The Martian

I am clearly on a roll: second post in the same week!
I'm afraid I'm going to be really rather picky about this film because I really liked but it was not quite as good a film as it might have been on the musical front. Matt Damon  turns in an impressive and engaging performance as the guy accidentally left for dead on Mars, reminding me of just what a jolly fine actor he is, and which he needs to be as a lot of the film is just him and his potatoes and a lot of red dust. The film starts with some semi-subtle allusions to 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a planetary sunrise set to some low drones sounds that recall, perhaps, some of the Ligeti in Kubrik's compilation score; and then the first obviously musical sounds we hear are a rising open fifth, à la Strauss Thus Spake Zarathustra, but then the music and visuals leave that particularly vision of space behind (and undoubtedly a good thing too, but I enjoyed the nod).

Things start out promisingly musically, and after Mark, our hero, is abandoned, the music and sound design initially do a good job constructing his subjective experience as the only man on Mars. In particular, the sound design gives a range of slightly disconcerting hums, some evidently ambient, some more ambiguous; a lovely little tinnitus moment when Mark more or less blows himself up in the process of trying to grow his potatoes; plus there is some fabulously incongruous disco music which is the only music he has access to, a fact that causes him at one point to declare that he is definitely go to die here if he has to keep listening to this. The fact that he does keep listening to it suggests, probably quite rightly, that when you are completely alone on a planet, 100s of 1000s of miles and potentially four years from anyone else, any music is better than nothing. But here in lie the seeds of the problem. By my calculations, Mark is actually on his own for about two years, and by the end he is definitely starting to go a little crazy, but the underscore music rather undermines this by being pretty much wall to wall through most of the film. The film's makers might have chosen to use musical silence and sound design to help us understand his isolation and the constant threat of death that he is under, and to encourage us to see the ways in which Mark starts to fall apart, a process that begins when his crops are destroyed. Damon is acting his socks off but the music actually makes his performance of a man holding on to his sanity by his fingertips toward the end seem kinda cute, and that seems to me to do his acting a disservice both here and elsewhere: the music does too much work for us in glossing his emotions into something generally simple and easy to identify with, whereas the situation is astoundingly complex and not something I imagine most of us can begin to think ourselves into. The sounds design is, frankly, also acting its socks off: the sounds of the various storms and the sense of the habitat pods being under constant  threat of destruction really begs for more musical silence in which to make itself felt, but instead I cannot remember the last time I was so conscious of being emotionally manipulated by a score (Oo, will he die? Hurrah, he's ok! Can he make it work? yes, he can! He's so plucky - cue the Kleenex). I am not blaming the composer: Harry Gregson Williams will have written music for where he was told to write it, doing what he was told to make it do; but the film ended up too cosy for me, like a revisiting of  Apollo 13 as a fun adventure film, or Mission to Mars with a happier ending. He's complete alone on a planet and is an odds-on favourite to perish! It is genuinely scary! A wee bit more silence now and then, a dose of the uncanny, would have made this an altogether less comfortable and frankly better film. It's a good film; it has great acting; but the musical strategy plays it too safe in how it directs the audience toward emotion and away from allowing them to glimpse how completely terrible it would be for someone to spend two years on their own on Mars with no guarantee at all of rescue.

Crimson Peak (2015)

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Music: Fernado Velazquez

Sound design: Randy Thom

It is an incredibly long time (literally, years) since I blogged about film music but today, in celebration of finishing the proofing on my cult TV book, I went to see Crimson Peak and for the first time in a very long time I am inspired to write. Not much has inspired me in film music of late. Crimson Peak is a marvellous gothic romp of a film, with ghosts literally coming out of the woodwork (and the floorboards) and more blood than you can shake a stick at: even the opening titles are drenched in a wash of red, and the film takes its name from the fact that the red clay of the hill on which haunted house is built turns the snow bright red in winter. The titles are accompanied by the sound of a child's voice singing an unaccompanied, haunting and slightly creepy song amidst massive electronically manipulated reverberation. Immediately, we are pointed toward horror: children's voices often feature in horror soundtracks where the film concerns a child in danger, so that the sound of a child singing from the soundtrack paradoxically indicates the threatening evil as much as the innocent child victim. Here, it's an interesting double bluff: in the first scene after the title we meet our heroine, Edith, as a ten year old at her mother's funeral, so the winsome child's voice is, we might suppose, Edith herself, the girl in peril at the centre of the narrative. But no, it's cleverer than that - oh, I do so love a clever score! Spoilers ahead. Much later in the film, we hear the same melody being played as a Chopinesque piano fantasia by Lucille, Edith's new sister in law, who turns out to be the  agent behind the evil and the horror driving the narrative. Lucille reveals that the melody is a lullaby she used to sing to her brother (now Edith's husband) when they were children; and near the end we learn that as a child, Lucille murdered their mother with a gigantic cleaver she has kept ever since as a memento of that happy occasion. The child's voice we hear in the titles is therefore arguably Lucille's and rather than the voice representing Edith, the child in danger that it usually does (for example, Alien 3, Sleepy Hollow), we belatedly discover that it is the voice of evil itself, the voice of Lucille as a child.

The other really interesting thing about the music of this film is that we effectively have two scores. On the one hand we have a sumptuous orchestral score that represents all things to do with the real world and the living, no matter how horrible, and the lullaby slips from diegetic to non-diegetic music throughout. On the other hand, we have sound design operating as music, using electronic sounds and electronically manipulated noises (drips, knocking sounds) to represent the Otherness of the many and various ghosts. The first appearance of this other sound world, when Edith's mother returns after the funeral to warn her about Crimson Peak (unfortunately, she should have warned her about Allerdale Hall as Crimson Peak is just a local nickname and Edith has already married and moved in before she hears it for the first time). In this first haunting, the sound design is at its most overtly composed, with very little obviously real sounds, and lots of electronics, but it establishes the extreme difference of the ghostly soundworld. In other haunting sequences, the boundary between sound design and musical composition is much less clearly defined, and the sound operates both as the sound of the ghosts themselves as they bump and slither around the house, and as a musical atmosphere and ambience for their presence. There is even, in the credits, a member of sound design team credited with "atmospheric sound design". This duality in the scoring strategy is itself a marvellously gothic construction: if the classic gothic castle is a site of decadent domesticity above with dank and dangerous cellars below in which God alone knows what lurks, then here the orchestral music presents us with the sumptuous world of the living 'above' and the noisy, unnatural and manipulated sound design of the dead 'below'. I really enjoyed this film: it's silly, over the top, quite revolting in places and having rather too much fun with itself at times but Mia Wasikowska as Edith does a knock up job of not just being a victim in need of being rescued (and turns out to be handy with shovel) and I could happily watch Tom Hiddleston reading the telephone directory, so watching him being tragic, bad and tormented all at the same time is a joy. And the music/ sound was deeply satisfying: inventive, interesting and rewarding to listen to. Hurrah!