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FILMTRACKS.COM
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Review of The Thin Red Line (Hans Zimmer/Various)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you appreciated the restrained and brooding atmosphere
of the music as you heard it in the film, for The Thin Red Line
is not a score to effectively approach without context.
Avoid it... if you expect any of the score's meandering themes to combine with the Melanesian songs featured in the film to form a clear and compelling narrative beyond the work's blunted demeanor.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
The Thin Red Line: (Hans Zimmer/Various) Terrence Malick's
brilliant imagery was absent from Hollywood for the twenty years prior
to 1998's The Thin Red Line, a film loosely based on the same
1962 autobiographical novel by James Jones that inspired a more faithful
and traditional 1964 adaptation to the screen. The story of one moment
in the World War II battle at Guadalcanal is painfully explored by
Malick with his typical sense of intellectual contemplation and visceral
stimulation. Above all, The Thin Red Line is a beautiful film, as
are most of Malick's visions. Unfortunately, in the process of bringing
his glorious imagery to a story, he typically bundles many of his films'
other attributes, and his editing has always been suspect. Nobody doubts
the quality of the first two hours of The Thin Red Line, but
after the battle for the hill central to the film's plot is finished,
Malick's plotline loses all cohesion. A series of cameos by major stars
distracts from the power of the film's message. The frantic battle
sequences and ultra-realistic displays of nerves and bravery differ from
Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan from earlier in the same
year, inferior in a brutally honest and technical sense, but the same
lack of romantic gloss permeates both films. One other aspect of
Malick's films that typically suffers is the original score, which more
often than not is badly rearranged or replaced by the director without
much logical thought. To tolerate Malick's methodology, a composer has
to be prepared for this eventually and write music according to the
anticipatory chopping that will commence in the days just before the
film's release. James Horner learned this lesson the hard way with
The New World in 2005, with much of his superior work replaced
nonsensically by classical music. In retrospect, Hans Zimmer handled
Malick in a much better fashion for The Thin Red Line, despite
the fact that the director predictably rearranged Zimmer's work up to
the last moment. "I'm always surprised by the reaction I get to The
Thin Red Line," Zimmer said in 2001. "I know it's good, but not many
people have heard it."
As a composer, if you approach a Malick film with hard synchronization points in mind, you're doomed to frustration. Studio chairman Mike Medavoy said of Zimmer's contribution, "It's not a traditional score," however, and that's why it worked. Zimmer instead scored The Thin Red Line loosely, composing between three and four hours of music for the film and allowing Malick to have a field day with the recordings. "A musician has a very good sense of rhythm and sometimes of the lines, the voice of a line, the narration should be like a song," Zimmer stated. "Terry sees himself very much as my lyrist. When you don't have the mortar shells going off, I create this sort of sense of silence and in a peculiar way I've been trying to create normal silence or started something that you can just observe and maybe you get drawn in." Some of the scenes had particular cues written for them, but these ideas were typically misplaced in the final edit of the film anyway. The only reason this technique actually worked to a degree in the film was due to Malick's need for music that was as visceral as the film, conveying a consistent sense of brooding and gloomy atmosphere that could be easily swapped between scenes. The many hours of music that Zimmer wrote for The Thin Red Line did contain motifs for individual characters and overarching ideas for the soldiers' fight for survival and uncertainty about their surroundings. The motifs for the characters ultimately prevailed in the film, for the most part, but they were completely lost on the original album for the score. Vice versa is the main survival theme, which was not totally realized for the scene it was meant for in the film but makes a grand statement in the track "Journey to the Line" and supplies power to the broader marching and battle sequences. The theme for uncertainty is a meandering set of note pairs often accompanied by wishy-washy whole notes of despair on top. It's a theme that permeates the score in full but never really evolves to a greater purpose. The resoundingly growling bass theme for Nick Nolte's commanding officer is perhaps the most memorable character idea, only heard prominently once on the original album in "The Coral Atoll" but revealed with several varying levels of animosity throughout the first third of longer presentations. Secondary motifs supplied by Zimmer for The Thin Red Line extended to Jim Caviezel's principal Witt character, whose vaguely optimistic and steady theme is both soothing and maddeningly static in development throughout the score. For Ben Chaplin's reminiscing Bell character, Zimmer explores a more lyrical and romantic period theme over a pair of major cues. Unfortunately, in terms of definitive style, Zimmer's score has little focus and relies on purely atmospheric meanderings to convey its sense of respect and fear. The composer said, "This is literally about making a very clear statement. It's more much along this sort of philosophical lines, actually." Restrained in every cue except the famous "Journey to the Line," the score differs from John Williams' similarly stark score for Saving Private Ryan in that it makes no attempt at patriotism or a noble heart. It is a defeated, slow, and ambient expression of battered hope and emotional trauma. The score's greatest weakness is its extremely laborious, aimless pacing and extremely repetitive, simple structures, and yet it is this exact set of attributes that made the music suitable for Malick's alterations. The instrumentation and thematic structures do carry some continuity throughout The Thin Red Line, but not necessarily to positive ends. A number of specialty instruments are employed by Zimmer, though their roles are somewhat diminished in the final mix. The Taiko drums are the most prominent of these, but their mixing varies significantly between scenes within the film and on album. The more surreal contributions by John Powell and Francesco Lupica, which do punctuate key moments in the film, offer pronounced use of Tibetan bowls and a deep electronic effect called a "Cosmic Beam." By Malick's request, Zimmer's electronics are largely absent outside of some droning textures provided by Jeff Rona, though it should be noted that the French horns and strings in the popular "Journey to the Line" are mixed with the same brash technique that tends to make most of Zimmer's scores emphasize a sharp, synthetic edge anyway. String layers are the most typical conveyers of emotion, dominating this score with their very long-lined performances of extended notes, and the violins do tend to present the score's few hopeful moments that do exist, as in "Light" and late scenes of loss. Some of the interesting moments of ethnic flavor didn't even make it into the film, quantified by most of the second half of the original album. The subtle drum and flute performances in "Air" are a prime example of this omission by Malick. Also not used in the film is the cue "The Village," a disappointment given that it's one of the stronger representations on album. Thirty seconds into this cue, Zimmer seemingly inserts a direct reference to the theme from John Williams' JFK. For listeners who can't get enough of the main dramatic theme in "Journey to the Line," a dissolving reprise is heard early in "Silence." Of course, when you're talking about comparing the music on the original album to that heard in the film, you're in for some frustration. Very little of the music that Zimmer wrote for the picture actually made the final cut, and what did is likely a different mix from what you hear on album. As mentioned before, four major cues on the album weren't even in the film. The famed "Journey to the Line" cue on album marginalizes the Taiko drum rhythm to such an extent that it may not satisfy some listeners. Compounding the problem is the fact that many of these score cues were replaced by Melanesian singing that was, admittedly, quite popular with awards voters when it came time to recognize The Thin Red Line. "Because it takes place at the Solomon Islands, we caught a lot of Melanesian music," Zimmer stated. "We have these wonderful choirs and we're using some of that because there's a purity about it." The challenge that the Melanesian hymns and chants cause is the complete disconnect between the native source music and Zimmer's work. The innocence of the singing is so contrary to the gloomy tone of Zimmer's score that it causes some difficulty with continuity in the film. Listeners seeking more of this material rejoiced in a separate soundtrack album devoted to these songs. In 2019, La-La Land Records provided a 4-CD for The Thin Red Line that could finally replace the rather poor bootlegs long circulating for the soundtrack. This presentation features Zimmer's intended recordings for the film on the first two CDs before supplying the original album on CD 3 and the Melanesian songs on CD 4. The first two CDs are the main attraction, and they do expose the extremely repetitive nature of the work with better clarity. Be prepared for a very somber two and a half hours of ambience. The attraction of the 2019 set for The Thin Red Line is that the character themes enjoy better purpose as a result of the full presentation, allowing their subtle variations in performance to shine. Still, these variations are so minimally distinguishable on the whole that the experience is one of substantial tedium. The Tall character's menacing bass string motif really dominates the first half hour or so of the score, reaching its most snarling nastiness in "Tall Calls Staros." Two pivotal cues missing from the original album grace the second CD of the set, and they show Zimmer's careful technique at supplying lyrical grace to horrific losses in their scenes. First is "Marty's Letter," a heartbreaking moment of love lost in which the composer allows the uncertainty theme a moment to merge with the sensibilities of the Bell character for a counterintuitively lovely passage. Second, of course, is "Witt Killed," which doesn't explicitly rely upon the character's theme but rather uses related chord progressions in an ethereal, classically respectful expression of release for strings. Some listeners will appreciate the composer's application of muted pace-setting percussion to certain themes revealed on the longer presentation, such as the journey theme set to clicking and tolling chimes in "Cemetery." In the end, though, the weight of the score's morbid, hazy personality really relegates the 2019 product to established enthusiasts of Zimmer's brooding mode, intellectual appreciation failing to dull the oppressive mood of the work. The sound quality on the longer set isn't appreciably improved from the 1998 original, though with only occasional rattling of percussion to denote suspense or attack in the work, you can crank up the volume on this one without much worry. (The lack of actual action music or significant dissonance in the score remains an intriguing point for debate.) The power of the film's first two hours on screen will give the music more gravity for viewers than those who approach it cold, but frustration over the placement, rearrangement, and re-mixing of the music could also result from viewing the film. This is one of the rare occasions when a Media Ventures score from the 1990's was never satisfyingly circulated on the bootleg market. The original recordings, upwards of four hours in length, were not adequately leaked in the following ten years to eager fans, causing the few bootlegs that resulted to feature only sixty minutes of roughly compiled material heard in the film itself, and most of these bootlegs suffered from varying levels of dialogue or sound effects. In October of 2000, however, at the Flanders International Film Festival in Belgium, Zimmer coordinated live performances of "Journey to the Line" and "Light" for the Flemish Radio Orchestra. The former was pressed on Decca's "The Wings of a Film" compilation while the latter has circulated on bootlegs. The legacy of Zimmer's score improved over time, with a notable use of the score during the 1999 Oscars' "In Memoriam" sequence and several connections to Zimmer's later Pearl Harbor. "You come back to your style even though you try to surpass it all the time," Zimmer reflects after Pearl Harbor. "I feel that The Thin Red Line was a movie about peace, brotherhood. And in a funny way I was working very hard at trying to get some of that into Pearl Harbor because I didn't just want it to be another war movie. I think I might just have forced this a bit too much." Not only were parts of "Journey to the Line" used as temp tracks by Zimmer in the production, but the film's impressive trailers coincidentally used the same cue as well to depict the approaching Japanese planes. "The best publicity that The Thin Red Line ever got was when Jerry Bruckheimer put it in the trailer to Pearl Harbor," Zimmer continued. "Everyone wanted to know what that music was, and Bruckheimer did more for The Thin Red Line than Fox ever did for that movie." As a listening experience, The Thin Red Line requires the same context of thought and mood as Saving Private Ryan. There are no cheap thrills and much of the score can tend to be barely audible, themes challenging to ascertain. Boredom could result for listeners not prepared for this atmospheric touch, especially on the longer, 2019 album. This is a case in which Zimmer's traditionally long format of arranged suites on the original album may be preferable for listeners not seeking cortisol control, the first four tracks arguably stronger than what follows because of their accentuation of the sense of flow inherent in the music. Both mood and functionality are the key here, making the score the polar opposite of the dramatically transparent The Prince of Egypt, Zimmer's other Academy Award-nominated venture in 1998. As the composer joked in early 1999, "I am a double loser this time!" That may have been true of the Oscars, but both his scores have much to offer in his career. It just so happens that the animated musical genre makes for a far more entertaining listening experience that won't, like The Thin Red Line, lull you to sleep. ***
TRACK LISTINGS:
1999 BMG/RCA Album:
Total Time: 58:56
* Composed by John Powell ** Composed by Francesco Lupica 2019 La-La Land Album: Total Time: 263:02
* Composed by John Powell ** Composed by Francesco Lupica
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert of the 1999 BMG/RCA album includes no extra information about
the score or film. That of the 2019 La-La Land album contains extensive notes about
both, though the product inconveniently fails to provide the track listings for
the first two CDs on the exterior of the packaging.
Featured Musicians:
Harp: Ellie Choate, Katie Kirkpatrick, & Marcia Dickstein Concert Master: Endre Granat Shakahachi Flute: Daniel Kuramoto Koto: June Kuramoto Cosmic Beam: Francesco Lupica Taiko Drums, Tibetan Bowls & Vocal Chants: Johnny Mori Bassoon: Ken Munday Taiko Drums, Tibetan Bowls & Tibetan Bells: Emil Richards Taiko Drums & Tibetan Bells: Danny Yamamoto
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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from The Thin Red Line are Copyright © 1999, 2019, BMG/RCA Victor, La-La Land Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 1/27/99 and last updated 8/24/20. |
