Deep Impact

The summer 1998 “asteroid hurtling towards earth” movie that was not Armageddon, Deep Impact was rather left in the dust tail of Michael Bay’s mega-successful film even though it’s much better (it’s also somewhat daft but has held up quite well, I think).  Robert Duvall leads the charge against the destructive force, Elijah Wood is the youngster who discovered it was coming, Tea Leoni is the journalist who stumbles upon the truth, Morgan Freeman is the president.

The filmmakers probably saved themselves a pretty penny by signing up James Horner at the time he was working on James Cameron’s vanity project Titanic, which everyone knew was going to be the biggest box office disaster of all time, rather than waiting for it to be released and seeing him briefly becoming the most famous composer on the planet.  It was the first Horner-scored film released after Titanic in fact, which meant an unusually large number of people probably bought the album at the time.

I was one of them and I have to say it left me somewhat disappointed at the time. I was quite young and foolish and didn’t really appreciate the finer things in life back then (and had not yet been fully cast by the spell of the great James Horner, which would follow as I became older and wiser). In truth it’s a very strong piece of work, full of the sort of emotion and keen sense of drama that the composer always brought, albeit perhaps a little more subtly at times than was his norm (perhaps why I wasn’t immediately so struck by it).

The score opens with “A Distant Discovery”, a twinkly, sparkling piano motif the focus of the first half, all light and airy.  The cue’s second half offers a preview of the action music to come – somewhat Apollo 13-like, the trademark Horner urgent strings, piano, percussion, a desperate feeling to it.  The second theme, primarily used for the astronauts despatched to prevent the comet reaching earth, is then introduced at the opening of “Crucial Rendezvous” – this one blessed with a kind of heroically stubborn resolve, hints of what was to come later in The Perfect Storm.

“Our Best Hope…” (now there’s a James Horner cue title if ever there was one) is one of those lengthy pieces he loved writing (13 minutes) and needless to say he packs a lot into it.  Hope is one thing ironically notable by its absence in the early parts of the cue, the synth choir initially adding a rather forlorn feel; suddenly a brassy flourish heralds what sounds like the start of the resistance, some of the action material that follows distinctly similar to parts of Titanic.  Horner builds the suspense well, the impending doom obvious, the snippets of the astronauts’ theme interpolated expertly – and it builds to the most frenzied of conclusions, panic setting in.  That continues in “The Comet’s Sunrise”, frantic and surprisingly dissonant action opening the cue before a slow, tragic arrangement of the astronauts’ theme (you can guess what’s happened in the film).  When it passes between horn and flute late in the cue, it’s very moving.

“A National Lottery” has a subdued opening – this isn’t a lottery which might give you a few million bucks, it’s one that might give you a place in the bunker being filled with the lucky few who will end up having to repopulate the species.  So it’s quite important and Horner being Horner recognised that of course what it’s really about is not the winners but those that don’t make it and have to start preparing for their imminent demise, and so it’s a sad piece, but towards its end Horner offers just the briefest glimpse of what is essentially the score’s main theme, used mainly to represent the various characters we follow on the planet and their fate.

The score’s most popular cue has always been “The Wedding” and it’s not difficult to see why.  The twinkly piano theme (which has a kind of childlike wonderment to it) alternates with the main theme; it’s lilting and beautiful, an innocent portrait of young love, for these few minutes away from the stresses and terror.  “The Long Return Home” is similarly light, but the main theme this time is used as a kind of representation of resignation, coming to terms with the inevitable.  Of course it turns out not to be so inevitable after all and the steely resolve shows itself again – albeit in muted fashion – as the astronaut’s theme returns.

“Sad News” – despite its title – actually has a somewhat hopeful tone, again a kind of acceptance of the fate to come.   The brief “Leo’s Decision” opens with a passage of dramatic weight before the main theme emerges once more, and we’re back in business.  “The President’s Speech” is not the kind of rousing music you would normally expect a piece of music called “The President’s Speech” to contain, primarily because in this speech the president is essentially telling everyone they’re going to die, and so the music reflects that.  There’s another twist of course, and that comes midway through the first of the remaining two cues, which both run over ten minutes.  The score’s trademark feature – the way Horner manages to musically express the steely resolve that follows people accepting their fate – is back heavily in “Drawing Straws”, the melody (not culled from the trio of themes) that appears around three and a half minutes in full of such tragedy.  Then the twist – strident action, rousing strings – the day is saved.  Horner’s skill in getting from one place to a very different one so seamlessly within a single piece of music is pretty astonishing and while it’s probably not a track that is on a lot of “Best of Horner” playlists, within the film it’s so effective.

There’s still time for a lengthy end credits piece, “Goodbye and Godspeed”, which is truly beautiful and has what I think it’s the score’s most spine-tingling moment, when for the first and only time a real choir is used for the most soaring arrangement of the main theme; towards the end of the cue there’s a brass chorale which is just sublime.  The twelve-minute piece includes lengthy versions of all the main themes and I think it’s quite profoundly moving, James Horner doing what he did so well, so often.

The original album was a very lengthy one (almost filling the capacity of a single CD) and now La-La Land has released an even lengthier one. I’m not sure that any of the additional music adds a great deal to the experience – most of the previously-unreleased cues come from the earlier parts of the film where everything is still being set up. At the same time – they certainly don’t take anything away – and perhaps just offer the listener the opportunity to hear Horner exploring his base of material even more. There’s also a slight potency to the sound that wasn’t there previously, but I suspect the quiet mastering of much of it was quite deliberate (to give the moments when it does swell up and go loud that much more of a punch) so don’t expect a radical shift.

Horner’s great gift as a film composer was to find the human aspect in whatever story he was supporting, to hone in on it with an almost relentless verve, which is what led to some fierce criticism particularly in the later years when that kind of film music just went out of fashion, but is really the thing that has drawn me and I suspect so many others to become such fervent admirers. We were blessed to have a few film composers operating simultaneously over a period from the 1960s through to the early part of the 2000s who had that special sauce that set them apart – Horner was the last one to join that group chronologically but very much deserves to be considered as one of the true giants of the field. Like all of the other greats, he had a unique way of applying music to film which was unlike anyone before him or after him, and I miss it so much. Deep Impact isn’t one of his top tier works but his standard was so high, it seems such a breath of fresh air hearing it almost three decades later, a reminder of how high the bar was for the composers on projects like this back in the day, the fact that it isn’t considered a top tier work an indicator of just how remarkable that top tier really was. “Goodbye and Godspeed”, indeed.