Radio 1 Rescores Drive, But Why Bother?

So that was the score, and my initial reactions during. On reflection, I’m sure that a lot of the songs would be nice enough on their own but – for many reasons – just don’t work as a score for Drive. Moreover, the beauty of Drive’s original score was – for me at least – the sparing use of lyrics and vocals in each of the songs, and with a lot of the new score the lyrics seemed either woefully inappropriate, plain rubbish, poorly placed, or all three.

A lot of people leveled the accusation at Zane and Co., that if you were going to embark on such a project as this then why not go totally left field, instead of sticking so closely to a similar style and tone, and its a fair enough question. As it is, the score never really gets off the ground precisely because it sounds so much like a poor aping of the original; while the artists involved weren’t asked to stick with the 80’s synthy feel of Mansel, Kavinsky, College etc, it’s clear that they couldn’t help it, which is more than a little bit frustrating – go big or go home, as the right reverend Leslie Knope once said. More to the point, the scattered approach where the individual musicians had clearly worked separately on their input without an overarching coherence impacted heavily – while each song sounds okay separately, put them together and you’ve got a bland, washy, vanilla hodgepodge of mismatching score sections.

The experiment did have value as an artistic one – viewing a film as an object d’art and taking it in a new direction – but fell short in that respect too. The idea of re-scoring Drive would have been far more interesting had it been steered toward the more unexpected, for example if, I dont know, Howard Shore or John Williams or even Hans Zimmer (I would watch the shit out of the latter version, repeatedly) had done something of a totally different style to the original and therefore transforming the film into a totally different beast, we might have something more remarkable to talk about.

Ultimately Zane’s project was brave and admirable in intention, but utterly bereft of impact. The notion of taking existing films of varying ages and applying new scores is an interesting one, not without merit or market, but will only ever be successful as an exercise in artistry if the new score makes a mark. Unfortunately this attempt winds up a pale and clunky, poor imitation of the evocative original, and despite the brave intentions and big possibilities, feels entirely pointless. In better hands, and with a different film, we might find something special.