The Fifth Element: The Final Frontier?

by Lukas Kendall

GoldenEye was bad. How bad? So bad that with one, flat-lining score Eric Serra took what could have been a perfectly fun James Bond adventure and soiled it for all-time.

Then again, The Professional was good. Not great, but good enough to cast a unique flavor on the artsy and tense but obvious, shades-of-pedophilia thriller.

Both GoldenEye and The Professional have been "good" enough to be temp-track fodder for a number of other films and trailers. For example, Sony's preview reel at the Vegas "Showest" convention for theater exhibitors used "Can I Have a Word with You?" from The Professional as its transition, Sony-logo "Movies—It's Our Life" theme.

So, like it or not, Erica Serra is here to stay. And The Fifth Element, his latest score for director and fellow Frenchman Luc Besson, is gonna be here for a long time too.

On first listen(s) away from the film the score is pretty typical Serra: a lot of techno, r&b loops with, for all their in-the-house fury, little forward motion. As is the case with pop rhythms, they are a great intro for a cue, but outside of the hands of a master, like Lalo Schifrin, they can just tread water for the duration. The Professional was such a good film for Serra because, like La Femma Nikita, it had a lot of edgy, nothing-happening suspense scenes, where Serra's ambiguous, wallpaper grooves lent an interesting atmosphere, like a scent in the air. GoldenEye was such an inappropriate film for him since he seems to have no aptitude or interest in propelling a movie forward. Story point? Duh, forget it—Serra's techno grooves tend to wind away for their own sake, and his French tastes in pop (all the stuff that sounds like bad accordion music) make for quaint but tacky love themes. (They were, though, somehow appropriate in The Professional with that weird child-hit man "love" story.)

Obviously I have yet to see The Fifth Element—it opens tomorrow—but listening to the album it seems somewhere between the character of The Professional and the inadequacy of GoldenEye. Musically it has its moments: "The Diva Dance" is a really neat piece of dance music with a female voice—but listen closely, because its virtuoso shifts in register seem to indicate a sample at work. It had me fooled, and if we are truly reaching a point where electronics can imitate acoustic instruments to this degree, we could actually be in store for some interesting music in the next few years.

Mark my words: the future of film music is here, and at least the immediate future is going to sound a lot more like Eric Serra than John Williams or Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Over the years, that film music which has been used for "contemporary" films has been derived from pop music, but more specifically from pop music with a black, i.e. African/world music tradition.

For example: jazz in the 1950s with Alex North and Elmer Bernstein, then Henry Mancini on Peter Gunn; the jazz-flavored James Bond scores by John Barry and all the spy rip-offs; the Lalo Schifrin masterworks like Bullitt and Enter the Dragon (hello blues bass lines—and even the Mission: Impossible 5/4 rhythm is a descent of Dave Brubeck's "Take Five"); and most obviously, the blaxploitation scores by Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield and others.

In the late 1970s and 1980s things diverged somewhat: the classical, deeply white/European tradition was revived by John Williams and the action/fantasy genres, and white people got their hold on black music with the disco craze, where the "beat" became the thing—this gave us all that Midnight Express disco stuff, by German musicians like Giorgio Moroder, Harold Faltermeyer and most notably and obviously, Hans Zimmer, the end and king of that particular line. But the early dance music had beats which were synthetically generated, not sampled and then manipulated. This gave us the whole synth/electronic percussion thing (the John Carpenter/Brad Fiedel school) that dominated the 1980s—especially in television—but hit a dead end when electronically generated music was just too rigid and limited for movies. It all sounded like the same DX-7. To me Fiedel's appropriate but limited score for Terminator 2 in 1991 marked the end of 1980s film music.

What is notable is how rarely actual "rock music" was used to score films. Maybe I'm blanking, but I can't think of a single rock score—of course there are dozens of examples of rock music being used in film, but it's not the same thing as a score. (Actually, check that—rock music has devoured TV themes, particular for sit coms, where white middle America has to be prepped for the oncoming half-hour of numbing non-entertainment.) Rock songs and their chord progressions are very fixed in time, whereas blues/funk/techno/world styles are loose—they can go on and on. In film music where the "mood" is so important, these latter, black-tradition styles have lent themselves well to underscore, whereas rock forms (white versions of those black styles) have not.

In the last five years, composers like James Newton Howard, Alan Silvestri (Predator is tremendously influential as a percussion-driven action score), Hans Zimmer, Mark Isham, Christopher Young and many more have succeeded by mixing the John Williams symphonic pallette with groove-driven synths. But the recent (as in less than a year old) popular wisdom that alternative rock is out and Euro-techno is in is going to propel even further the Speed/Broken Arrow style of what is "contemporary" film music. Right now, that is Eric Serra, the first guy who, Zimmer excepted, seems to base his music almost entirely in the electronic domain. Unlike the synth scores of the '80s, this is music which is acoustically generated, and then electronically manipulated.

Theoretically there is no limit to this "new" film music, except the fact that techno has traditionally been so one-note in regards to pace and affect—which is what wrecked GoldenEye. I honestly do not know how much electronically manipulated music can pull off the various moods and emotions required by film music (it is, after all, dance music). Ultimately this type of music will be as much of a dead-end as the Moroder/Carpenter stuff—it too is a white-version-of-black-music—but it has a lot of wad left to blow, to put it one way. Basically the electronically-generated '80s and the no-show of alternative rock were just sidetracks—The Fifth Element is the next Midnight Express, and we're going to be hearing a lot more of it.