June 11, 2013

  • Review: After Earth (Howard)

    The summer blockbuster season is upon us and After Earth was positioned at first to be the latest #1 vehicle featuring Will Smith, though his son, Jada Pinkett Smith, is really left to carry the film whose story is by Will Smith as well.  The M. Night Shyamalan film follows this father and son who crash land on Earth some 1,000 years after humans abandoned the planet.  As much promise as the director showed earlier, it sometimes feels as if each subsequent film is less satisfying and this one opened to abysmal reviews.  That aside, the best part is that James Newton Howard, who has scored all the director’s films since 1999’s The Sixth Sense, can often find plenty interesting things to add musically and After Earth is likely to be the only memorable aspect of this film when the dust settles.   

    The opening bars of “The History of Man” presents the sort of heavy orchestral scoring that Howard has used for other larger-than-life action adventure scores.  Strong thematic writing, often epically sweeping in lower strings or highlighted in slower sections by piano, makes this a rather interesting score.  The lower end of the orchestra provides a really warm bass support to some of Howard’s melodic content.  In “Pack Your Bags,” we hear a rather magical sound float around the texture with a mix of great horn writing and choral support that shifts into the sort of post-Zimmer sound the composer has added to his arsenal.  There are plenty of moments for action music in the film, but the more primal ideas, heard first in “Ship Tears Apart,” are blended with atmospheric orchestral writing among Howard’s harshest and darkest (at times reminiscent of his work in Dreamcatcher).  There is a visceral edge to this music applying a variety of contemporary techniques to create tension and dissonance.  This balanced by the lyrical thematic material, a beautiful presentation which appears in “Kitai Finds Cypher” and becomes important musically in subsequent sections focusing on Kitai’s character.  The shifts between these three narrative developments results in a rather fascinating listen.  Most interesting though is that Howard’s score must communicate these shifts in relatively small moments of time, and that they are presented here in these smaller segments rather than in larger, substantial edits.  “Baboons” is one of these longer edits filled with the sounds of ethnic winds and percussion in quite eerie musical underscoring (used for sequences of connected to animal attacks) that shifts into the action tropes as it plays along, though it unfortunately gets dialed out.        

     After Earth is a score that feels like it takes pages from Howard’s experiences on projects such as Batman Begins and melds them with the sort of atmospheric writing of previous Shyamalan scores to create a rather rich musical tapestry.  Thematically, the score has many highlights that are well balanced with the primal and adventurous writing.  Unfortunately, there are plenty of places where one wishes the music would have been allowed to play out, even the final track just gets dialed down, no doubt to make way for the ubiquitous pop song from which purchases of this release are graciously spared.