PU-239 Review

George Bass extensively reviews the score for PU-239. See some quotes below and visit Cokemachineglow.com for the full article and more music news.
 

According to Cokemachineglow

Using the well-paced picture to make his debut for English-language cinema is composer Abel Korzeniowski, whose music, like its on-screen source material, is little short of shit-hot. Recorded and mixed at the Warner Brothers’ Scoring Stage by Steve Kempster and Joel Iwataki, the sonic nuances and scientific insight that drip from the screen are unlike any I’ve seen from Hollywood.

If anyone can play a man on the edge it’s Considine (tap up Dead Man’s Shoes on YouTube to see how petrifying he can become), and composer Korzeniowski supplies the character with cues worthy of the film’s stirring narrative. “Opening” begins like something from a savings commercial, the Soviet strings and Geiger counters quickly promising us characters and agony, and “Field” fleshes out the film’s recurring imagery of blue periwinkles with bobbing synths and plaintive violins. But it’s when the protagonist crosses paths with affable hood Shiv that things pick up on both screen and headphone.

Like Timofey, Shiv’s battling with turbulent elements, but the difference here is the absence of his counterpart’s integrity in the face of widespread rot. His goonish mischief is matched by Korzeniowski’s cheeky instrumentals; we’re shown the old side of New Russia that the gangsters would have you is gone. “Mobsters” is typical communist slapstick, all polka accordions and Tetris dancing, perfectly representing the brainless ineptitude of the film’s doltishly-dense bad guys.

The pads and glyphs of “Fireworks” soften the obligatory cold night with photons and “Harness”‘s stern fiddles inject Considine’s character with resolve as his body decays in the face of poison with a 24,110 year half-life. If you don’t want to spoil the inevitable end to the story then skip tracks fifteen and sixteen, but “Ending”, which airs over the movie’s breathtaking denouement, has the necessary warmth and feedback picks to preserve the fates of those fortunate to survive. All that pain at last dissolves into angelic shoegaze, sweet to the point it’d make Sofia Coppola swivel with jealousy. The perfect close to a film as beautiful and ugly as the behaviour of all its disturbed particles.

George Bass

October 2008

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