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Review of The Thirteenth Floor (Harald Kloser)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

Buy it... if you can shut down your brain long enough to enjoy the shamelessly harmonic and predictably simplistic orchestral and choral techniques of Harald Kloser's incongruous score.

Avoid it... if your guilty pleasures require more than just a few gorgeous crescendos of choral majesty and a little 1930's big band flair.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

The Thirteenth Floor: (Harald Kloser/Thomas Wanker) Based on Daniel Galouye's 1964 novel Simulacron-3, The Thirteenth Floor was part of a mad rush in the late 1990's to develop films that challenge audiences' notions of reality. The king of this movement was obviously The Matrix, though spinoff ideas in Dark City and eXistenZ took advantage of the hype to lesser degrees. The Thirteenth Floor conceptually shares the most with The Matrix, switching constantly between the real world and a simulated one, with the real world being the one less expected. The problem with The Thirteenth Floor is that any audience can figure out the twist early in the film, leaving it as merely an exhibition of different scenery designs in 1937 and 1999. A lackluster cast and crew assembled by producer Roland Emmerich, mostly Germans, would create a film released with both Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and The Matrix in the theatres, dooming the project to a quick death on video shelves. While Emmerich claimed to narrow his search for a composer to one of five, Hollywood novice and Austrian Harald Kloser would receive his big break. While his career would include both The Day After Tomorrow and Alien vs. Predator in the coming years, neither would be as strong as The Thirteenth Floor and his career would languish back in Europe. Considering these three major entries into mainstream scoring, the most immediately obvious aspect of his writing is his inability to form a distinct personality or style in his large-scale scores. This is partly due to the fact that he seems incapable of writing a theme or motif and developing it to satisfaction in any of these films, but Kloser's other problem exists in his faceless and unpredictable approach to these scores. The Thirteenth Floor, like the others, has some highlights. And, in this case, the highlights are easily the best of anything in the three. But despite these high points, The Thirteenth Floor is a score without an identity, relying on the pleasure of the moment to appease listeners trying to establish a continuity to the entire package. That continuity never happens.

Kloser, with the assistance of co-composer, co-conductor, and co-orchestrator Thomas Wanker, provides a score for The Thirteenth Floor that can be split into three distinct parts, and identifying them is easy because they appear chronologically on the album. The first third of the score offers large-scale orchestral and choral accompaniment that Emmerich would have received from David Arnold. Shamelessly harmonic and simple in its progressions and instrumentation, cues like "Downtown L.A., 1937" and "Downloading" are often enchanting in their constructs, even when they're essentially accomplishing nothing more than beautiful noise. The title theme is weak --barely distinguishable, in fact-- and a lazy, descending three-note motif is established for later reference. Technically, this music is the stuff of amateurs, but it once again proves that any basic construct, when aided by an ambitious and large orchestra with choir, can sound great in amplification. The second part of the score features the "Wilshire Grand Swing Suite," three cues of 30's big band jazz that is ironically the most convincing part of the entire album despite having nothing familiar with the surrounding underscore. While competent, these three cues will likely be passed by film score collectors. The remaining orchestral action cues rely heavily on sampled rhythms, metallic percussion, and deep electronic bass dwelling. Its industrial sound, mirroring some of the Media Ventures tactics of the era, does cease in places for a resumption of the beauty from early in the score, including a delightful solo boy's voice in "The 13th Floor." The appropriate hard techno rhythm in "Techno Download" yields to a couple of cues containing the kind of choral crescendos that Arnold would be proud of in the following two cues. After a quick resumption of obnoxiously frenetic synthetic pounding in "Showdown," a heartfelt death cue leads to one final statement of grand harmony with chorus at the end of the film. It's predictable music, but it's executed quite well. And because of that decent recording, the album is easy to recommend if you find it in a used CD bin. Don't expect the film or score to challenge you whatsoever.  ***

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 52:15

• 1. Downtown L.A., 1937 (1:38) • 2. Jane's Theme (2:57) • 3. Downloading (4:35) • 4. Desert (2:28) • 5. Locker Chase (1:34) • 6. Bookstore (2:33) • 7. Caravan* (4:04) • 8. St. Louis Blues* (3:04) • 9. Easy Come, Easy Go* (3:31)

• 10. The 13th Floor (3:49) • 11. Fuller Goes to Sleep (4:22) • 12. Techno Download (2:54) • 13. Flatliner (1:59) • 14. End of the World (4:28) • 15. Showdown (1:47) • 16. Hall is Dead (3:36) • 17. Where are We? (2:53)

NOTES & QUOTES:

The insert notes include a statement about the score by producer Roland Emmerich.

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