by Brett Parker
If you have two hours of boredom to kill and movies are typically your go-to activity for that, then there are a lot worse choices you can make than watching Oblivion, a fine product from the recent surge of end-of-the-world flicks. While you can often catch this futuristic tale swinging for the sci-fi fences, it ultimately ends up being enjoyable on the level of a short story in a pulp magazine, which isn’t a bad thing at all. While the plot chugs away in splendid ignorance of the fact that movies like Wall-E and Moon exist, you still find yourself marveling at the sleek production design and the vulgarly picturesque evocation of a devastated Earth. Plus Tom Cruise, a movie star I’ve always admired, proves efficient in a role tailor-made for him: an action figure who reflects on his own nature with great intensity.
Yet for all its visual bells and whistles, the best thing about Oblivion is the musical score. French rock band M83, known for their distinct electronic sounds, helped develop the score with composer Joseph Trapanese and it’s not hard to hear why the marriage between the band’s music and a sci-fi movie is a perfect match. Anyone who’s ever heard their stuff knows they churn out the kind of tunes the crew of the USS Enterprise would listen to during their downtime, so it makes sense that their robotic sounds help give a sense of cosmic otherness to a galactic dystopia tale. Another paradoxical yet beautiful effect of M83’s contributions is the futuristic retro vibe it gives the film. The band’s spaced-out tunes feel as if they’re straight out of the 80s, a period in which such sounds represented that era’s idea of what the future might sound like. As a result, Oblivion ends up having the old school sounds of a sci-fi popcorn flick from the 80s, incongruently giving a tale of futuristic despair a glowing vibe of cinematic nostalgia.
I certainly don’t want to oversell this expert score, however. It falls more into the category of a competent movie score as opposed to transcendent rock. Long stretches of the music play like Hans Zimmer hand-me-downs and you really wish M83’s trademark sounds were given more room to breathe. But the band’s triumph is that they made me want to listen to the entire soundtrack album for pleasure outside of the movie, which certainly isn’t the case with most film scores. The brutal truth about most movie score albums is that they largely go unsought, for most of the time they consist of bland and unremarkable musical undercurrents that aren’t much fun without viewing the actual film they accompany. This makes sense, however, for if instrumental scores consisted of mostly killer, stand-alone jams in their own right, then they probably wouldn’t fit too easily into the bedrock of a film narrative. M83’s Oblivion work respects these two ideals and demonstrates that a perfect film score should be distinct yet seamless.
There’s a school of thought that a film score should almost disappear into the film, helping emotions and plot points move along with little fuss. In theory, this is a sophisticated idea, but in practice, it can prove to be uninteresting in an area where great power can be added to a film’s aesthetic value. 42, for example, provided a score by Mark Isham that proved to be sentimental and syrupy. It owed more to Hollywood’s bags of manipulative tricks than to anything organic in the film’s actual story. Perhaps the score could’ve evoked the music of its time period or even music that the film’s hero, Jackie Robinson, enjoyed in his day. But the score certainly doesn’t betray the craftsmanship of the film, for it does its job of helping the story along in the most primitive way possible. For most composers realize that it’s far more damaging to have a score that steals all the attention from everything else on screen. The biggest perpetrator of a distracting score I can remember is Nobel Son, which employed a heavy techno score by Paul Oakenfold for no coherent reason. His work on Swordfish fit perfectly into that world of electronic chaos, but in a human con game with greedy double-crosses, you really had no clever idea why his music showed up there.
When it comes to transcendent scores that marry both of these ideals wonderfully, my favorite recent example is composer Cliff Martinez’s ambient work on the Drive soundtrack. With sublime assistance from a crystal baschet, Martinez produced an unconventional dreamlike sound that shrewdly honored director Nicolas Winding Refn’s fairy tale take on his noir tale. With great assistance from retro-centric pop songs, the hymnal-like score held such wounded and yearning sounds devoid of any time and place, that it made you realize it fits the hero’s psychology perfectly. Another exceptional recent score is Jonny Greenwood’s mischievous work on The Master, which took formalities from a classical American melodramatic score and filtered them through a nightmare. It’s as if the music from Written on the Wind was played through Satan’s record player. The result is an unsettling score that perfectly reflects the movie’s idea of a picture-perfect America twisted into unease. And now we have M83’s Oblivion work to add to this growing trend of striking and unique movie music.
If nothing else, Oblivion director Joespeh Kosinski certainly knows the power of a good movie soundtrack. He employed techno kings Daft Punk to help with the score of his Tron: Legacy, although even a casual Daft Punk listener knows the duo’s sounds were kept on a very tight cinematic leash in that outing. M83 is certainly used in a more cannily fashion. But the point is Kosinski’s acute realization that a musical score shouldn’t rot in monotony but should push the creative boundaries to see how unique it can be while still serving its purpose. And I’m all for this, since music can be one of the most beautiful pieces to a cinematic puzzle. If directors can put so much emphasis on an actress’s eyes, beautiful lighting, and dapper costumes, then why can’t they also obsess over a killer soundtrack that fires on all cylinders?
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