By Jessica Taurins
Hear My Eyes events are, as the name implies, a veritable feast for the senses. Their core concept is re-scoring an existing film and playing the resultant work live, bringing new feelings and emotions to the onscreen visuals.
I expected a lot from their performance of Terminator 2, and I was, appropriately, blown away.
Terminator 2 is 35 years old, yet it remains uncomfortably modern. The film opens with a look into a desolate future, where humanity is hiding, missing, or destroyed, and then the date appears in a splash across the screen… 2029 AD. A ripple of laughter flows through the audience as we realise the apocalyptic science fiction future of 1991 is, unfortunately, so close to home.
A quick reminder of the film’s plot: there’s the Terminator – a robot with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face – the T-1000 – a robot made of ‘liquid metal’ – Sarah Connor – hot, wracked with guilt over her knowledge of humanity’s future fate – and John Connor – little boy protagonist. The robots fight, the world is saved, OR IS IT?
The film’s soundtrack is one of the most well-known out there, which makes it difficult to imagine anything else. The theme – DUN DUN DUN DA-DUN – is iconic, one of those earworms that’s helped T2 maintain its pop culture standing to this day. The rest of the music, part-orchestral, part-synth, all incredibly cool, likely contributed a lot to the blueprint of sci-fi apocalypse films that followed.
And yet, Belgian composer Peter Van Hoesen and the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS) ensemble have somehow successfully managed to craft a new soundtrack that would have fit right into the original release.
The score of a film is of remarkable importance. There’s string music when we’re supposed to be sad, a piercing sting when we’re supposed to be surprised, or some wacky horns when we’re supposed to be amused. In crafting this new score, Van Hoesen has clearly considered the importance of every note and wrapped it carefully into his creation.
The iconic theme is – sadly! – missing, but the rest of the pounding, heady synthetic sounds played by MESS almost always make up for it. Van Hoesen’s new score shines most in action scenes, where his techno beats are able to rumble alongside car chases and screech through the steel factory. Plus, watching MESS get into it, nodding their heads along with the addictive, full-body rhythm, is really entertaining. I found myself often looking away from the film to take in the ensemble as they played.
There are certain moments that are weaker than others, particularly where Van Hoesen fails to let the film breathe through. The new score often drowns out quieter dialogue – although this could perhaps have been a mixing issue – and there were some scenes where I expected the music to peak and drop… only for the sound to peter out a little more frail than I’d expected.
In addition to the ‘hear’, there is also ‘see’ to consider, and audio-visual artist Robin Fox’s live laser show was an absolute dream. Fox’s laser show really immersed the audience in the film, taking 2D spaces from the screen and blasting them out across Hamer Hall. In one scene Fox extended the roof to bring us into Cyberdyne, and in others I almost felt the need to duck under the laser gunshots blasting into the crowd. Fox also occasionally brought fresh levity to iconic moments in the film, piercing the stage with a laser as a character is stabbed by a liquid silver blade just off screen.
When wrapped all together, the Hear My Eyes rendition of Terminator 2 is effortlessly enjoyable. Despite the few moments where the music felt not-quite-right – maybe five minutes of a three hour showing – I had a fantastic time feeling the film pop off the screen. Fans of all types will love this performance, be they fans of techno, science fiction, cool robots, Linda Hamilton – the list goes on!
