Scores Which You Simply Cannot Fathom
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My issue with the Obi-Wan score is that of all Star Wars Disney+ live action Shows Obi-Wan really would have required a more traditional Star Wars sound. Actually, it would have been even better if they had just let Kiner do his usual The Clone Wars thing than this score by Holt.
Exactly my thought as well.
It’s an interesting question actually… “Scores Which You Simply Cannot Fathom.”
There are film scores I don’t dislike, that would be too easy. Disliking something is a clean, declarative act. You hear it, you wince, you move on. “Not fathoming”, though, is a different beast. It’s that strange limbo where you sit there thinking: “I don’t get this… but maybe someone smarter than me does?” It’s the musical equivalent of staring at a modern art installation and wondering whether the joke is on you, or on the curator, or on the entire concept of walls.And to be fair, there are scores I once dismissed that I now like, sometimes even love. Tastes evolve, ears mature, and occasionally you realize that the thing you thought was noise was actually a composer being twenty years ahead of you. Interestingly enough, I never had much of an issue with some of the composers people grapple with… like Leonard Rosenman or Alex North. I thought they were wonderfully original and uncompromising voices. They were exciting from the start. They still are. They are among my all time favorite film composers.
But then there are those moments, those baffling “what the hell were they thinking” moments. Not because the music is bold or experimental, but because it seems to have wandered in from a completely different movie, possibly a different planet.
Take John Barry’s “Laser” cue in The Black Hole. Climactic action, tension rising, robots fighting, the whole thing teetering on the edge of cosmic doom… and suddenly the score decides it wants to be somewhere else entirely. The music isn’t bad per se, and most certainly fitting for a British Coronation Ceremony or something, but not for people and robots fighting it out in outer space! I cannot fathom why they did that. The music calls attention to itself in every way you don’t want music to do in a scene like that. It’s like someone interrupting a heavyweight championship boxing match to read poetry. No matter how nice the poem… it just doesn’t fit!
Or the Hanson symphony excerpt tracked onto the end of Alien. To this day, I remember sitting in the theater thinking, “What is that doing here?’ And I didn’t know the Hanson piece at the time, but I felt it didn’t belong. It felt like the music editor had discovered a lovely bit of symphonic calm and thought, “Well, the movie needs to end somehow, why not with this? Isn’t this soothing? Isn’t this pretty?” Many people didn’t mind, some even liked it. I remain unconvinced. My initial rejection hasn’t really changed, I’m just more used to it now.
However, unconventional choices can absolutely work. Vangelis scoring THE BOUNTY with electronics? Hell yeah, inspired. A historical drama with synths? Why not. It’s a reminder that “unexpected” is not the same as “misjudged”, and that sometimes the least obvious approach is the one that lands with the most grace.
So yes, there are scores I cannot fathom. Or at least tracks and cues. Not because they’re bad, necessarily (though they may be), but because they are “misplaced”, because they don’t work. They make me wonder what the creative mind thought that was a good idea. In many cases I doubt the people in charge know or understand much about music. Of course, not everything needs to be “understood”. But it should, at the very least, make sense in the movie it’s in.
Yes, I agree that these don’t HAVE TO be choices you don’t LIKE. Although in most cases they will be. Sometimes, however, they will merely cause puzzlement, sans the harsh value judgement. It can be both, or either. The OBI-WAN example I mentioned earlier was both.
An example of a scene that veers more towards ‘puzzlement’ than sheer dislike appears in Gato Barbieri’s LAST TANGO IN PARIS, when Jeanne searches Paul’s pockets and there’s an extremely violent musical outburst that is completely at odds with the scene. I don’t know what he was trying to say there.
I don’t know what he was trying to say there.
Maybe he didn’t want at all and the director just “misused” it…
Take John Barry’s “Laser” cue in The Black Hole. Climactic action, tension rising, robots fighting, the whole thing teetering on the edge of cosmic doom… and suddenly the score decides it wants to be somewhere else entirely. The music isn’t bad per se, and most certainly fitting for a British Coronation Ceremony or something, but not for people and robots fighting it out in outer space! I cannot fathom why they did that. The music calls attention to itself in every way you don’t want music to do in a scene like that. It’s like someone interrupting a heavyweight championship boxing match to read poetry. No matter how nice the poem… it just doesn’t fit!
The issue I have with The Black Hole is that you have on the one hand that dark moody and disturbing captain Nemo story, which was the original idea of the movie. And you have, to Pop it up for younger audiences this what I would call starwarsation of it by adding the funny robots and the laser fights.
The whole laser scene is a nod to Star Wars fans including the music, which makes little sense when you see it today. But watching it as a little boy it gave me my dose of Star Wars, that I was so hungry for.
But this came at a cost. Because of that, the movie didn’t grow old well and appears like Battlestar Galactica like a cheap Star Wars copy. Without these concessions to Star Wars the Black Hole could be a cult hit today, I think.THE BLACK HOLE was, well, a black hole for me for many years. I heard people speak about it left and right, for various reasons, ever since the 90s, but never felt an inkling to check it out myself. Until I finally did, about two years ago. Well, it was a bad film, there’s no getting around it. But with some redeeming factors, like Jules Verne-ian production design. There were bits of the Barry score I found okay, but mostly it fell into the type of Barry sound I don’t like, especially as far as action music is concerned. I DID take notice of that bizarre scene you’re talking about – I remember people jumping around, falling over consoles and what-have-you – with this super slow theme that could care less about synch points or energy. Utterly, utterly bizarre and most certainly a perfect candidate for this thread.
Sync points were never a concern of Barry, as far as I remember he even actively decried them as Mickey-Mousing and generally didn’t compose to sync action. The problem in the music of The Black Hole is that the action scenes used music that was just totally unfitting.
The movie is no masterpiece, but it has its moments, especially the two Maximilians, Schell and the robot.The music itself is terrific though, one of my all time favorite Barry scores, and my very first “Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” album.
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