Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,488
Written 2/19/10
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Buy it... only if you want to shatter the sanity in your head with
an incredibly challenging, dissonant musical extension of the sound
effects used to convey the alienating suspense of the impossible
circumstances in the film.
Avoid it... if you purchase your soundtracks with the intent of
enjoying them, for the depressing pseudo-music for The Hurt
Locker is so frightfully obnoxious that even suicidal people may
find it too disturbing to put them into the right mood for killing
themselves.
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| Beltrami |
The Hurt Locker: (Marco Beltrami/Buck Sanders)
Bouncing around the festival tour for a year, director Kathryn Bigelow's
The Hurt Locker became the top intellectual thriller of the late
2009 awards season, matching James Cameron's Avatar in
recognition and rewarded with nearly unanimously positive reviews from
critics. Based upon the accounts of a journalist embedded with an elite
Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in the American Army during the early
years of the second war in Iraq, the film follows the lives of members
of the team as they encounter a variety of difficult, sometimes
unsolvable situations in their line of duty. The film is ultimately an
extremely depressing one, depicting the action of this team as addictive
and leading its primary protagonist to leave his family to serve another
tour of duty in the same brutal conditions. While technically masterful
and intended to be as authentic as possible (being shot just outside of
Iraq in Jordan and Kuwait), The Hurt Locker was not as well
received by actual veterans of the war, many of whom dismissed Bigelow's
story as completely unrealistic and therefore a very poor representation
of the actual conditions in which similar soldiers find themselves.
Nevertheless, it's the type of film that meets or exceeds the
expectations of an industry thirsty for documentary-style drama from an
unpopular war. Its disturbing atmosphere was an element that Bigelow
wanted to be enhanced by the music for the film, and she sought a score
from Marco Beltrami and his collaborative assistant, Buck Sanders, that
would not interfere through the use of a sympathetic, recognizable
orchestral sound. The two composers had shared screen credit twice
before, Sanders responsible for some of the soundscape textures heard in
Beltrami's work. Because the primary character has something of a cowboy
attitude, Beltrami chose to address him with a very slight Western-style
theme and instrumentation, though this material is limited to just a few
minutes on album. Despite the employment of a tiny chamber ensemble for
a handful of sequences, the majority of the score for The Hurt
Locker contains an intentionally grating blend of electronic and
organic sounds manipulated into a frightfully uncomfortable series of
dissonant waves of dull sound.
This score is undoubtedly going to raise the perpetual
debate about whether music that serves as an extended sound effect
should ever be released on album. Beltrami and Sanders worked closely
with the film's sound effects editor to incorporate some of the
production's wider soundscape directly into the music, and it should
come as no surprise that both the sound effects and the score were
nominated for Oscars. In reality, there was no reason to award the
combined effort twice, the score never establishing much personality
outside of significant manipulations of vaguely musical sounds to
accompany the effects. Both erhu and voice join guitars in the task of
being synthetically altered to such an extent that they are nearly
unrecognizable or, at the most, intolerably applied. The score shifts
from one mind-numbing series of meandering musical effects to another,
sometimes erupting in explosions even more dissonant than the dusty,
aimless environment maintained by every cue. Stutter effects,
pitch-wavering, and inconsistent rhythmic movement (outside of frequent
pairs of bass thumps) continue to keep the listener in a state of
unease. The sound effects range from dull thuds deep in the bass to
imitations of high range interference in a tone that will make you think
that insects are buzzing around the room. Absolutely none of this
material translates into a tolerable listening experience; so disturbing
is this score that it's curious to ponder what type of individual could
use it for the purpose of enjoyment. Even as the source of a challenging
atmosphere,
The Hurt Locker is so overwhelmingly depressing that
those who claim its merits outside of its duties within the film
probably have issues of their own to deal with. The final two-and-a-half
minute cue is the only redemption, the Western electric guitar theme
methodically and tragically conveying the story's bittersweet message
about the addiction of war. Expect nothing in this cue as satisfying as
even the most drab moments of Beltrami's stylish
3:10 to Yuma a
few years prior. The rest of the short presentation on album (absent the
songs in the film) is remarkable in its ability to unsettle, and
although that difficult merging of sound effects and musical tones may
be appropriate for the film, there is simply no reason for anyone to
invest in an album that makes Cliff Martinez's
Solaris seem like
a celebratory overture for a bright, sunny day. Not even the best pills
on the market can turn
The Hurt Locker into a recommended album
listening experience.
* @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:
For Marco Beltrami reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.75
(in 28 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.8
(in 19,012 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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