Fantastic Voyage (Limited Edition CD Soundtrack)
Sound:
B Music: B+
After
raving about Leonard Rosenman’s incredible score for Beneath The Planet Of The Apes in a previous review on this site,
then the more recent release of The
Cobweb/Edge Of The City soundtrack review, it is back to Science Fiction
with his score for the 1966 hit Fantastic
Voyage. All are from the FSM label
of Film Score Monthly Magazine, doing justice to every great film music
composer they can.
The film
about a crew who is miniaturized to fight hard-to-reach disease in a man’s body
became a genre classic and a twist on the then-cliché of the mad scientist
shrinking people to torment them. As a
matter of fact, being a few years prior to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, this was the
most commercial of the films that were seen as the genre’s movement to more
thoughtful filmmaking and storytelling.
Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit
451 and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville
are more enduring, but this was the best that the declining old Hollywood
studio system could pull off and it certainly is something to take more
seriously than the silly take-off Innerspace
from 1987.
When the
science and logic failed the film, its still-interesting (and gloriously
non-digital) visual effects and music filled in. Rosenman should be given credit for bringing
electronic music into mainstream filmmaking beyond Sci-Fi stories. The combination of the films visuals and music
make it one-of-a-kind, and played contradictory in many ways to the music John
Barry had written for the great underwater sequences the year before in the
James Bond blockbuster Thunderball. Though it inside the body, it is that kind of
unusual space that needs to be scored with its solitude in mind. To Rosenman’s credit, he uses plenty of
non-electronic instruments, creating a sort of juxtaposition between the
natural human body the technology trying to save and not kill it.
Alan
Silvestri’s score for James Cameron’s The
Abyss is more mystified by comparison, adding to that film’s problems in
being totally part of the Science Fiction genre. The greatest thing about Rosenman’s score is
that it is more diverse and most unashamedly Science Fiction pushing for
possible science, and that is why it took electronic music in the genre and
cinema in general passed the paranoid Theremin’s of 1950s B-movie works in the
genre. That is also why we can say Beneath The Planet Of The Apes finishes
what this score began.
The PCM
CD stereo is pretty good, with a fullness and separation worthy of such a big
CinemaScope production, though it would be one of the last with that format of
lenses. The film was issued on a DVD
double feature from Fox back in 2000 with Voyage
To the Bottom Of The Sea, which had the feature in Dolby Digital 4.0, but
it is too old to compare to this CD, so we’ll wait for a reissue.
Since the
DVD is not out yet, despite Fox releasing the majority of Raquel Welch’s output
for the studio already, so the sound options on that release should be
interesting. This CD proves they have
great materials from which to restore the soundtrack. This soundtrack, however, has been limited to
only 3,000 pressings and has been in print for a while, so if you want it, go
to www.filmscoremonthly.com and
check out all the great titles they have available.
- Nicholas Sheffo
