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Enigma
Review
(by James Southall)
 Attractive
but surprisingly uninspired-sounding thriller score.
John
Barry fans have for many years had to deal with taunts that all
of his scores are alike, a notion that is of course ludicrous. But
the signs are that finally he has succumbed to the ultimate laziness
because his two 2001 projects, Enigma and the concept album Eternal
Echoes are so predictable that it's difficult to get as excited
about them as about new Barry works in previous years. Enigma should
be the most inspiring film for Barry in ages - a spy thriller with
an element of romance, it seems like the sort of movie he is born
to score. But we get music that is so familiar, it is very difficult
to see why Barry got so excited about scoring the film - surely
if he had been that excited, he would have written something that
would have reflected the energy and enthusiasm he had for the project?
While
scores like Mercury Rising hardly set the world alight, this was
essentially put down to the fact that Barry just wasn't inspired
by the material, but quite frankly if he doesn't get inspired by
Enigma then it is hard to see him ever getting that spark of inspiration
for a project that has provided three of the best scores of the
1990s (and his career) in Dances with Wolves, Chaplin and Playing
by Heart.
There
is nothing wrong with the music, dramatically note-perfect for the
movie. It's just that it sounds like recycled music from The Living
Daylights and Mercury Rising and not like something Barry really
cared about. The love theme is very pleasant but very minor in the
annals of similar themes the composer has penned for other movies
- a piano solo is accompanied by the usual wash of strings, but
it's less pleasant and less memorable than even things like Simon's
Theme from Mercury Rising or the theme from Indecent Proposal .
Slightly more interesting is the version performed without the piano
in "Is That What Happened?" Trivia note: the theme has exactly the
same chord progression as Hans Zimmer's theme from Pearl Harbour
but, even though the album is only now being released for Enigma
, Barry wrote his theme long before Zimmer started work. It seems
a bizarre coincidence that two film composers could have written
virtually identical themes for movies about World War II in the
same year.
Barry
plays the tension and suspense in his usual way, with very simple
brass ostinatos and gradually-building string accompaniment. Best
is "The Convoy", almost six minutes long and by far the most impressive
cue of its type on the album. Aside from this, there are basically
just a series of repeats of the main theme, with very little variation.
Yes, it is very pleasant, but no it is not pleasant enough to warrant
such repetition without anything being done to it.
Ultimately,
despite the complaints, Barry is a superb musical craftsman and
it is great to see him back in the business after such a long period
has elapsed since his previous score. After a string of rejected
scores (one of which, Goodbye Lover, reportedly features heavily
in Enigma ) and fall-outs with directors, it is good that he found
a director with whom he did not have a problem working; bad, though,
that he was hired pretty much without the consent of the director,
whose choice of composer was David Arnold. Enigma is a good album,
a good score, but the inspiration that formed the basis for all
of Barry's best works just seems to have deserted him, and really
there's nothing new here at all.
James
Southall |
