I haven’t thought about this fabulous movie ( minus the distracting score) in years.
Rutger Hauer…Mrawwwwww!
Short nationalistic hijack: actors Rutger Hauer, Jeroen Krabbe, Famke Janssen, and directors Paul Verhoeven and Jan de Bont are all Dutch.
Rutger Hauer, especially, has played in more Dutch movies then in American ones.
Where is this Dutchland place I keep hearing about?
Totally agree with the OP. This movie had the misfortune of being made in a brief era when we thought that synthy crap was good, and now we know better. See also: Heartbeat City, by the Cars.
Similarly, I’ve always wished for Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid to be released with a new, non-corny 60’s soundtrack.
Call me a weirdo, but I actually quite liked the soundtrack for Ladyhawke … yes, it’s very Eighties, but so what? It was an original touch, which I think added to the movie; a standard orchestral sound (like all the Wagner and Carmina Burana in Excalibur, or the Ennio-Morricone-on-an-endless-loop theme of Red Sonja) would have been much less interesting. As it is, the modernistic music and the (really quite decent) mediaeval setting combine to give the film a timeless fantasy feel. IMHO. Obviously, other people’s HOs vary.
Except that very little of it is “medieval” in any way other than superficially. It’s not just the music: it’s the costumes, the weapons, and so on. So why bother with more period-appropriate music when so very little else of the movie pertains to history? If you’re filming a fantasy, then cheesy synth-pop is fine.
I haven’t seen this movie (but I added it to my netflix queue), but from what everyone’s saying it reminds me of the soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ. I thought it was kind of weird for the movie, but interesting. Is it kind of like that?
I love Peter Gabriel’s Passion on its own, and I also liked the movie…I would not enjoy owning a cd of the Ladyhawke soundtrack.
Think of the worst 6 o’clock news music you’ve ever heard, throw in a good bit of Miami Vice theme, and way too much electric guitar and you’ll come close to approximating what the problem areas of the Ladyhawke score are like. Imho, of course.
It occurs to me that Richard Donner is also responsible for that stupid “Can you read my mind?” song/poem nonsense in the first Superman movie.
I think he should stay away from music decisions.
It’s not about period-appropriate, it’s about theme-appropriate. The synth-soundtrack is sending completely different messages than the story and visuals it accompanies. Someone brought up the soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ, and that’s a perfect contrast for the soundtrack to Ladyhawke. Peter Gabriel used a lot of instruments that didn’t exsist at the time of Christ, but he also did a lot of research into the folk music of the area. Stuff that, likely, was not contemporaneous with the material of the film, but still had some connection to the setting, especially to an untutored foreign ear. You don’t need to see the movie (and, indeed, I have not, despite considering the soundtrack as one of my all time favorite albums) to feel the sense of the story it accompanied. There’s a sense of something ancient, epic, tragic, and mysterious to the music that is appropriate for a story about the death of the Christ. The same can be said about the soundtrack to Conan the Barbarian*, which has a lot of brutal, almost primative rhytms that suit the pre-historical sword-and-sandal epic. You listen to the soundtrack, and you can pretty easily see some musclely guy with a big-ass sword swiping people’s heads off. Ladyhawke ought to have a soundtrack that brings to mind knights in shining armor, tragic love, etc. Instead it brings to mind guys with bad hair and Casio keyboards. It’s like having Lord of the Rings scored by The Wu Tang Clan. The juxtaposition of the two styles is jarring, and brings you out of the movie.
Someone mentioned Highlander as mitigating evidence, but that’s not the same thing at all. That film is solidly grounded in the 1980s, and the soundtrack if wholly appropriate. The film starts with a swordfight in a modern parking garage, and ends in a high-rise(?) apartment a few weeks later. There are flashbacks to earlier eras, sure, but to have a flashback, you have to have a point of reference from which you’re moving backwards from. The film is not set in the 1700s, it just has a character in the present day who remembers something that happened to him in the 1700s. Also, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but do the Queen tracks actually play during the flashbacks? I seem to remember them being used only during the scenes set in the modern day, but I could be wrong.
And, of course, there’s the fact that the soundtrack, on its own, without the context of the movie, still sucks donkey’s balls. Jesus Christ, the Alan Parsons Project inspired this movie? I’m stunned that they’ve ever inspired anyone to do anything other than turn off the stereo.
*According to the liner notes for the soundtrack, the producer originally pushed for an electronic, Ladyhawke-style soundtrack, but was succesfully fought by the director, who brought in Basil Poledouris.