issonant and even atonal in places, this unexpectedly powerful John Williams score sounds like what it is: accompaniment for an intense SF/horror flick. It's hands-down the darkest score he's written since Close Encounters of the Third Kind, pulsating, appropriately enough, with energy and power. There's no real main "theme" or recurring motif. Williams has instead opted to concentrate on building tension through the use of orchestral layering and skillful deployment of percussion and ascending string clusters.
But, accomplished as he is, Williams' music doesn't work as well on CD as it does in the film. One could say that this is only to be expected from what is, after all, film music. A lot of it is almost subliminal, as in "Prologue," in which the maestro builds up ominously from quiet strings and synthesizer tones to tug on our emotions and nerves. After Morgan Freeman's dry narration (recapitulating the novel's opening paragraph), piercing brass and thundering percussion follow as the main credits are revealed.
The script calls for three musical moods: heavy percussion for tense action; brass and woodwinds and occasional voices for dissonant terror; and piano and gentler strings for soft emotion. "The Ferry," a scene depicting the rout of civilization, and "The Intersection Scene," in which the power of the aliens is first revealed, exemplify the action style: a throbbing ostinato interleaved with jabs of dissonant brass and thundering timpani. It really is unnerving. "Probing the Basement," with the TV-camera-tipped tentacle poking around the ruins (incidentally one of two or three nice hat tips to the old George Pal/Gene Barry version of the film), shows The Man From JAWS building anxiety. Dissonant brass passages are balanced against muttering woodwinds, over a series of all-but-subsonic timpani pulses and nervous strings. In terms of the softer tones, a slow, mournful piano solo highlights a beaten-down, tragic mood in "The Separation of the Family."
There's even a whisper of Darth Vader in cue 3, "Reaching the Country," and perhaps a few other brief nods to Revenge of the Sith elsewhere in the score, such as in "Ray and Rachel." One can't say that Williams isn't having a good year.
Music to invade Earth by
There isn't anything bad here—some of the tracks, such as "Attack on the Car," really get the blood pumping. In action mode here, Williams relies on rapid brass and string triplets punctuated by tympanic beats to drive home the tenseness of the scene.
In the years since Williams has last done this sort of score, a great many other, lesser composers have tried their hand at it, so it's interesting to hear his take on the style. Clearly he remains the master—but the problem with his mastery is that there isn't anything here for the casual listener to latch on to. It's all dread and despair put to the service of a film that is almost relentlessly downbeat and about as disturbing as a Steven Spielberg flick can be. Williams knows his craft—none better—but this score is perhaps too good at what it does. It just isn't as rousing (or as much fun) as any Star Wars score, while also lacking the high-mindedness of Close Encounters of the Third Kind because of the very nature of the aliens—in CE3K they were benevolent despite the initial mystery, but here they are just out-and-out monsters, not cartoonish bad guys as in Independence Day, but evil, blood-drinking fiends despite their mastery of technology. The score has to play to that, and as a result it isn't really comfortable listening at any point.
Because the music here serves more to underscore the onscreen tension, it's not clear to me that this disc succeeds well enough on its own without the visuals. And it's not exactly appropriate as background music for summer parties. It's very well done—John Williams doesn't write throwaway material—but I probably won't listen to it very much.
And hey—given that the alien tripods don't seem to have been buried that deeply under NYC streets, how come no one ever noticed them while excavating gas lines, sewers, cable TV or whatever? Just sayin'.
— Al
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