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The Solium/Broxton Conflagration
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Angela Morley´s score will always have a special place in my heart and cannot be topped.
But the score for this remake is absolutely fine and nothing like a video game score at all. It´s a beautiful and intelligent symphonic score which I would actually rank under my year´s favorites.
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My twopence worth...Having now watched the entire film, I have to say it was much better than I anticipated. However, the original 1978 version (IMHO) does remain superior.
The most noticeable thing for me; the updated version took twice as long to deliver only one half of the emotional and dramatic wallop of Martin Rosen's original. That is not to say the new adaptation is without merit. The world and it's characters certainly felt 'fleshed out' and I watched the whole thing in one sitting without being bored. I do agree with an earlier comment regarding the animation; it did remind me of some of the graphics I've seen in PS3 games.
Angela Morley's score has always remained special to me; I was only sixteen years old when I bought the soundtrack in '78. Federico Jusid's score is certainly accomplished, but I yearned to hear new arrangements of Morley's themes and perhaps a quote or two from 'Bright Eyes'. As for Sam Smith's song..Sorry! but it sounded clunky and bolted on over the end credits as an afterthought.
After forcing myself to look past any 'Dewy eyed' nostalgia for the original, this new version is certainly worth a look and I don't think parents will need to plan a visit to a Child Psychologist if their children see this one.
Cheers
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Posted: |
Dec 29, 2018 - 1:08 PM
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By: |
Wedge
(Member)
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I was deeply disappointed in this adaptation. I could maybe have lived with the stilted animation and often-flat visuals, but I felt terribly let down by the script and characterizations. Though the miniseries includes a few plot points left out of the 1978 film, on balance it somehow manages to wind up a LESS faithful adaptation of the novel, despite more than doubling the running time. It removes key story points and invents others, while reassigning character motivations and behavior in ways that, for me, cheapen the overall story. Hazel in particular feels diminished here, with his leadership qualities consistently masked or undercut in the early chapters, presumably because the writer felt it worked better as an arc. This dovetails with making Bigwig a lot more angry and hostile throughout, which makes him less charismatic and paradoxically less formidable. (I don't blame this on the excellent voice cast, but they can only do so much.) And don't get me started on the handling of Hazel's "love story," which detracts from other relationships and pointlessly complicates and drags down the already bloated Efrafa plotlines.
The music is fine at times, but I find the action material thin and short of the mark dramatically -- a key example being the early escape across the stream. (Incidentally, this scene is neat bit of dramatic foreshadowing in the original, robbed of its resonance here since (a) a dog no longer figures into the sequence, and (b) the much more significant water-based escape later in the story has been inexplicably axed.) The rabbits triumph against long odds, Holly shouts a threat, Bigwig laughs it off, and they all run off to freedom. But the music just keeps pounding away with no nuance or emotional color. I suppose you could stretch and say this was meant to reflect that the danger isn't really over, but really it just feels like a narrative misstep.
Anyway, that's just my two cents. Plenty of people seem to be enjoying this adaptation, and this score -- and if the miniseries leads readers unfamiliar with Richard Adams to discover his work, or to check out the original film, I think that's a wonderful thing. But it's not for me.
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I love this score and can only highly recommend it.
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Not totally unrelated, but I once attended a Miles Davis seminar and one of the speakers was the controversial jazz critic Stanley Crouch. Crouch referred to Miles Davis' classic album Sketches of Spain as "elevator music." During the Q&A I asked Crouch what elevators he frequented.
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I think the term you may be searching for is 'incidental' and I agree completely. 
