Rando Yaguchi wrote: ↑Fri Oct 08, 2021 12:40 pm
I don't see the lack of identifiable character themes as a negative.
I wasn't trying to imply that a film
has to use leitmotifs for characters, I was just pointing out that this film is "scored" (actually edited) in a way that's atypical for the Godzilla series.
What doesn't work about this approach in
Biollante is the way the same few bars of music are tracked in in varying contexts. For example, the
Jaws-soundalike part of Godzilla's theme is used alternately for Godzilla, Biollante, a general battle theme, and I think in other contexts as a suspense cue. That kind of tracking feels as jarring to me as the almost random use of the
Creature theme throughout the U.S. version of
King Kong vs. Godzilla.
It fails as a film score because the music is sloppily arranged throughout the movie. It's not like Sugiyama composed/Howell recorded a bunch of different variations of the same themes, it's literally that the same <20 minutes of music is repeated many times over a 105-minute movie. It's usually not even a creative use of the same music: It's like "Let's track in the bouncy suspense theme now; let's use that
Jaws thing here; let's go back to the heroic march." That's not Sugiyama's fault, however, as he clearly didn't compose music to match *scenes* in the film; it's a failure of the soundtrack editor to not use more of what was recorded.
Is the music enjoyable to listen to? For the most part, yes, even when it doesn't make sense how it's sometimes used in the film. But as a film score, I think it feels very patchwork, very sloppy, and way too repetitive.
And to that last point, I'm sure someone will interject "Well what about Ifukube?" Yes, Akira Ifukube used the same themes over and over for his film scores. Sometimes he even used a piece composed for a certain context in one film in a wildly different context in another. However, the difference here is that Ifukube still arranged and recorded different versions of those pieces, while
Biollante literally just uses the same recordings over and over. Consider
Terror of Mechagodzilla, where Ifukube uses the same composition for Titanosaurus and Katsura: When we first hear it, it's arranged as a horror cue over the main title; when we last hear it at the end of the film, it's been re-arranged in a heartbreakingly tragic manner to underscore Katsura's death. Contrast that with this film, where the soundtrack editor drops in the same pieces without any musical variation.