The Midnight Sky

The Radiohead classic “No Surprises”, from 1998’s OK Computer, enters at 0:23 after being given a custom orchestrated introduction. Stems are certainly being used, as there is also a countermelody in the strings against the clean guitar line that wasn’t present in the original recording. 

At 0:33 Thom Yorke’s voice enters with a filter, which turns out after the fact to be a diegetic approximation. This becomes apparent at 0:37 when it enters full fidelity once the camera switches to a view inside the space station with George Clooney—and, perhaps, his in-movie daughter—in it. “A heart that’s full up like a landfill,” the lyrics go, which was always juxtaposed against the serene instrumentation. This is transposed seamlessly to the scenario on screen, between a gently orbiting space station and a global catastrophe having taken place on Earth. 

The music pauses at 0:52, but it doesn’t end so much as enact a bridge using a single note. This plays into the exposition at this point as the astronauts have lost contact with NASA for three weeks. A second note at 0:56 suggests this could be a large-scale augmentation of the song’s melodic theme. Instead, this leads to an upwards intensification in pitch in the suspense tradition—bearing more an a passing resemblance to the trailer for Gravity, another Clooney vehicle—which then upends the track entirely at 1:06 upon revealing the date title card (December 23rd, on Netflix).

Midway through the trailer the treatment of the song reverts from being faithful to the original to something markedly different. The rhythm shifts to a compound affair, with triplets under each previous eighth note and other effects giving a martial feel. This breaks out into a section that does not resemble “No Surprises” whatsoever, crossing over into choir, brass, and an unreservedly epic feel. What is retained, which listeners may or may not recognize but will probably at least implicitly feel, is the harmonic structure, strengthened by the dramatic silences between chords. The move from a major home chord to the mediant offers a way to hold on to the emotional core of “No Surprises” in a polar-opposite arrangement. 

More importantly, it conveys through the music the feeling of wishing to hold on to something familiar while weathering large-scale change. While movies that record the apocalyptic future are common enough to form a genre, few manage to retain such an intimate, relatable core in its epic music as this trailer does. It accomplishes this by gradually introducing and incorporating elements of the arrangement into the original in a way that fits the visual narrative.

— Curtis Perry