We’ll be writing a whole lot about Kick-Ass this week, in the lead up to Friday night’s opening (check out our spoiler-free first look here), but one thing that I’ve already started hearing from just about everyone who’s seen the movie early is this: The music seals the deal.
Here’s a thriller that knows a thing or two about both songs and scores, and also makes the provocative decision of re-using musical scores from other films. While I have not yet had this confirmed by Lionsgate publicists, I firmly believe that Kick-Ass has poached two tracks from Danny Boyle soundtracks to boost the intensity of key fight scenes. One track is from 28 Days Later – the zombie run through London. To my ears, the other track sounded like it was from Sunshine, Boyle’s outer space thriller, as heard in this sequence:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMns4c-0sq0]
After my second Kick-Ass screening, I went online to find this music once again, and was reminded instead of just how gripping a sequence Boyle managed to mold. This is sci-fi at its most operatic. Death as something grand and mysterious. (More at Techland: Want a job at Pixar?)
Kaneda and Capa, out in the cold of the space, repairing the heat shield. A race against the clock, before the shield turns and the sun blasts across the metal. Kaneda tells Capa to get moving, and then stays behind to finish the crucial repairs. And rather than make an unlikely dash for safety at the last second, he turns and confronts the tidal wave of sunrays bearing down on him. As everyone else panics, one crewmate, obsessed with the giant star, screams out to Kaneda at the last second: “What do you see!”
It’s really a beautifully constructed sequence, from the nuclear explosion of sunrays to the ways in which Kaneda turns to confront his destiny head-on, to the way that Capa is so worried about his colleague that he almost forgets to take shelter from the shockwave in time. The action all looks great, but it also bears an unforgettable sound. John Murphy’s score is big and brash, less about building up to a climax that maintaining a certain level of high-throttle adrenaline. His music doesn’t so much build as emanate. And appropriately enough, this becomes the perfect counterpoint for a game-changing turn of events – a life-altering decision to plunge into the white void. (More at Techland: 8 Netbooks Worth Buying Right Now)
This music is used in Sunshine to show us a commander that’s decided to sacrifice himself for the crew, to look into the star from which we have been taught from childhood to avert our gaze. It’s a no-holds-barred, nothing-to-lose crescendo, and that’s much the same way it’s used in Kick-Ass too, to give audiences a sense that we’re leaving the path that’s been laid out, that we’re crossing into uncharted territory with a band of unlikely heroes.
I love the way Matthew Vaughn integrates this music into Kick-Ass, but after re-watching a couple scenes on YouTube, now I’m interested in returning to Sunshine too. I remember being impressed by the movie the first time around and particularly with this sequence, so beautiful, dark and intense that it flips Stanley Kubrick’s calm and cold vision of space on its head. This is a fiery, bombastic space mission, taking the image of our sun as a beautiful giver of life and twisting it into something far more awesome and terrifying. We’ve never seen the sun destroy life like this, and to my mind, it’s John Murphy’s score that takes something impressive and intriguing, and makes it nothing short of incredible.