It’s too early in the year to declare a film “deserves” an Oscar in technical categories, but Joseph Kosinski‘s Oblivion certainly deserves to remain part of the conversation throughout the rest of 2013 for Best Visual Effects, Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing. Today Soundworks Collection offers a look at the sound of the film in the following ten minute featurette, which begins with an interesting comment from Kosinski, which I believe actually speaks to part of the problems with the film on a whole:
Sound is half the story, I truly believe that, and I always love those moments in cinema when you can kind of just lean in to the music and the imagery to tell the story. So it’s a big part of this film and I kind of conceived the film as an in-camera science fiction film. I wanted it to feel as organic and real as possible. So that philosophy, I think, bled into the sound design as well.
I think Kosinski is spot-on with the above statement, which is why I would therefore like to as why he opens with such spectacular sound and imagery to only have Tom Cruise blather on-and-on over the top of it right out of the gate. The voice over at the beginning of the film is such a mouthful it stops the film before it begins, forcing it to start all over again once he’s done chattering and we never got the proper chance to enjoy those early visuals and M83’s score as much as we really should have.
The video below, however, really is worth a watch as composer Joseph Trapanese, M83‘s Anthony Gonzalez and re-recording mixers Gary Rizzo and Juan Peralta join Kosinski to talk about the sound and score, two elements, along with the visuals, that actually make Oblivion a film really worth seeing in IMAX if at all possible.
After you watch, you can check out my review of the film right here.
