Reluctant Warrior

by Michael Ware

Jerry Goldsmith's lustrous music for THE 13TH WARRIOR presents a master's dissertation on the craft of dramatic scoring, and in the process rekindles the art form with a work of gleaming vitality and strength. Though this composer's innate musicianship has never been in doubt, discerning admirers (or critics) would believe his approach in the years since BASIC INSTINCT has been effective and good but missing crucial ingredients, that the intense drive for fulfilment which blasted his consummate achievements into the realm of distinguished musicality and art has become essentially a memory. This new score blasts those speculations all to hell.

Goldsmith has always seemed a composer at his best when given a strong contextual challenge, whether working off a better collaborator (cf., Franklin Schaffner, Paul Verhoeven, Robert Wise, Michael Crichton) or working off a film with interesting dramatic issues as opposed to the amorphous blob-school of commercial filmmaking (FIRST KNIGHT, POWDER, THE MUMMY). His 1990s work has been cited by some as in a style too blatant and broadly romantic for an Apollonian sceptic sensibility (although I personally enjoyed the Godzilla-stomps-Tokyo number on the Zimmer genre in AIR FORCE ONE). THE 13TH WARRIOR plays directly into his strengths as a dramatist with its story of a learned Persian among barbarous Vikings on a mission into dangerous territory, on both physical and spiritual planes of reckoning. Ibn Fadlan's dilemma as an educated man of culture thrust into combat generates a complex of first-rate ideas and dichotomies galvanized into a thoroughly unified, and inspired, symphonic expression.

The opening track on the Varese Sarabande disc (VSD 6038)-- "Old Bagdad", deceptively creates the impression one is in for another of Goldmith's late quasi-Romantic themes in the vein of FIRST KNIGHT or STAR TREK FIRST CONTACT, more rhetoric than catalyst, but immediately the grave beauty of the Arabic-scaled nocturne sliding into the majestic low brass Viking theme (augmented with male choir) takes hold as more than just a structural foundation for the entire score, but also as the spiritual center with a perfectly articulated line and counterpoint design, a built-in question and answer quality to the phrasing. It's a superb melody, one of the composer's best, a rich statement of inner resolve that thematically sets up a crucial tension of simultaneous doubt and authority while setting the film's ethnic colors with cooled imagery that establishes this as a 100 proof Jerry Goldsmith score, dramatically entertaining and loaded with substance. From there the score dazzles with a streamlined version of the sort of intensive detail and structural logic once common among the best filmusic but lately having been replaced with verly-simplified conventions. The disc's second track, "Exiled", is allowed to flourish into a tight but intoxicating pattern of its own before finishing out with an apocryphal statement of the brass motif that one feels in the gut. Mr. Goldsmith's edgey, viscerally powerhouse sound is back.

The score's form is respected with classical discipline and economizing gestures avoiding the slight indulgence of something like THE MUMMY (a run-off piece composed after this, a good score for CGI effects at least) by using a judicious restraint in imposing a symbolic means of extracting the film's drama from within, with that personalised insightful observation into human beings familiar from hard-edged Western scores like RIO CONCHOS, TAKE A HARD RIDE, maybe LONELY ARE THE BRAVE, and not without the ineffably soaring lyricism. If nothing else this composer nails the John McTiernan masculine-test-of-character genre in ways no one else would, with a serious study of the inner warrior that enlivens the epic, mythicized aspects with Goldsmith's specific probity of intellect.

The esteemed level of compositional integrity that was once business as usual for him lately has been worn down perhaps by current scoring contingencies, tight schedules, meaningless films, resulting in a steady functionalism that is hardly to be dismissed. This new work is leagues better than everything since 1992. It's still in the clean-lined unornamented style of contemporary music which no doubt disappoints those wishing for a return to 1970s WIND AND THE LION stylings and that score's free-flowing energy. THE 13TH WARRIOR is a different film and done in a constricted period for movies, and film scores, in general. Compositionally this score is by no means a throwback to an outmoded concept. It is fierce and lean. The architectural building blocks are as chiseled as those of BASIC INSTINCT and TOTAL RECALL though not necessarily as elaborate or as pristine, as this film lacks a similar level of conviction. The Ibn Fadlan/Vikings theme is put up against some borderline ALIEN-like textured modernisms for "The Eaters of the Dead", and ultimately "Mother Wendol's Cave"; the overall effect is to drive home a taste of what scores like this used to do before every scene became a hard-sell cliche: utilize space, pattern, and form to maximize impact. Goldsmith's current way of handling textures of this kind just seem beefed up and ripped. He almost seems to have muscled into Herrmann's pulverizing ostinato jag with the great two-note threat motif for "The Horns of Hell" that beautifully preps us for one of the classic kick-ass action cues in "The Fire Dragon"-- a sustained four minute blaze of cascading brass and soaring string writing over jagged interlocking rhythms for a sublime extirpation of orchestral firepower worthy of serious ballet, and not Stravinsky's, or anyone's, but Goldsmith's. And this is not even the score's highpoint! That moment comes in a thunderous reclamation of the Viking theme as a triumphant percussive victory attack in a 10 minute suite of enveloping beauty and inexorable emotional purity, "Valhalla/Viking Victory".

One of Jerry Goldsmith's best works, 13TH WARRIOR scorches the current status of the form with a serious work of power and discipline, a challenge in one sense as a revitalization of classically developed filmusic, and an inspiration through its example of one composer's white-hot artistry. It puts me in mind of the grizzled veteran Bruce Wayne returning to action in Frank Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS-- interesting that this score has the gutsy hyperbolic intensity of modern comics: it is everything necessary, amped and mean. I am personally grateful for another glinting masterwork from the industry's consummate musician.

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