Nonetheless, when you need a track to describe Armageddon, the “Dies Irae” will likely be on your short list of musical pieces.Verdi’s Requiem grew out of a project which he initiated in 1868 in order to commemorate the death of Rossini. Quentin Tarantino used the same arrangement during the Ku Klux Klan’s attack in Django Unchained, another moment of violence. Bryan Singer’s X2: X-Men United also opens with an arrangement of the “Dies Irae” to score Nightcrawler’s attack on the White House, which set an ominous tone to the film.įor a man who passed in 1901, Giuseppe Verdi’s IMDB entry is surprisingly robust, and there are 18 entries for the “Dies Irae.” It tickles me that two entries for the “Dies Irae” are from Taz-Mania and Tiny Toon Adventures, which might be as far from Battle Royale, Django Unchained, and Mad Max: Fury Road as you can get. Hearing that track during the Mad Max: Fury Road trailer immediately brought to mind how Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale, a violently dystopian film, uses Masamichi Amano’s arrangement of the “Dies Irae” in its own trailer and is the first thing the viewer experiences in the film. It’sĪnd bombastic, operatic and transgressive because Verdi had to request the Catholic Church to allow female singers to perform the Requiem at a time when female singers were not permitted to perform in Catholic Church rituals.īecause of how memorable and bombastic it is, the “Dies Irae” has become the go-to soundtrack to signal an apocalypse or Armageddon. The “Dies Irae” (Day of Wrath) is the Latin hymn used in the Requiem Mass, or Funeral Mass, that describes the Christian day of judgment, and it speaks to the world dissolving in ashes, when all will become revealed, when nothing will go unpunished, when all will have to pray for mercy. The official theatrical teaser trailer used the “Dies Irae” from Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem and large yellow blocky text to punctuate the teaser’s arresting visuals and emphasize that the movie was set in a world of “fire and blood” where “everybody’s gone out of their mind.” It was a beautifully put together trailer, which showed enough to whet the appetite without giving away the context or the best parts of the film. Since the beginning of the piece on Ex Machina focused on how it was advertised, I started thinking about how Mad Max: Fury Road was advertised because I can’t stop thinking about Mad Max: Fury Road.
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