Soundtrack Review/Sample

Those guys over at AICN get everything... they've posted a review of the Wing Commander Movie Soundtrack. A GOOD review. Check it out... You can grab a 28 second sample of the music in mp3 format here, thanks to Smily. It's rather... epic, I'm really looking forward to March 9th.

Wing Commander is, simply, a score which is likely to go on long after the movie itself has faded into oblivion. It's not a tremendous score, but it is huge, energized and propulsive - drawing on many of the sensibilities which make its two composers so good to begin with.

The Wing Commander score is richly textured and incredibly layered, various melody lines dodging in and out of (and running beneath) action motifs create a sense of both consistent style within the score, and an ever changing tapestry in it's presentation. It's got a specific sound, but it's varied enough so it doesn't become boring.

Wing Commander's theme was composed by David Arnold (who, I am told, also served as something of a "supervisor" for the rest of the score). One may remember Arnold's work from Stargate, Independence Day, and the amazingly suave and cool score for Tomorrow Never Dies. In fact, Wing Commander's score manifests many of Tomorrow Never Dies' better sensibilities - if you dug Arnold's work in TND, you'll probably get a kick out of WC.

Arnold associate Kevin Kiner is credited with composing the WC score itself. Kiner has scored the Emmerich and Devlin series The Visitor (for which Arnold wrote the theme show's music and score for the first episode) and Stargate SG-1 (Arnold's theme is cannibalized and used throughout the series). In other words, Kiner knows how to work with Arnold as a guideline, and how to integrate his own "sound" with Arnolds' unique style. The result is a nice mix between the two composers, as Kiner's work is not entirely imitative, but recognizable enough as not to clash with with the efforts of the composer he is trying to complement.

Richly textured and densely layered, Arnold and Kiner's Wing Commander score should hit stores on March 9. Having not seen the film, I can not vouch for how well this score will work with the imagery it's meant to accompany. But on its own, this is a fun and exhilarating listen which may well become a cult favorite in the not too distant future.