MOVIE MUSIC UK

GAME ZONE REVIEW

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

Whereas television was once the breeding ground for aspiring composers, in the year 2005 the best place for the young and the talented to hone their craft is in the video game arena. I remember back in the 1980s when video game music consisted solely of little electronic blips and bloops; if you were lucky, you got a little synthesised melody which looped endlessly as you played. Not so today – it seems that every new ‘prestige’ game comes loaded with a full, thematic, orchestral score, many of which can rival the best of Hollywood’s output. So it is with Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, the latest release from LucasArts and software developers Pandemic.

Mercenaries is a third-person combat-action game that takes players into North Korea in the near future; with the troubled nation into chaos following a coup, players choose to be either an American ex-soldier, a British secret agent, or a Swedish bounty hunter, charged with hunting down and disposing of the “deck of 52” fugitive members of the old hardliner regime before they can launch a nuclear attack. What makes Mercenaries unique is the so-called “Havok Physics Engine”, which effectively makes everything within the environment act and react as it would in real life: from grenades, sniper rifles and rocket launchers to helicopters, cars, jeeps, tanks and SUVs. Basically, if you can see it you can steal it, use it, or blow it up.

26-year old Louisiana-born composer Chris Tilton has spent much of the past four years assisting Michael Giacchino on his ground-breaking Medal of Honor scores, as well as the hit TV show Alias and the massively popular Pixar movie The Incredibles. Having been very much in the background of these projects, when Mercenaries came along Giacchino decided that it was time for his protégé to finally take centre stage: the main themes suite would be composed by Giacchino, and Tilton would handle the remainder of the score. One can only imagine how daunting this task must have been, but ultimately Tilton has delivered a highly impressive debut score which surely sets him up as a talent to watch in future.

Written for the NorthWest Sinfonia and a number of instrumental soloists, Mercenaries takes the musical standpoint that, as the player can do pretty much whatever he or she wishes during gameplay, the different military factions in the game should have it’s own “sound”, depending on who the player is fighting with, or against, at any given time. This mindset was carried over not in just the main motifs for each faction, but also in the orchestration. The Allied forces (USA, Britain, Sweden) have a western orchestral ensemble, with added taiko drums; the Russian Mafia is mainly orchestral, but without any high brass, and minimal percussion; the Chinese are almost exclusively percussion, with taikos and ethnic flutes taking centre stage; the Koreans are accompanied by taikos, strings, female choir; and so on. It’s a clever play in the leitmotif technique which doubly succeeds by making different aspects of game play aurally different, as well as keeping the soundtrack album fresh and interesting.

In many ways, the sound of Mercenaries is a natural extension of the sound Michael Giacchino gave to the Medal of Honor series back in 1999 – and not unexpectedly. Video game producers who go to Giacchino for their scores know what they want. But, to Tilton’s credit, his music has a great deal of personality, and does not simply ape the “John Williams Orchestral Sound” that Medal of Honor so rigidly adhered to throughout its first four incarnations. Giacchino’s main theme, first heard in “Mercenaries: Main Theme” occasionally reminded me of Jaws, in the way a simple rhythmic bass device can be wholly menacing. The five-note fanfare is suitably heroic, and is liberally sprinkled throughout the rest of the score as a recurring action motif in many subsequent cues.

The rest of La-La-Land’s generous CD is basically a series of bold and exciting action cues, which mix and match all of the score’s disparate thematic elements as the cues progress. Moments of special note include the nervous-sounding, “Mercenary Without a Cause”; the vaguely John Barry-ish “Deck of 52” with its echoing brass phrases; the emotional string variation of the theme in “For the Motherland”; the sensational Oriental orchestrations of “Honour and Strength” (which bring to mind parts of Zimmer’s The Last Samurai); the beautiful and haunting female choir in “Hidden Valley Bunker”; the super-fast Williamsy string work of “Explosion Scherzo”; the wonderful setting of the female choir against the main theme in “Thermal Event” and “Countdown”; and the bittersweet “The Blinding Flash”.

I actually found it quite hard to review this score impartially. I know Chris Tilton in real life, have corresponded with him regularly (as I’m sure many people reading this have, via his exploits on the Filmtracks ScoreBoard Forum) – I want him to have a long and prosperous career. Having said all that, and put myself in a compromised position, I still believe that Mercenaries is an wonderfully exciting and impressive “debut score” by Tilton, helped by professional production values. It’s not “score of the year” material, as some over-zealous fans would have you believe, but it certainly shows a great deal of promise. And who knows… if Giacchino’s movie career takes off on the back of The Incredibles, Tilton could be our man for Alias Season 5 and beyond…

Track Listing:

• Mercenaries Main Theme (4:11)
• Destination: DMZ (3:37)
• Allied Nations (3:22)
• Mercenary Without a Cause (5:39)
• Deck of 52 (2:03)
• For the Motherland (2:31)
• Family Business (3:02)
• Show Me the Mercenary (2:04)
• Honour and Strength (3:26)
• Hidden Valley Bunker (4:53)
• Sniper (2:15)
• Swedish Fireballs (3:03)
• Trouble At Work (2:05)
• Trains, Planes and HMMWVs (2:02)
• Relentless Pursuit (2:25)
• Gas Tank on the Roof (1:03)
• Explosion Scherzo (1:51)
• Thermal Event (2:11)
• Countdown (3:05)
• The Blinding Flash (1:07)
• World’s Best Carpool Lane (1:54)

Running Time: 58 minutes 39 seconds

La-La-Land LLLCD-1029 (2004)

Music composed by Chris Tilton. Performed by The Northwest Sinfonia. Conducted by Tim Simonec. Orchestrations by Tim Simonec and Chris Tilton. “Mercenaries” theme by Michael Giacchino. Recorded and mixed by Steve Smith and Dan Wallin. Album produced by Chris Tilton and Michael Giacchino.