January 15, 2010

  • Review: The Hurt Locker (Beltrami & Sanders)

    Kathryn Bigelow’s 2008 film, The Hurt Locker, appeared at the Venice Film Festival where it received the Gucci Prize for screenwriter Mark Boal.  The film appeared in limited release last June and is getting a new lease on life this year with its appearance on DVD and numerous critical awards including the more high profile Golden Globes where it has 3 nominations.  The film is a gritty and realistic story of American bomb squads whose job it is to disarm Iraqi roadside bombs.  The film’s narrative is drawn from Boal’s firsthand observations with a special bomb unit in Iraq.  For the score, Bigelow turned to Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders to create a non-traditional score eschewing the more overtly orchestral accompaniment.  The results, while not always the most easy music to listen to, are perhaps among one of Beltrami’s most experimental and riveting scores.

    Macabre might be the best way to describe the unsettling title track that opens this score release.  A suspense-filled beat drives the various sounds while pitched ideas try to bubble to the surface.  The pained vocalise, with a bit of Middle Eastern quality, breaks into this sound forcefully jarring the listener and alerting them to the drama about to occur.  “Goodnight Bastard,” which follows, includes some of these same design elements as well, but a couple of minutes in we get a more Beltrami-like melodic idea for guitar.  Atonal string clusters creep into the music over time and soon this gives way to more frightening aleatoric music.  Imagine Beltrami’s Scream scores but with restrained tense sound design elements and dissonant clusters and you will begin to get a closer picture of what the score holds.  The Hurt Locker is a tense listen that is experimental in its sound design and musical elements—among some of the creepiest music Beltrami and Sanders have dreamed up together in their more recent partnerships.  Perhaps what is most striking about the score is that it seems to blur further musical underscoring, ambient design, and on-screen sound effects to create an often surreal and gripping musical narrative.  There are still bits and pieces of thematic content that Beltrami’s fans will recognize as the composer’s stamp, but they have been stretched to the breaking point.  “Oil Tanker Aftermath” encapsulates these various design, effect and thematic elements quite effectively with an erhu giving the music a plaintive quality in the midst of tense surroundings.  By the time we get to a more thematic musical statement in the final “The Way I Am” the music takes on an almost Western quality (a little taste of what Beltrami would expand on in 3:10 to Yuma).  The final track helps put a bit of closure to the proceeding tension and makes for a fitting close to the disc.

    What really makes The Hurt Locker work on its own is the regular occurrence of thematic material coupled with some very intense sounds that feel integrated into the texture of the score itself.  This may not be a score you return to often, but it is yet another indication of Beltrami’s adaptability into current scoring trends while maintaining a unique musical voice.  Though brief, the sequencing of the score here makes for a satisfying experience.