoes the opportunity to update the alien pod creatures (as
well as their mission and their demise) and instead reverts to the
original concepts and illustrations that accompanied Well's novel.
Critics haven't been kind to this Spielberg vision of the invasion, for
the film does seem to suffer from its share of fallacies of logic,
including the awkward design of the alien pods themselves. The necessary
human drama element also bogs the film down, and without the spectacular
imagery of
Independence Day,
War of the Worlds has been
classified as a distinctly mundane film. Don't tell that to composer
John Williams, however, whose level of complexity in his music has
maintained itself with force as we venture further past the turn of the
century. Spielberg's usual collaborator, Williams offers
War of the
Worlds only a month after his final journey into the
Star
Wars universe, and despite the two films' shared topic of human
despair, alien creatures, and large-scale special effects, the focus of
the two scores could not be further from each other. It's safe to say
that
War of the Worlds has a happy ending, albeit not one of
human triumph. Our military is useless, our collective panic forces us
to turn on each other, and in the end, the solution to our problem is an
intellectual one rather than something blatantly victorious. Williams
responds by providing music that is so enveloped in this chaos that he
actually writes a score with no discernible concert piece... a major
deviation for the composer.
The base complexities of Williams' usual high standards
are clearly evident in
War of the Worlds. Flourishing woodwinds,
explosions of timpani, and rapid brass bursts that would test any horn
player's abilities are put on good display. The strings are as frantic
as ever, sprinting over massive blasts of deep brass and rolling rhythms
that keep you on the edge of your seat with the persistent jumps, sudden
stops, and complete changes in direction. This would be describing, of
course, the action cues in the score. Interspersed with these walls of
noise are the even more disjointed and dissonant cousins of those cues,
representing the suspense in the film. The term "spine-tingling" isn't
accurate to describe these cues, for Williams hits the listener with the
blunt force of his Los Angeles ensemble of players rather than using
particular, individual instruments mixed above the ensemble to create
his fright. Large washes of atonal sound, sometimes painful to the ears
in their ability to take the ensemble and simply move its pitch upward
in uncomfortable ways, effectively create a twisted panic, though they
don't linger on the mind long after. The final elements in the score are
those for the film's primary two characters, as well humanity and its
suffering. Surprisingly, Williams chooses not to provide anyone in the
film with thematic development. Motifs representing the destructive pods
are scattered throughout the score, but the people themselves receive
the treatment of a lost piano and string section. Luckily, Williams
still is able to provide some of the warmth in his solo piano writing
without the available themes, so once again, the music suffices on a
primordial level. Without a title theme, and certainly without any
statement of resolution at the end,
War of the Worlds is not a
readily enjoyable Williams score. The closest cue Williams has to
adapting for a concert performance is "The Return to Boston," which
resembles some of his
Indiana Jones music in its heightened
organization of rhythm, propulsion by snare, and final, tonal brass
notes that take a page from
Revenge of the Sith.
Aside from this "The Return to Boston" cue, however,
Williams' score intentionally strays towards the intellectual
consequences of the attack on humanity rather than the bombastic
alternative that would have made for better listening. The epilogue cue
is all the evidence you need; Williams provides the structural string
crescendo that you would expect, followed by the solo instrumental
sendoff, but he does so with continued dissonance up to the final note,
leaving us to wonder if the tale is really finished. With this in mind,
the average Williams collector will not be leaping at the chance to
listen to
War of the Worlds with any great frequency. It's
difficult to fault Williams for producing a score that is so largely
unmemorable outside of its context, for this path towards the atonal was
obviously his intent. At the same time, both the action and suspense has
been better rendered in his previous works, even at the expense of
harmony, and many listeners will be reminded of the interesting, but
equally unglamorous score for
Minority Report when enjoying
War of the Worlds. Neither effort will leave you humming a theme
after their conclusion, and with a remake on the magnitude of
War of
the Worlds, you can't help but wonder if the fright could have been
realized with a sound more readily identifiable. Even among the
complexities of Williams' action writing here, which you have to
appreciate for their mere structure, you still are left wishing for just
a little continuity from cue to cue. Without the typically masterful
threads of cohesion usually evident in Williams' work,
War of the
Worlds is merely an average background listening experience on
album. The album does offer Morgan Freeman's narration for the opening
and closing of the film (and taken with few alterations from the novel
itself). With the score functioning in context much better than on its
own, the narration is a welcome addition to the album (if not the
highlight), supplementing Williams' tense underscore with the deep,
soothing voice of Freeman performing some of the story's most famous
lines. At an hour in length, the album is an interesting listening
experience for those score collectors who appreciate Williams' high
standards of complexity, but the score will more likely alienate the
majority of his fans who prefer his scores to have strong lines of
thematic cohesion and an obvious concert arrangement.
***
| Bias Check: | For John Williams reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.72 (in 63 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.67
(in 299,177 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes a note from Spielberg about the score and
film, as well as a list of players. The format of the unfolding insert,
however, is very cumbersome.
