MOVIE MUSIC UK

THROWBACK THIRTY

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

Mellow greetings. What seems to be your boggle?

One of my favorite action movies of the 1990s is Demolition Man, directed by Marco Brambilla from a screenplay by Peter Lenkov, Daniel Waters, and Robert Reneau (the latter of whom might be better known to readers as ‘Scott Bettencourt,’ a regular contributor to Film Score Monthly magazine). It’s a dystopian, futuristic sci-fi story with a heavy dose of satire and social commentary, interspersed with several outstanding action set pieces. The film stars Sylvester Stallone as John Spartan, a renegade LAPD cop from the 1990s known as the “demolition man” for his unorthodox and sometimes brutal law enforcement tactics, especially when it comes down to catching his arch-nemesis, violent criminal Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes). After one such confrontation Phoenix is captured and cryogenically frozen in a ‘cryo-prison’ as punishment – but Spartan is framed for a murder he did not commit, and is frozen alongside him. In 2032, Phoenix somehow breaks out of the prison and emerges into ‘San Angeles,’ a utopian, peaceful, politically correct society run by the benevolent yet controlling Dr. Raymond Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne). However, when Phoenix resumes his life of crime in a city with a police force that is simply unable to deal with his violence, Spartan is thawed out too, and teams up with Lenina Huxley (Sandra Bullock), a 2030s police officer who idolizes 1990s culture, to stop him.

Demolition Man is an outstanding movie. The cast is top notch, from Stallone’s taciturn cop who is considered a ‘caveman’ and doesn’t understand San Angeles or its customs, to Snipes’s wisecracking but pathologically deranged criminal, and Hawthorne’s apparently altruistic Cocteau, to whom there is more than meets the eye. However, the standout here for me is the then 29-year old Sandra Bullock, in a breakout role as the spunky Lenina Huxley, a cop who is fascinated with 20th-century culture and idolizes Spartan, but continually misunderstands 1990s cultural touchstones, and hilariously mixes her metaphors – “you really matched his meat,” “you really licked his ass,” “fluid transfer!” It’s also interesting how many of the little throwaway lines and ideas entered pop culture public consciousness after the fact, from the ‘three seashells’ in the bathroom, to the idea that Taco Bell won the ‘franchise wars,’ and now every restaurant is Taco Bell.

The score for Demolition Man was by Elliot Goldenthal, and was an important stepping stone for him up the film music hierarchical ladder, after Pet Sematary in 1989 and Alien 3 in 1992. If you discount the incredibly low-budget indie films he did for director Ulli Lommel in 1979 and 1980, and the couple of TV movies he did for HBO, Demolition Man was just the fourth film credit in Goldenthal’s career. However, even at this early stage, he was developing a highly personal and immediately recognizable style based on the avant-garde techniques of his mentor, John Corigliano, as well as the penchant for dense, chaotic-sounding orchestrations he developed with orchestrator Robert Elhai. What’s great about Goldenthal’s music is that he was able to take this sound, a sound that was wholly his, and adapt it to so many different settings and genres; in Goldenthal’s hands this music is just at home scoring aliens and interviews with vampires and futuristic action as it is baseball biopics (Cobb), period dramas (Golden Gate), and films about the Irish independence movement (Michael Collins).

One of the other things about Goldenthal’s music is that is it always has a degree of witty self-awareness to it, especially when it comes to adhering and then subverting genre tropes, and that is certainly the case with Demolition Man. Goldenthal is acutely aware of what type of film Demolition Man is, and so he scores the film almost as a parody of itself, as if it had been written by a composer from 2032 trying to re-capture the hyper-masculine 1980s/90s action style but *not quite* getting it right. As such, the orchestra is almost *too* big, the action music is *too* dense and over-the-top, and the sweeping finale is almost *too* grandiose. This even extends to the cue titles, like “Action, Guns, Fun” and “Obligatory Car Chase,” which poke even more holes in the genre tropes. Despite this, or perhaps even because of it, the score remains eminently listenable and enjoyable, especially for anyone who, like me, has grown to appreciate Goldenthal’s style over the years.

There is no main Demolition Man theme as such, just a series of smaller motifs, which emanate out of and between the numerous action set pieces. The opening “Dies Irae” is a quintessential Goldenthal track, taking elements from the iconic Latin liturgy and surrounding it with a phalanx of howling heraldic horns, swirling portentous strings, and bombastic percussion patterns, before ending with a bank of screaming trombones – a sound which has become iconically associated with Goldenthal throughout his career. Some of the chord progressions in this cue remind me of a little early Patrick Doyle, so I wonder if there was a little temp-tracking going on here that snuck into Goldenthal’s thinking. “Fire Fight” is the first action cue that introduces an interesting new textural idea to the score, a sort of frantically bubbling, boiling electronic sound that dances around under the bombastic orchestra. Goldenthal would revisit this idea later in his super-hero scores Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, and it’s interesting to hear it being developed here.

A new motif for the concept of the Cryo-Prison is introduced in “Guilty As Charged,” a sinister idea for plucked strings, icy pianos, and a harp, accented by various banging and clanging metallic and wooden percussion items. It has an appropriately chilly, mechanical sound that captures the terrifying reality of what it would mean to be cryogenically frozen, and it comes back later to excellent effect in the equally frigid “Defrosting”. In “Defrosting” Goldenthal also introduces an unusual, iridescent, shimmering idea in the strings that appears to represent the nefarious behavior of Raymond Cocteau, whose desire to maintain control over San Angeles is what leads to Phoenix’s escape from the cryo-prison in the first place. This ‘shimmering’ idea comes back later in “Meeting Cocteau,” further underlining the idea as a leitmotif for his malevolent actions, although here the sound is accompanied by a wash of unexpectedly lush and soothing strings.

The aforementioned “Action, Guns, Fun” is a brilliant, mind-bending piece of action music, a mesmerizing collision of unpredictable brass phrases over clattering metallic percussion, swooping woodwind textures, and swirling, hypnotic strings. The same can be said for the subsequent “Machine Waltz,” which is as unconventional as it is bombastically aggressive, and features some madness-inducing French horn figures performing a chaotic variation on classical waltz-time.

“Confronting The Chief” is a brief but brilliant rampaging march. “Museum Dis Duel” uses some peculiar jagged pseudo-hiphop electronic textures as a sort of 1990s throwback to underscore Simon Phoenix’s murderous visit to the San Angeles Museum of History. The “Subterranean Slugfest” revisits the bubbling action idea heard in “Fire Fight,” although this time the texture is transposed to a traditional piano, while the rest of the orchestra goes bonkers around it with a series of highly dissonant and challenging passages. The zenith of the action music undoubtedly comes in the “Obligatory Car Chase,” which underscores a brilliant scene of Spartan and Huxley chasing Phoenix in a classic gas-guzzling Oldsmobile down a crowded San Angeles freeway, with Phoenix having commandeered Huxley’s electric cop car. Here, Goldenthal pushes his action style to its limits, bubbling pianos, electronic pulses, and crushing percussion hits punctuated by explosions of howling, gnashing brass and thunderous march-like string lines.

There are hints of romanticism in “Flawless Pearl,” before a final blast of frantic string-led action, booming percussion, and wailing brass clusters in the “Final Confrontation” between Phoenix and Spartan which results in Phoenix getting frozen by cryo-fluid and having his head kicked off and shattering in a million pieces; interestingly, there are a lot of tonal similarities between this cue and the angry finale of Alien 3, during which a vicious beastie is doused in molten lead, then quickly hyper-cooled with water, resulting in it exploding – perhaps Goldenthal saw these visual similarities and felt that it deserved a similar musical approach too?

“Code 187” is 42 seconds of musical anger, but then the final cue, “Silver Screen Kiss,” sees Goldenthal engaging in some unexpectedly gorgeous sweeping romanticism, although even here Goldenthal’s subversiveness can’t help but peek through, as some of the chords resolve in a minor key and maintain the sense of darkness and barely-disguised tragedy that often underpins Goldenthal’s more apparently ‘approachable’ work. It’s interesting to note that this cue offers the genesis of a sound that Goldenthal would use countless times during the climaxes of future scores – Michael Collins, A Time to Kill, Sphere, and Titus, among many others.

It’s also worth noting that the film itself contains a couple of interesting songs and source music pieces, notably a re-working of the 1981 Sting/Grace Jones song “Demolition Man” that inspired the title of the film for writer Peter Lenkov, and several 1960s commercial jingles (including one for “Armour Hot Dogs”) that are, inexplicably but hilariously, known as ‘mini tunes’ in 2030s San Angeles, and are popular radio hits. The original score soundtrack album is just a hair over 30 minutes long, and doesn’t include any of these fun pieces of source music, sp personally I think the time is ripe for an expansion of this early Elliot Goldenthal classic.

I really enjoy the Demolition Man score. Early in my film music life I dismissed it as merely ‘annoying noise,’ much like I did with a lot of Goldenthal’s work from that period, notably things like Alien 3 and Interview with the Vampire, both of which I now love. Truthfully, Elliot Goldenthal *is* an acquired taste; his style is challenging and unconventional and idiosyncratic, and relies on the listener being comfortable with long periods of aural discomfort. For years, I was not comfortable with this, but now – thirty years down the line – I find myself appreciating the uniqueness of his sound more and more, and wishing he was still writing frequently for film – he’s only 69, for heaven’s sake. When you couple this with the fact that Demolition Man is a quirky, enjoyable film, the whole thing is a recipe for success – even if we never do find out how that damn three seashells thing works!

Buy the Demolition Man soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• Dies Irae (1:51)
• Fire Fight (1:35)
• Guilty As Charged (3:58)
• Action, Guns, Fun (1:26)
• Machine Waltz (1:56)
• Defrosting (1:43)
• Confronting The Chief (0:32)
• Museum Dis Duel (1:56)
• Subterranean Slugfest (1:44)
• Meeting Cocteau (1:42)
• Tracking Simon Phoenix (3:03)
• Obligatory Car Chase (3:06)
• Flawless Pearl (1:15)
• Final Confrontation (1:55)
• Code 187 (0:41)
• Silver Screen Kiss (1:30)

Running Time: 30 minutes 03 seconds

Varèse Sarabande VSD-5447 (1993)

Music composed by Elliot Goldenthal. Conducted by Jonathan Sheffer and Artie Kane. Orchestrations by Elliot Goldenthal, Robert Elhai, David John Olsen and Lolita Ritmanis. Recorded and mixed by Steve McLaughlin, Bobby Fernandez and Joel Iwataki. Edited by Christopher S. Brooks. Album produced by Elliot Goldenthal and Matthias Gohl.