TRENT REZNOR & ATTICUS ROSS - Before The Flood (Music From The Motion Picture)

You've long been one of the most famous actors in the world, and your acting chops have visibly grown stronger from your debut to today. Everyone's been itching for you to finally get an Oscar, yet you claim you're not in it for the award, but for the craft itself. The golden statuette arrives, and for a few hours, culminating in the key moment of the presentation, the eyes of the whole world are fixed on you. In that instant, all you can do is underline the concern that, outside the film set, occupies your mind more than anything else: the world is hurtling toward an environmental crisis with irreversible effects, one severe enough to threaten the very livability of the Earth.

Although he has taken on the role of UN Messenger of Peace, Leonardo DiCaprio remains, first and foremost, a man of cinema, and the most effective tool at his disposal for reaching a mass audience is putting his own face on screen, joining forces with National Geographic to turn the global threat into a spectacle that seeks empathy and calls on everyone for immediate action.

All things considered, "Before The Flood" (translated into Italian as "Punto di non ritorno," sidestepping any link to Hieronymus Bosch's pictorial cycle) comes across as an environmentalist propaganda documentary that obsessively targets the viewer's conscience, rewarding it with spectacular imagery and emphatic music: the latter is the work of a team assembled on paper from top-tier résumés — and not only in the film world.

More than a line-up, it's a dream-team of today's leading soundtrack talents: the duo of Reznor/Ross, the brooding expressive alter ego of director David Fincher; the ever harder to pigeonhole Mogwai, themselves reborn as TV-score specialists; and finally Argentina's Gustavo Santaolalla, a two-time Oscar winner for "Brokeback Mountain" and "Babel".

It's clear that, as in many other cases, this lineup wasn't the result of careful deliberation: it's a deliberate deployment of creative firepower (and financial muscle) that essentially amounts to a request to replicate the atmospheres that first brought these artists to prominence. In all three cases, practically speaking, it's a blend of ambient music and subtle electronic shadings meant to hint at the dramatic tension underlying the narrative: a tried-and-tested formula, a safe bet, but one rarely subject to any meaningful variation.

Of the full 96 minutes — released digitally only — precious little manages to stand out across the film's runtime, packed as it is with statistics and conversations with experts, not to mention Leo's ever-present voiceover. All of which works in favor of the album's only song, reserved for the end credits and placed second in the tracklist: "A Minute To Breathe" is the quintessence of a hermetic, crepuscular mood that marks, perhaps, the furthest extreme NIN have ever reached in this incarnation.

Deny to believe

We can’t believe

In anything

I don’t want to say goodbye

Stars falling from the sky

We will all be judged

By what we leave behind

Ross's languid piano is echoed by Barry Burns of Mogwai's own lullaby-leaning touch, as the band seizes the chance to continue down the path they successfully charted with the moving French TV series score: a low-key approach, if you will, favoring compressed synthetic beats and reverb-drenched, distortion-free guitars. Within this context, the relatively more melodramatic note comes from Santaolalla's orchestrations, which willingly let his mournful string swells sink beneath the ambient blanket laid down by the other contributors, who end up being the true protagonists of the score.

Across a very long sequence of only loosely cohesive tracks, the heart of the Reznor/Ross triptych just before the finale marks another immersive high point of their partnership: the calm, linear, flawless progression of "One Perfect Moment" echoes the best of "Millennium" or the recent single "Juno," dedicated to NASA's probe bound for Jupiter, stopping just short of its own explosive release.

Far more often, the ideas are forcibly stretched out over long durations, dragging out suggestions that could easily have fit within the space of a single radio-length track ("And When The Sky Was Opened," "Trembling," "8 Billion") or could have been skipped altogether (the vibraphones on "Disappearing Act" feel decidedly out of place).

At least in terms of soundtrack albums, the flaw in most OSTs is the urge to cram in all the material used in the final cut, disregarding the fact that these are two distinct forms of listening with different attention spans. What's still missing from the independence of film scores is precisely composers' willingness to shape an organic summary that sidesteps filler interludes and needless padding; or, more boldly, the artists involved could rework the fragmented material into a second version in suite form, in turn crafting a new (and perhaps even more engaging) sonic narrative.

In both formats, unfortunately, “Before The Flood” settles into a comfortable mediocrity: playing dirty with easy irony, we might say that, at least artistically, these are products bordering on zero impact.

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26/11/2016