Music, Sound Effects, and Digital Technologies in Contemporary Science-fiction Films - Text 3
Silence can also suggest inaction or boredom. In a review of Passengers (Morten Tyldum, 2016), the story of an interstellar voyage that morphs into a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back romance, critic Christopher Orr in The Atlantic praises those moments in which Jim, now a year older and the only one of 5,000 passengers accidentally awakened from suspended animation ninety years too soon — eats a bowl of cereal or simply sits in the ship’s movie theater, lost in thought.[8] Other parts of the Passengers soundtrack waver between studio-recorded music, digitalized noise, quotations from familiar pop-songs, and symphonic climaxes at moments of danger. As preliminary studio advertisements appear on screen, a musical prelude of pings, manipulated piano notes, and bell sounds blends with other sonic layers in a gentle, minimalistic style. At 1:22 digitally engineered cries — reminiscent of exotic bird calls in 1940s jungle movies — suggest danger as space-ship Avalon approaches a cluster of meteors. As the moment of impact approaches, the sounds of violins and percussion “colour” a score typical of Thomas Newman’s largely digital work but created in this case with the help of thirteen studio musicians.[9]
Still later, after Jim awakens pretty passenger Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) to share his hopelessness, audiences hear fragments of numbers performed by Bobby Darin, Bob Dylan, and Elvis Presley; a moment of pastoral music, complete with hunting horns, as Jim gazes at an image of the “colony world of Homestead II”; bits of Muzak throughout the theme-park-like Grand Concourse; and scattered mechanical noises. Finally, just before Jim and Aurora fall in love (and before she finds out he’s condemned her to a ship-board death), they venture together into outer space.
