Buy it... if you're a James Horner collector seeking an adequate and sometimes powerful war score with a token ethnic element thrown in at occasional intervals.

Avoid it... if you expect the same artistic integrity and personal intensity heard in Horner's previous scores that address ethnic plots.

Horner

Windtalkers: (James Horner) Reportedly delayed for as many as seven months due to the attacks of September 11th, 2001, Windtalkers was slow in recovering its publicity and eventually faded without much hype. Famed Hong Kong director John Woo proved with this film that he is indeed skilled with graphic depictions of violence, but his talents in the heavier dramatic genres are severely lacking. The long delay in post-production unfortunately didn't yield a reworking of the script to shift the pieces of the film into a more coherent whole, leaving it instead as a story with little audience engagement or depth in characters. The plot of the gory Woo film deals with the use of Navajo American Indians as a source of military encoding through their native language in World War II, a code that the enemy could not break. The film's handling of the various facets of racism was criticized heavily for being too simplistic. The extra time in post-production was also not kind to James Horner's score for Windtalkers, which Woo rearranged mercilessly so that very few of the composer's cues were eventually placed in the proper location. He often chopped them into pieces and fit them in like library samples, yielding an unsatisfactory aural experience in the film to accompany the equally messy visuals. After several years of writing music of a smaller scope, Horner had returned to weighty genres of drama and war in the year he wrote Windtalkers. His scores for Enemy at the Gates, A Beautiful Mind, and Iris represented a movement in Horner's career back towards heavy orchestral projects. Understandably, when Horner's name was mentioned as a candidate for assignment to Windtalkers, many of his followers immediately recalled his work for the early 1990's film Thunderheart, for which Horner took a minimal ensemble and created a hauntingly effective Native American score. The use of ethnic instrumentation, experimental or native, had been declining for Horner in the years in between, so Windtalkers offered him a chance to reassert those characteristics from an era that many argued to be the prime of his career.

For the most part, however, Windtalkers follows more of a familiar pattern of generic Horner action and drama material rather than pulling the best from his earlier works for a more engaging listening experience. As an accompaniment for war, Horner's composition for the film is powerful, brooding, heroic, and somber all at once. Its functionality should not be doubted; while some people have inevitably documented the similarities between this effort and Enemy at the Gates, the mass of music for Windtalkers makes for an adequate war score, even if it doesn't test new grounds in Horner's career. At least this work doesn't step on the toes of so many classical composers and the cliches from Horner's own works (which essentially ruined Enemy at the Gates for many listeners). Unfortunately, that does cause Windtalkers to be significantly more generic in its sound. Along these lines, the major detraction from Windtalkers for most fans of the composer will be the obvious underplaying of the Native American elements. Horner utilizes a very restrained combination of ethnic vocal chants and a single native flute to constitute the Navajo story, and while both efforts succeed to the extent to which they were used, the majority of the score invariably suffers without them. Collectors know that Horner is more than capable of using Native American voices, drums, and other instrumentation to an incredible effect (due solely to the existence of Thunderheart), but he didn't do that here, and the score for Windtalkers cries out for more of the same kind of ethnic magic that Horner used to go to extremes to include in his works. Some might argue that the film demanded a straight forward score for the wartime situations that, on the whole, had little to do with Native Americans in a broader sense. But Horner doesn't even interpolate these ethnic elements in subtle ways throughout the work, choosing instead to apply them in an almost token formula. There are more than a few rousing action cues in Windtalkers that could have benefited enormously by the harmonious integration of the American and Najavo elements. Unfortunately, Horner's 2000's career was not emphasizing the same distinct instrumental colors of his 1990's works, and this score is some of the clearest evidence of that change.

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The action sequences involving battle, such as the lengthy "Taking the Beachhead," are very effective in their purity of American bravado. Horner even tries to manipulate the four-note "danger motif" from his previous works by appending two additional notes that give it a slightly less ominous personality. The use of the usually tender title theme with full snare rolls and trumpets blazing is among the most explosive material that Horner had put out in years. It's not as dramatically significant as, say, Glory's beachhead cue, but it is much more inspiring in effort that much of Horner's other action material from the era. There was a substantial number of early comments claiming that Windtalkers contains no satisfying theme. These accounts are simply inaccurate at every level. While the score on the album does not introduce the theme in full until the end of "A New Assignment," the score quickly establishes and ends with the uplifting and elegant theme representing the Navajo Americans. It's an inverted form of the controversial love theme from Enemy at the Gates, rising in its progression instead of falling. In the softer moments, the native flute performs the theme with the same delicacy heard in the somber sequences of Casper. Fuller expressions of theme by the entire orchestra are satisfying in "Taking the Beachhead" and "Calling to the Wind." If the score for Windtalkers is criticized for its flaws (which it has to be) it certainly won't be because of the lack of theme. There are three or so tracks on the album that are less than inspiring work for Horner, featuring the composer meandering on auto-pilot, but the majority of this music is at least interesting enough for a second listen. The flaws of Windtalkers all come back to the mysterious lack of ethnic integration throughout the mass of the orchestral material. While the score as it stands is a strong three-star entry, it could very easily have been a noteworthy four-star score if Horner had simply approached Windtalkers with the same kind of personal intensity as he had with Thunderheart. A simple repeat of Thunderheart would have been inappropriate, of course, but to hear the same powerful ethnic work combined with the orchestral might of wartime heroism would have been a great pleasure, and undoubtedly an effective sound for the film. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.13 (in 98 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.25 (in 184,725 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.