I couldn’t agree more. I know many movies better for their soundtrack rather than the movie itself.
Also I believe that in many cases the beauty of the soundtrack is somehow hidden in the movie, it doesn’t properly emerge with all its intensity and pathos.
One of these cases, in my personal opinion, is Mission: Impossible Fallout. It’s a very organic with the movie but its potential is tamed too much and I was a touch disappointed for that reason when I watched the movie for the first time (I’ve been listening to this soundtrack many times before). I did like the movie a lot, but it didn’t make true justice to its great soundtrack.
And, of course, there is the phenomenon of ‘the score is far better than the film it was written for’. John Williams did a few of these in the 90s:
Hook (1991)
Far & Away (1992)
Sabrina (1995)
The scores to the first two are so good, they’ve had expanded re-releases issued, which is very much more than can be said for the films they accompany!
Further to my advocacy of the soundtrack to Alien a few posts back, I bought it off Qobuz and I have been listening to it a lot recently and I really like it. Its worth another picture:
I did a bit of reading about the soundtrack and it turns out that the version in the film is a bit different from the soundtrack record, which I believe is a reissue of the original 1979 released soundtrack LP. Apparently the composer (Jerry Goldsmith) wanted to start off peacefully then get more aggressive and strange as the tension mounted as the film went on, but the director (Ridley Scott) preferred the more weird parts of the score and wanted more of that. For example, the opening title on the record is a romantic version introducing some of the score’s main themes, and later on the more avant-garde and cacophonic music comes along as the creature starts doing the characters in. The director asked the composer to make a less conventional opening title score and the result is like a greatest hits of the rest of the score and as a result is much stranger. There are quite a few other differences as well.
After reading all this, I wanted to see if I could get hold of the complete original score and the one used in the film. I have got the blu ray of the film and yesterday by blind chance I looked on the back of it and it said that there were two isolated musical score tracks, and this was exactly what I was looking for! I extracted these two tracks to wav files so I can play them through the music centre without having to play the film and both are really good. The two versions have all the same fundamental themes, but there are crucial differences, like the opening title mentioned above.
I think the film is a winner and it is made more effective by the score. The score goes from gentle to manic and uses all sorts of instruments, sounds and recording techniques. I think the result is very effective at creating a mood of otherworldliness and threat, and is a real original.
@SJT This is really interesting and as a big fan of the film you have given me the incentive to purchase the Bluray and also rediscover the soundtrack.
Great! I hope you like it. I got the 4k blu ray version from amazon - I think it was about £15. Its got a 4k disc and a standard blu ray disc in it, and I got the musical score audio tracks from the standard blu ray disc. I have a fairly cheap 4k tv and blu ray player and the film looks very good on this. On the score tracks there is a lot of silent parts because they have put the bits of the musical score where they occur in the film. The score tracks are raw recordings from the session (in Feb 1979 I think) and they even have bits where the recording engineer says the cue number as well! When I got the wav files out, I chopped the silent bits off in Audacity.
I remember seeing it at the cinema when it first came out and it left a real impression on me. Brilliant music. I also really enjoyed Glass’ soundtrack for Mishima
Many great movie soundtracks here, ( and indeed I’ve got some of them - Gladiator on double LP for example, which was a birthday pressie from the daughters!) but one should also consider video games. OK, so you have to be “a gamer” to hear them, but there’s some good stuff out there.
There are some great soundtracks around, but they are not always praised as they should be, at least in my opinion. However music is, of course, very subjective indeed.
I think some soundtracks deserve more than their position in that list (eg. The Dark Knight, Skyfall, Inception). Also many great soundtracks weren’t mentioned at all.
Indeed. There has been an astonishing amount of snobbery around film music for decades that has only just begun to lessen in the last few years as musicologists have turned to the music of many film composers and started to uncover just how layered, nuanced and artful much of it is.
Of course, like anything produced ‘to order’ with a tight deadline, there’s a lot of substandard stuff out there, but there are some absolute jewels too.
If you want some more recent examples of the sort of snobbery I’m talking about, do google some of Norman Lebrecht’s writings about John Williams in particular. I suppose there must be people out there who agree with Lebrecht, but I don’t know any better examples of wrong-minded and misdirected snootiness about music of any kind. It’s so dreadful, I actually find it amusing.
I agree, there has been a lot of snobbery unluckily and I do wonder why, as soundtracks seem to be a natural evolution of classical music. Indeed John Williams has composed both soundtracks and classical music. The same goes with Max Richter, if you know some of his works.
To be brutally honest, they can say whatever they like, soundtracks often have a noble heritage and deserve consideration, at least for me. I mostly listen to soundtracks and I thoroughly appreciate their nouances. I’m glad that I’m not the only one to think that way.
I agree, there are many conventional soundtracks out there, but there are many great ones too.
