Blogathon 08/24: Captured!

There are few films that have so perfectly captured my imagination that they went on to have a profound, moving, and long-lasting effect on my life.

I can remember being absolutely blown away by Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. And I was lucky to see it, that first time, in the Odeon, Marble Arch which was a premier widescreen cinema. But blown away as I was by Mister Spielberg’s magic, the film didn’t have a profound, moving, and long-lasting effect on my life. I was blown away by it, though.

The first time I saw Groundhog Day I was amused by it. Entertained. The film didn’t get its hooks into me until the second time I watched it, a couple of years later. And boy did it get its hooks into me. It’s a series of clever mechanisms built on top of a terrific story premise and superbly acted. And I think it’s fair to say Groundhog Day had a profound, moving, and long-lasting effect on my life, especially since I have adopted and adapted the central theme of the film for the Tempest series of books.

And then along came Interstellar. Maybe I should clarify that. In amongst all the hundreds (if not thousands) of films I’ve seen since Groundhog Day (1993), there’s Interstellar. I’m not a Christopher Nolan fanboy by any stretch of the imagination, but in Interstellar Mister Nolan has created what I consider to be a perfect film. I could pick apart every layer, from the casting to the acting, to the lighting to the special effects, to the underlying story and the direction, to the scientific accuracy (well, look who they got in as scientific advisor: Nobel Scientific Prize Laureate, physicist Kip Thorne) to the production and post-production… but the one thing that makes this film perfect is the icing on the cake: Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack.

Hans Zimmer manages to add layers to the film that transcend the visual. Layers that add mood, mystery, suspense, threat, peril, expectation, disappointment and even terror. And he did it in a more subtle, less intrusive way than Bernard Herrmann achieved in the Psycho shower scene (EEEEE, EEEEE, EEEEE, EEEEE). Because everyone remembers that scene because of the music. And that’s not how it should be.

The Interstellar soundtrack is an example of how music should accompany, not take over. There’s an organist who has performed elements of the Interstellar soundtrack on a variety of organs around the world. I might return to her in a future blogpost. But as I sit here writing this, I’m listening to the Interstellar soundtrack and as I listen I’m recalling every scene, every shot, every movement, every moment.

But…

The cleverest piece of the soundtrack is the accompaniment to ‘the mountains’ scene, where the crew lands on the water planet. Embedded in the soundtrack is a noticeable but slight click, every 1.25 seconds. That click signifies the passing of a 24-hour day of earth-time. Yes, the tempo increases later, as the threat and peril approaches, but for one hundred and five seconds the passage of earth-time is marked out for the listener, to contradict and complement the ‘real time’ action taking place on the water planet. That is a stroke of genius.

The whole ‘Interstellar theme’ is used elsewhere to great effect. Cornfield Chase captures excitement and thrill and the unknown in the early stages of the film, and plays out with the Interstellar theme beneath it. Dust brings peril and a little wonder and a lot of WTF as it overlays a variation of the Interstellar theme. Day One brings the theme to the foreground of the soundtrack for the first time, it’s beautiful tick-tock simplicity is a memorable work of art for the ears. There are so many other stunning pieces of the soundtrack where Mister Zimmer uses clever audio/musical techniques to get the audience to revisit visual themes that carry us effortlessly along. I could list them all and I sort of want to. But I won’t. I have other writing to do.

But I was recently talking to the good lady wife her indoors about a totally separate subject, which made me recall an essay I wrote as part of my English Lit and Language dissertation. My essay picks apart an example of music subsuming the original art form (in that instance, lyrical), and people latching on to the mood of the composer’s work, instead of understanding (and even going as far as ignoring) the meaning of the original poem. Maybe I’ll bring that out one day…

In the meantime, there are a lot of versions of the main Interstellar theme floating about on the Internet. I quite like this one. I also like this version of Cornfield Chase (I also like what Anna Lapwood has achieved for organ music). But here’s the original soundtrack of Mountains, with the 1-1/4 second clickbeat.