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Review Summary: Always exemplifying the moment, yet constantly struggling to create an identity for itself. Alexander, a movie that doesn't exactly raise any noteworthy attention when mentioned in a conversation, perhaps due to its substitution of historical events in the interest of enhancing the plot and the viewer's attention. The soundtrack is of a higher quality than its theater counterpart, however it falls plague to the same snag that the film got itself into, and that would be failing to create any distinctive features to identify itself from the rest of the crowd. Vangelis most likely tried to match his compositions to the film, but in an effort to make it not mimic the cheesy nature of the film, was forced to repress the potential of the score.
Throughout the soundtrack there is a healthy yet not too expansive blend of different styles, but most songs use the same contemporary yet rather nostalgic soundscapes. Blaring horns roar with fury on tracks such as ”Titans”, ”Across the Mountains”, and ”Young Alexander”. Usually these horns are accompanied by orchestral choir vocals that fluctuate to enhance the overall sound and they do so to great effect, as they are the most well done aspect of this soundtrack. Along with these, there are more repressed and calm instrumental sections to accompany the parts of the film more geared towards the obvious flairs of romanticism. Pounding percussion and climbing strings typical of soundtracks in the historical epic movie genre are present as well, littered throughout tracks like ”The Drums of Gaugamela”, ”Dreams of Babylon”, and ”Preparation”. As for the organization and the structures of each of the songs, they are fluid and flow well with each other and with the film. All of these individual parts together along with various other ambient trinkets lopped on there to help boost the atmosphere result in the soundtrack being a success for the film.
That however is where the pitfalls of this album come to be noticed, while the album may accomplish what it was intended to do, it does so without style or flair. The horns may be front and center yet their purpose signifies nothing important other than a generic jubilant feeling or a downcast moment that lacks the emotion that was supposed to be invested in it. The grandiose nature in other words is big on the display but lacking in the framework. The monotony between the songs can be heard as well, with songs like ”Titans”, and ”Dreams of Babylon” sounding almost identical in parts. Tracks that are supposed to enhance tense or passionate moments are a varied sort on this, while on one hand, there are several such as ”Roxane’s Veil” which do a fine job in crafting the atmosphere intended with a healthy blend of strings and soft choir vocals. On the other hand, you have songs such as "Gardens of Delight”, which not only are distracting from the focus of the film, but are even downright soporific in certain spots.
In conclusion, the positive sides of this score are slightly better than the negatives, but only just, and lack any memorable features to keep them in common memory. Perhaps if the material this score was based around was a little more well crafted, the soundtrack would have had an increase in quality.
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Album Rating: 3.0
My first review, I've noticed that there aren't a lot of soundtrack reviews on this website and I want to help write some soundtrack reviews.
I hope my review is up to par! If you feel something is wrong with my review like anything with grammar / spelling / context please point it out so I can fix it. Thank you!
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Wow, really impressive first review. You got a good writing style down, and you definitely know what
you're doing and what you want to say. Have a pos. A few things though, don't underline the tracks
when you mention them, it just looks really awkward. Also, don't put the artist's name in bold in the
review. The quotation marks alone work fine for when you talk about the tracks, and nothing in the
text needs to be altered when mentioning an artist's name. Putting something in bold looks awkward all
together, so you could just drop that completely. When you mention an album's name in your review, I
suggest italics, it looks the best.
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Thanks! I occasionally write short stories when I'm bored, so I'm not a new writer but this is my
first review. Also I'll edit those things right now.
Edit: Removed the awkward formatting and the underlining.
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Good first review pos'd
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No problem, welcome to Sputnik! You got some promise, looking forward to seeing what you'll review in
the future. Also, you're absolutely right, there really needs to be a lot more soundtrack and score
reviews on the site. Been trying to review some video game OST's myself lately.
| | | Album Rating: 3.0
Thanks Viral! Mostly what I'll be reviewing is movie scores, I have a pretty limited video game
library (the only game I play often is Morrowind and I don't feel like I'm ready to write a review for
that soundtrack yet). So I probably won't be writing too many video game OST reviews. But thanks for
the welcome breaking!
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It'd be fun to review a soundtrack maybe ill do there will be blood
| | | Album Rating: 3.0
I'm a rather big fan of suspense / horror films so I might review some soundtracks to those types of movies next.
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My favorite music from a horror movie is The Thing
| | | Album Rating: 3.0
John Carpenter is honestly one of my favorite directors, The Thing was fantastic!
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It's too bad he made ghost of mars that movie was painful to watch lol but ill always love him for Halloween, the thing, escape from New York, assault on precinct 13
| | | Album Rating: 3.0
I never had the displeasure of seeing Ghosts of Mars, was it really that bad?
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It was complete shit
| | | Album Rating: 3.0
Well that's a shame, I was hoping it would be at least a decent film. What went wrong with it?
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You question the characters actions the entire time not one like able character horrible dialogue I could go on and on
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That, and it stars Ice Cube. Nothing more really needs to be said about it other than that, kind of explains itself lol.
| | | Album Rating: 3.0
Would it even be a fun watch for a B sci-fi movie night?
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Well I thought that didn't need mentioning considering everyone knows how terrible he is
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Nope it makes you wanna club baby seals
| | | Album Rating: 3.0
Well darn, looks like that one is off my to watch list. Couldn't be as bad as Dinocroc though, saw that the other day out of curiosity, was absolutely horrid.
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