Archive
INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE – Thomas Wander and Harald Kloser
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Independence Day: Resurgence is the sequel to the 1996 sci-fi disaster movie classic Independence Day, and sees director Roland Emmerich returning to the genre that made his name, him having spent much of the last decade trying to prove himself as a serious filmmaker in other arenas, with varying degrees of success. Twenty years have passed since the events of the first movie, and in the intervening period the world has used the technology of those defeated aggressive aliens to boost Earth’s military prowess. Scientist David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) is the man in charge of the EDS Earth Defense System, which has its headquarters on the Moon. Dylan Hiller (Jessie Usher), the son of Will Smith’s character from the first film, is a hotshot pilot in the EDS, along with his best friend and colleague Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth). The then-President of the United States, Thomas Whitmore (Bill Pullman), remains a close advisor of the current President Elizabeth Lanford (Sela Ward). When the alien forces return to Earth, this time with bigger and more powerful weaponry, and attempt to conquer the planet for a second time, all are called into action to face this new, even more terrifying threat to humanity. Read more…
WHITE HOUSE DOWN – Thomas Wanker and Harald Kloser
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Honestly, you wait around forever for a movie about terrorists blowing up the White House, and then two come along at once. Hot on the heels of Olympus Has Fallen is the second of 2013’s big screen demolitions in DC, White House Down, directed by the master of worldwide destruction, Roland Emmerich. Actually, White House Down was the first of the two films in pre-production, but Olympus Has Fallen was rushed out first, stealing some of this film’s thunder and potentially some of its box office spoils too. The film stars Channing Tatum as John Cale, a US Capitol police office and wannabe Presidential secret service agent, who is forced into action when a paramilitary group storms the White House, attacking the incumbent president James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx). The film also stars Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jason Clarke, Richard Jenkins and James Woods, and is by far the better of the two similar films, containing a better and more plausible plot, an underpinning of prescient political ideology, and some truly spectacular action. Read more…
2012 – Harald Kloser and Thomas Wanker
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The disaster movie to end all disaster movies, 2012 is an apocalyptic action adventure directed by Roland Emmerich who, not content with destroying New York twice in Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow, or destroying most of the United States in Independence Day, has now gone one better and destroyed the entire world. The film is based on the old legend of the highly accurate calendars created by the ancient Mayan civilization which ‘ran out’ in the year 2012, causing some to believe that they predicted the end of the world, and stars John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Danny Glover, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton and Oliver Platt as the men and women caught up in the global cataclysm.
2012 marks the second instance of composer Harald Kloser also being responsible for the film’s screenplay after his debut work 10, 000 BC last year. Naturally, he also writes the film’s score Read more…
10,000 B.C. – Harald Kloser and Thomas Wanker
Original Review by Clark Douglas
Director Roland Emmerich has a reputation for helming preposterously silly cinematic epics. Films such as “Stargate”, “Independence Day”, and “Godzilla” are the highlights of his resume. Despite the goofiness of all of these movies, it could be argued that they provided a small measure of carefree fun. Take that away, and the films are completely worthless. Guess what? Emmerich decided to start taking himself seriously with “10,000 BC”, and the result is the worst film the director has ever made.
Interestingly enough, the screenplay was co-written by Emmerich and composer Harold Kloser. The film tells the story of a young mammoth hunter who is forced to go to battle with some bad guys 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…
THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW – Harald Kloser
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
2004 has proved to be a year where several composers have been given their “shot at the big time”. Among these was Austrian composer Harald Kloser, best known to date for his occasional forays into the North American market on films such as The Thirteenth Floor and the critically acclaimed TV movies such as RFK and Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story. That he was hired to score The Day After Tomorrow was surprising in that no-one expected him to be scoring this high-profile a movie without achieving some kind of success beforehand. On the other hand, director Roland Emmerich has often gambled on young, relatively unknown composers before, with great effect – he is the man who ‘discovered’ David Arnold after all. Read more…
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