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•	2021 Album

•	2009 Album

Beltrami, along with substantial contributions by Buck Sanders and Marcus Trumpp, tackled Knowing in predictable fashion, sculpting a score in three distinct sections that address the suspense of the story's first 90 minutes, the fantasy of its concluding half hour, and the overarching sense of tender love between father and son that exists in short sequences throughout. All three portions qualify themselves in context, though Beltrami creates an environment of predictability that pulls inspiration from Bernard Herrmann, James Newton Howard, and Jerry Goldsmith, rarely providing an unexpected twist. The suspense material in the first three quarters of the film is occupied by a frantic, skittish personality of plucked strings and other prickly elements. As Nicolas Cage's character first decodes a series of numbers predicting the disasters to come, this technique is placed as practically the only element in the film's soundscape. Though the cue "Door Jam" may not be entirely pleasant, it does stir a growing sense of intrigue and, later, panic. This idea translates into a representation for the "strangers" as well, though thankfully the intense whispering sound effects heard in the film to represent their communication are absent from the score. Instead, they receive Tibetan bowls as their other-worldly instrumental representation, later joined by cimbalom. The pretty, though arguably underplayed piano theme for the father/son relationship in the story is most poignant, of course, at the end of "Caleb Leaves," though it is sufficient in its task prior to this moment. The overblown fantasy elements allow Beltrami's descending main theme to rattle the floors with broad strokes of brass in the three climactic action cues. It's not a particularly memorable idea outside of the fact that nearly every major motif in the film uses its descending chord progressions that never truly resolve, though it does have a slightly brutal tone to its deliberate pacing that adequately represents the destruction at hand. Fragmented down to four notes in early cues, Beltrami does explore it fully in "Main Title," though the core variant of this idea comes in eight descending notes in a line that dominate later cues. The choir is employed during the later sequences featuring these progressions as well, culminating in a "come to Jesus" style of grand harmony in "Who Wants an Apple?" that only exacerbates the level of dissatisfaction with Proyas' execution of the concept on screen.

As Beltrami abruptly shifts from suspense to majestic fantasy in Knowing during the revelatory "Shock and Awe," the resulting grand, tonal scope does provide for at least fifteen minutes of extremely engaging material. The "Caleb Leaves" cue is worthy of special note, though despite its easy, melodramatic, and bittersweet undulation, it really doesn't explore the concept from any particularly new direction. The use of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in the following scene, as Cage's character drives through New York to be with his family at death, is extremely distracting and wrong for the tone of the scene. The "Roll Over Beethoven" cue presented on album was Beltrami's own take on this scene, and his adaptation of the descending main theme for this moment would have been far superior in addressing the tragedy of the event. The Beethoven recording is not included on the lengthy score-only album for Knowing from Varèse Sarabande in 2009. That product contains extended sequences of suspense on pins and needles early on, with smart but rather mundane electronic ambience joining it. The latter sequences save the listening experience, though only for a quarter of its running time. The label returned to the score in 2021 (no, the world never did end) for a limited 2-CD set, almost doubling the music from the film but some of that time taken by the inserted Beethoven material. That set corrects the chronological ordering of the tracks and supplies a number of relatively mundane, short cues from the midsection of the score. This does include more of the Goldsmith-inspired music summarized in "Waiting For Bad News." More intriguing is the additional material offered at the end of the film, for which Beltrami wrote a number of different variants for the concluding scenes. Ultimately, the destruction of the planet is unscored in the final cut, but these alternate takes are an interesting view into the problematic process of turning a moody suspense score into one of hopeful fantasy. The longer presentation thus offers more highlights for the casual listener, including better enunciation of the descending main theme and the Beethoven interludes, but the product also boosts the less desirable portions as well. The sound quality on the two products is not substantially different. On the whole, Beltrami and team's music for Knowing is functional but just as predictable as the film's disappointingly shallow narrative, and the sudden shift in mood at the end betrays the personality of the score's majority.  ***   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

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.