Archive
ALIEN 3 – Elliot Goldenthal
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When I first started writing about film music, in the summer of 1997, I tried to write a review of Alien 3. I had seen the film previously, and liked it a great deal, and I remember being especially impressed with the music in the finale, so I went out and bought Elliot Goldenthal’s soundtrack CD. This was my first experience of his music outside of film context, and my film music knowledge at that point barely extended beyond the big orchestral scores of John Williams and James Horner, and the sweeping romance of John Barry. Hearing Alien 3 for the first time was… well, it was almost indescribable. I had no idea what I was listening to. It felt like angry, vicious, random noise, and I absolutely hated it. I hadn’t yet begun to explore the darker and more atonal side of film music, I had no knowledge of Stravinsky or Penderecki, or of twentieth century avant-garde music in general. In short, I had no clue what Elliot Goldenthal was doing. I didn’t have the vocabulary to understand it. Thankfully, thirty years down the line, I now have had vastly more exposure to and tolerance of this type of aggressive music, and I can now appreciate it for the masterpiece it is. Read more…
ALIEN COVENANT – Jed Kurzel
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Alien Covenant is director Ridley Scott’s second prequel to the 1979 masterpiece Alien, following on from 2012’s Prometheus. In this film, which takes place fifteen years after the end of the previous one, we follow the space ship Covenant, which is ferrying several thousand human colonists to a remote Earth-like planet. However, an accident aboard the vessel kills the captain and forces other crew members to wake from stasis and carry out repairs; then, after they intercept what appears to be a distress call from a nearby planet, the new captain Oram (Billy Crudup) decides to investigate, despite the objections of both his second in command Daniels (Katherine Waterston), and the ship’s android Walter (Michael Fassbender). After arriving on the planet, Daniels quickly finds her misgivings to have been correct, and before long the crew is fighting for its life. Read more…
ALIENS – James Horner
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror masterpiece Alien was a watershed landmark, a seminal film that forever changed the genre, so it was something of a surprise that a sequel was not forthcoming straight away. With behind-the-scenes wrangling between executives at 20th Century Fox, and a script that languished in development hell, it actually took almost seven years for Aliens to hit the big screen, but with hindsight it was more than worth the wait. For me, Aliens is one of the greatest action films ever made; a blockbuster war movie allegory about the Vietnam War, inspired by several seminal works in classic sci-fi literature, written and directed by the young and hungry auteur behind the 1984 hit The Terminator. In James Cameron’s capable hands, Aliens became a masterpiece of tension and horror, pulsating adventure, and noble sacrifice. Read more…
ALIEN VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s interesting how the careers of Brian Tyler and the late Jerry Goldsmith have dovetailed: Tyler replaced Goldsmith on Timeline in 2003, and is scoring the fourth Rambo movie in a series which Goldsmith made his own. On Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, Tyler is not only following in the footsteps of Goldsmith, but also James Horner, Elliot Goldenthal and Alan Silvestri, each of whom left an indelible musical mark on their respective entries into the franchises. What’s most impressive about this score is how Tyler has managed to pay homage to all the composers who preceded him by incorporating some of their compositional stylistics into his own music, while still retaining a great deal of his own voice throughout the score. Read more…
ALIEN VS. PREDATOR – Harald Kloser
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In an attempt to breathe life into the franchises, Twentieth Century Fox have done what Universal did over half a century ago by pitching two of their greatest monster creations against each other in a single motion picture. But this is not Frankenstein, Dracula or The Wolfman: the monsters here are Predators and Aliens. Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, Alien vs. Predator stars Lance Henriksen as Charles Weyland, a billionaire industrialist leading an archaeological expedition in Antarctica in the not-so-distant future. When the team unearths the ruins of an ancient pyramid buried beneath the ice, it is hoped that a great breakthrough in human history has been reached. However, the team soon find themselves unwittingly caught in the middle of an intergalactic war in which the fearsome Predators come to earth to take part in a coming-of-age ritual that involves them hunting and killing a group of fully-grown Aliens, who have also been buried under the ice for the past few millennia… Read more…
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