Red Planet

It's not unusual for high-concept Hollywood projects to result in strange sets of cinema doppelgängers; in 2000, two studios released tales of astronauts stranded on Mars, first the so-bad-it-might-become-a-camp-classic Mission to Mars, then Red Planet. But if both movies shared a sense of Survivor bloated with extraterrestrial existentialism, their music couldn't be more dissimilar. In contrast to Mars's typically dignified Morricone orchestral score, Red Planet features a more adventurous fusion of composer Graeme Revell's synth-scapes coupled with a slate of electronica-infused songs by Peter Gabriel (the industrial "The Tower Ate People" and its remix), Sting (the moody "A Thousand Years"), and Strange Cargo ("Montauk Point," a brooding 1995 side project featuring William Orbit, Rico Conning, and spoken word artist Joe Frank). But the revelations here are Revell's genre-morphing collaborations with French opera star Emma Shapplin, tracks that fuse electronics, organic elements, and seemingly ageless liturgical music into an intriguing new whole.