Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Legion by John Frizzell (Review)


Let me start off by saying that Legion was one of the worst movies I’ve seen in recent years. However, I have found many great scores in quite awful films. Legion is not this case. John Frizzell has never composed anything that has ever connected with me. Wait, I take that back. I actually liked the score to Dante’s Peak, but I credit James Newton Howard’s writing on that since the theme is amazing. Frizzell’s music is usually as formulaic as the movies he composes, which aren’t the best projects to begin with. Just to name a few films he’s done: Whiteout, The Reaping, First Born, Primeval, Stay Alive, Cradle 2 The Grave, Ghost Ship, Thir13en Ghosts, Alien Resurrection, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.


Legion is terrible material to be given as a composer. There is only so much you can do with one of the worst scripts to hit the market since Ultraviolet, but at least Klaus Badelt managed to make it stylish. Here we get nothing out of the ordinary. Pulsing strings and overbearing synth modified vocals at inappropriate times. Some of the structures actually lead me to believe that The Dark Knight may have been used as a temp track, but that’s just my speculation.


The score never stands on its own. I can barely tell you what the main theme is. There are a couple attempts at drawing out some emotion and it’s of course a piano melody. The one glimmer of light I found in the score is the track “Die Like One Of Them”. You can feel the embodiment of thematic structure that you wish somehow found its way into the rest of the score. Then again this is the score to Legion; a film starring Paul Bettany as a rogue angel protecting a trailer trash baby from God's army at a gas station in the desert.

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