Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #2,164
Written 5/31/21
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Buy it... if you can zone out to softly suspenseful ambience of
tonally accessible simplicity, Brian Tyler taking a surprisingly low-key
approach to this thriller.
Avoid it... if you expect the composer to address the location of
the tale or supply interesting action material despite his
unconventional burning of a leading instrument while playing it.
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| Tyler |
Those Who Wish Me Dead: (Brian Tyler) The last
thing you need when you're trying to escape a forest fire is to be the
target of assassins at the same time. Such is the troubled premise of
Taylor Sheridan's 2021 thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead, taking
place not far from the locale of the director's "Yellowstone" series. An
accountant discovers a murder and runs to seek protection from a rural
sheriff. On the way there, he is assassinated, his young son escaping
into the Montana forests with evidence of the original crime. With the
bad guys in pursuit, the boy happens upon the sheriff's ex-girlfriend,
who is a smokejumper-turned-lookout. The remainder of the movie involves
the cat and mouse game between these characters, but the drama is
complicated when the assassins intentionally start a forest fire that
threatens them all. Although the movie was moderately successful,
Angelina Jolie was badly miscast in the smokejumper role, her persona
and appearance simply incompatible for the task. The simultaneous
theatrical and HBO Max release represented the most major assignment for
composer Brian Tyler in a few years, and he approached it with his usual
flair for the flamboyant. While one might expect Tyler to treat the
scenery in the same way Trevor Jones did so brilliantly with the
similarly plotted Cliffhanger, he does nothing in his music to
address the majesty of the locale. In fact, there's nothing really
Western about this score at all, its suspenseful rendering just as
suitable for an urban setting as the forests of Montana. For all of
Tyler's intellectualized pondering of how to supply the concept of fire
with an interesting musical personality, he lost the bigger picture.
Still, his score for Those Who Wish Me Dead is adequate at its
basic purpose, though it might be far more ambient than you would
expect. The aforementioned experimentation Tyler undertook for this
recording was the use of a burning cello to represent the tone of his
fire motif. He literally recorded himself playing a burning cello until
he could no longer do so. (The insurance companies must have been
thrilled that he didn't ask anyone else to risk a workers' compensation
claim.) While moderately amusing, this technique didn't achieve any
sound that couldn't have been rendered by other means, and nothing in
the music screams out "this is the sound of a cello and its bow
literally on fire." Rather, the decently sized orchestral ensemble is
joined by an array of electronics that produce a surprisingly gloomy but
oddly relaxing listening experience for much of its length.
Piano and strings provide much of the score's default
mode in
Those Who Wish Me Dead, with lower brass weighing at
times and limited woodwinds applied for the villains. Tyler's intent to
emphasize woodwinds because of the winds driving the fire on screen
doesn't have obvious results in the sound of the score. The work has a
solid melodic core, though expect the themes to be overly simple and
dissolved to simple expressions of chord progressions at times. The main
idea is what the composer calls the "heartbreak theme," its performances
utilizing what seems like a blend of electronic strings over an organic
base and clustered mostly in the first half of the album. These passages
are softly resolute and most often pleasant, setting an accessible
ambience in "Those Who Wish Me Dead (Main Theme)," "Elegy for a Soul,"
"Opus" (in which its personality becomes manipulated), "Lament" (taking
on the fire's electronic edge), and the redemptive "Those Who Wish Me
Dead Finale." The fire's motif is a growling, atonal pitch that, like
the heartbreak theme, dwells on key quite often. It debuts in hints late
during "Embers" but explodes in "Shadow Mechanics," "Lightning Strikes,"
"A Burning Cello," the last of which illuminating the unnecessary
instrumental destruction in most displeasing ways. The most interesting
but elusive theme in
Those Who Wish Me Dead exists for the two
assassins, their idea targeting woodwind ostinatos with mysterious
ambiguity. This material begins to emerge in "The Love of a Father" but
is fully enunciated in "Zero Sum Game" and shifts to deep electronics by
"Ultimatum." Faint echoes of the motif persist against the heartbreak
theme, even at the start of "Those Who Wish Me Dead Finale." All three
ideas in the score are juxtaposed in disheartening ways by "Mind Heart
Conflation," the final third of the work pushing these melodies across
onto the instrumentation of the other themes. These passages aren't
tremendously exciting, even in "Ultimatum" Tyler seemingly content to
press the suspenseful horror element rather than straight action. The
whole endeavor is basically competent, but the lack of any
distinguishing characteristic for the location or these main players
yields an emotionally disconnected score. The fire's instrumental
experimentation doesn't compete with Hans Zimmer's
Backdraft, and
the woodwind applications for the villains are under-emphasized. This
tendency towards the mundane leaves the listener with the many
renditions of the heartbreak theme that open and close the album, and
these function as readily accessible tonality of bland but satisfying
background meandering. This fifteen minutes of resonating, vaguely
muscular music is a worthy addition to any Tyler compilation.
Instrumental destruction should sound more impressive than this.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:
For Brian Tyler reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.2
(in 41 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.13
(in 19,742 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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