Movie Wave Home
Reviews by Title | Reviews by Composer
Composed by
ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL
Rating
****
Album running time
35:36
Performed by
UNNAMED ORCHESTRA
Conducted by
STEVEN MERCURIO
JONATHAN SHEFFER
Trumpet
PHIL SMITH
Orchestrated by
ROBERT ELHAI
ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL
Engineered by
JOEL IWATAKI
Music Editor
CURTIS ROUSH
Produced by
ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL
Released by
VARESE SARABANDE
Serial number
VSD-5913
Artwork copyright (c) 1998 Warner Bros.; review copyright (c) 2003 James Southall
SPHERE
Intelligent
portrait of terror
A review by JAMES SOUTHALL
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I found Barry Levinson's much-maligned Sphere to be an intelligent, superior science fiction / horror movie, featuring excellent performances by the likes of Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone and taut, focused direction. I'm not entirely sure where all the criticism came from - not enough explosions, perhaps, to satisfy the modern-day audience - but for my money it was excellent. Sure, the ending was telegraphed a bit too early, but aside from that I didn't see much wrong with it. One of its key assets is its score by the ever-reliable Elliot Goldenthal. Levinson always picks the perfect composer for each film he scores rather than rigidly sticking with the same one, and the roster of composers with whom he has worked is a virtual who's who of the film music business - Alex North, Bruce Broughton, John Williams, Randy Newman, Ennio Morricone, Hans Zimmer, Christopher Young, and others.
Goldenthal's score has two functions - first, it builds tension and draws you in - then, it scares the shit out of you. His glassy, hollow-sounding suspense music that dominates the opening half of the album somehow manages to create feelings of wonder, beauty and worry all at the same time. His orchestrations (with help from the ubiquitous Robert Elhai) are as precise and impressive as ever.
From "Terror Adagio" pretty much through to the end of the album, the mood changes from suspense to horror. There are two dominant motifs with which Goldenthal builds several cues - intelligently, spherical violin runs make up one, and angular brass clusters the other. Played against each other, they make for some of the scariest film music I've heard in years. It's not quite as experimental as Goldenthal's Alien3, but it's drawn from the same cloth, and track titles like "Manifest3" and "The Beast Within" (also the name of a track in Alien3) show that the composer knew it, too.
The score provoked controversy when it was released in 1998. For one thing, people tarred it with the same brush they tarred the film and pronounced it to be worthless, while others were very critical of the album's comparatively short running time and the fact that some of the best music from the film didn't appear on it. The first point is clearly absurd and as for the second, while I am rarely an advocate of very long albums for film scores, in this case I would have to agree; unfortunately, Goldenthal recorded half of his score in New York and half in Los Angeles and so because of reuse fees, he and producer Robert Townson had to choose which of the two sets of recordings to give on the album, and they decided that on the whole the New York half was more interesting - and I wouldn't disagree.
All in all, this is a terrific album. Goldenthal never writes any uninteresting music and has such a commanding musical personality - two qualities shared by the very best film composers. It's a pity that his scores have never really been attached to really big critical successes, but I suppose his style just doesn't gel with the kind of "worthy dramas" that usually get so much praise; he's one of the few truly remarkable film composers working today.
Tracks
- Pandora's Fanfare (1:17)
- Main Titles (2:49)
- Event Entry 6-21-43 (:53)
- The Gift (1:42)
- Sphere Discovery (2:08)
- Visit to a Wreckage (1:58)
- Water Snake (2:37)
- Terror Adagio (3:"5)
- Wave (3:18)
- Fear Retrieval (3:48)
- Andante (2:20)
- Manifest Fire (3:49)
- Manifest3 (3:48)
- Their Beast Within