excerpted from Soundtrack!, vol. 2, no. 9; March 1984: by Steven J. Lehti
Brainstorm

Varese Sarabande VCD 47215 (USA)

James Horner has come quite a long way in the last few years. From low-budget New World quickies like Humanoids From the Deep and Up From the Depths he graduated to Star Trek II, turning in a score that, despite thin moments like a weak main title, possessed great energy and drive and verve. His "urban" score for 48 Hours was of little note, but now Horner, who is only 30 years old, has written some of the best, most affected scores of 1983. All of them richly deserve recordings, but thus far only Krull and Brainstorm have been put to disc. Horner's energetic, wistful and nostalgic score for Something Wicked This Way Comes greatly contributed tothe power of that film. Horner's music for the picture's lovely opening (after the excellent main title "Train" theme), accompanying pastoral vistas of Green Town and Arthur Hill's nicely done naration, is both beatiful and stunning. Just as Hermann did "A Portrait of a Hitch" from Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry, Horner's theme could be a "portrait of Bradbury and his Green Town", so evocative is it of the mood and style of Bradbury's nostalgic, magical works. Testament, the melancholy and very moving film about a mother's attempt to help her children survive after the bombs are dropped, was an emotionally draining experience to begin with, but Horner has contributed a quiet score fills out the emotional resonance--particularly in the mother's (Jane Alexander's) heart-breaking scenes with her dying children. Horner effectively underlines the complete innocent of these helpless victoms of the nuclear war.

Brainstorm is not in and of itself a very emotionally satisfying film. The characters and their relationships are defined solely in terms of the scientific project with which they are all connected. That project is the creation of a device which can render human experiences and emotions to tape, to be played back and experienced by other individuals. When one of the scientists dies while hooked up to the machine, the film becomes a race between the protagonist (Christopher Walken), who wants to experience the tape himself and others who try to stop him. The picture strives for an emotional effect, but it does so with characters whom we know so little about, and have seen in such a cold light, that we cannot feel touched the way the filmmakers wish.

With Herculean effort, Horner's score overcomes the picture's built-in obstacles and obtains a richly-textured catharsis. He lays the seeds for this in the Main Title (the titles are very impressive), which is embellished by wordless choral music that is pure (though at some points it comes off as unintentionally awkward as it builds), spiritual and almost religious: it is like a cascading melody of an angelic choir--interupted at its height by cacophonous music that will later serve the post-death experiences the film demonstrates. The "Main Title" presents the mysticism and other-worldliness that Brainstorm would otherwise not possess.

Horner's music for the death of the project's lead scientist, Lillian Russell, is grim and relentless. As she endures the pain of a fatal heart attack--while struggling to put on the machine's headphones to leave to her colleagues a record of death--the music strikes out at us viciously, building and building until at last she succombs, as though to the music itself. The music slowly trails off at her death, suggesting the finished tape that is shown flapping in the machine. The chorus is brought in softly at the very end, suggesting the mystery of the death experience.

A second portion of the score could be called "suspense" music. Steady and subversive in tone, the five-note leitmotif quickly builds, descends and echoes itself. Used for Walken's attempts to gain entrance into the computer system (that he has been barred from) and play Lillian's tape, it is presented simply at first, and then with more import and energy, interwoven with other themes towards the climax of the film. It is fine music, and my only criticism of the entire score is that it sounds very much as though Jerry Goldsmith wrote it, so reminiscent of many of Jerry Goldsmith's similar suspense themes, particularly, Capricorn One. Such criticisms are not new to Horner's work. He was accused of stylistic plagiarism for Battle Beyond the Stars (though he insists that he was requested to compose such a score by the film's producers), and much of that is left in Star Trek II.

A third section of the score concerns the love theme. To refer to it merely as a love theme, however, is to do it a grave and unjust disservice. Horner uses the melody three times, once in the story and then twice in the end titles. In the story, it accompanies a scene where Walken, who has acidentally experienced his estranged wife's (Natalie Wood) anger towards him through one of the tapes, records his own feelings toward her, and his perceptions of the history of their love affair, and presents them to her. When she inquires about the tape's contents, Walekn tells her, "It's me." Horner suggests the mystical nature of the experience with a choral reference and the risk Walken is taking in presenting to his wife his true feelings for her. The "love theme" is bracketed by a very intimate, simple motif for a lone harp (I believe) when he gives her the tapes, and then her reactions to it. The motif builds slightly with support from the string section, moving into a supurb musical tour-de-force for full orchestra and chorale that portrays the early, happy days of their marriage with exuberant strings and piano. Actually this section is very short, and we soon return to that intimate harp motif wherein the couple reconcile, with a violin transition to a piano rendition of the love theme (where the reconciled couple play their piano together), then joined by sympathetic violins, and then once again building to its full force (but this time without the chorale as the scene is now in the present). These lovely passages are more than a mere love melody; they grow to become a theme for life and all its exuberance, and this is confirmed in the composer's treatment of this cue in the "End Title". James Horner's music makes this otherwise typical romantic montage truly soar.

The fourth section, often interwoven with the suspense motif, is bizarre, cacophonous and abstract. Used to simulate the terrible experiences of those who play Lillian's tape and actually 'feel' her heart attack, it features nightmarish, gibbering choral and heaving, elephantine brass. It often reminds one of the sounds an orchestra makes on the stage vefore a performance while the musicians tune their instruments, but though the music here has little immediate form, overall structure us present. While not exactly pleasant, it is chilling and much more listenable than classical composer John Corigliano's similarly wild and braying music for Altered States. This section of the score then become pulsing and abstract as Walken's mind soars through galaxies on the way to where all souls go. It is reminiscent of the Ligeti piece Stanly Kubrick used for 2001's "Stargate" sequence. Horner's cue ends on a hopeful note, when Walken is called back from his own death by his wife's love, and he reveals that man's ethereal destination is the stars.

Compared to the rest of the score, the "End Titles" are very calm and quiet. This solemn and spiritual, other-worldly choral theme is interrupted twice by the now-subdued "love theme"--both briefly before they are cut off and drowned out by the stronger, distant omnipresent chorale, which slowly trails off into silence. One would suppose that the effect Horner is trying to create is to show how death surrounds life and ultimately will conquer it--what with the happy burst of piano cut off by the droning, mystical chorale and all. Though a refreshing change from the typical science-fiction end titles championed by Goldsmith, Williams, and Horner himself (Star Wars, Star Trek, Star Trek II), which always feature a reprise of the main overture with the love theme interjected, it seems a bit hackneyed, pompous, and corny.

Nevertheless, Horner's score remains an effective one. Though I liked the film Brainstorm, it would not be one-half so effective as it is without the young composer's score. Virtually making the film, it is difficult to imagine it having the little power that it does if it had been scored by a lesser composer. Horner is a musician in the John Williams school, already surpassing that over-praised conjurer of pretentious and pompous bombast. Let us hope that Horner's successes do not touch himl that he does not start composing overblown, empty themes that only serve to call attention to themselves. His melodies have shown much cleverness and invention in their energy and dynamism; with the arrival of Something Wicked This Way Comes, Testament and Brainstorm, he is also achieving an emotional sincerity necessary (but often lacking) to the success of any composer of film music.