There was a time when I would have been excited to hear the score for a film about the peasants’ revolt in England, which took place in the 14th century after taxes were raised following the Black Death. But that time is not 2026 and especially not when the film is directed by Paul Greengrass (not renowned for encouraging his composers to express a great deal of dramatic range – with hindsight it’s a miracle we got John Powell’s Bourne scores) and also scored by Volker Bertelmann (who doesn’t seem to express a great deal of dramatic range regardless of who the director is). And so my expectations were fairly low when I started my first listen of the album from The Uprising, a film which ignited a bizarre spat between its US and UK distributors when the former decided to market it as a Robin Hood origin story and the latter put out a statement saying it isn’t.
Unfortunately, my low expectations were not set low enough, because it’s an even more miserable experience than I had expected. One certainly couldn’t accuse Bertelmann of failing to capture the mood of a society which has just lost about half its number to the plague. This is bleak – as bleak as it gets – rumbling strings accompanied by brief rhythmic pulses from one thing or another, no emotion anywhere other than abject misery, no attempt at painting any sort of picture or going on any kind of dramatic journey. It starts in one place (with the “Uprising Ouverture” – not just an overture but an ouverture) and is still there in the same place at the end (“Freeman” is, despite its name, as effective a musical depiction of tortured agony as everything else that went before it). It’s perhaps functional as film music at the most basic level, but its ambition is so limited and as an album it is very much not for me.
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