Last time - Spartan Assault and Spartan Strike - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=142894
This time - “You ask, you buy.”
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With a franchise whose success in online multiplayer had been so significant for over a decade, it may have been worth speculating if a Halo campaign still mattered in 2015. The missteps of the one for Halo 5: Guardians prove it very much still did.
A lot of the flack at the time was that half of the runtime had you playing not as the Master Chief but as a different Spartan supersoldier named Locke, but that seems a little trivial today (it’s a first person shooter, you aren’t supposed to see who you’re playing as), especially given the game’s other flaws. The mechanical Forerunner enemies from Halo 4 had gotten annoying. A new boss fight approach was okay the first time, but then the game made you do it again and again. 343’s storytelling decisions suggested it didn’t have a firm handle on where it wanted to go either; the main villain of Halo 4 was eliminated in an intervening comic book, while another villain it had developed in a cooperative campaign extension of Halo 4 was taken out in an early cutscene of Halo 5 (hilariously, the actual villain of Halo 5 would be eradicated in the events in between that game and the sixth main entry).
Still, you’d think giving Kazuma Jinnouchi the chance to write a full score for one of these games would’ve been a sure thing. His 11th hour contributions to Halo 4 had resulted in not just the best music in that game but one of the musical highlights of the franchise in 117. It seemed like things were off to a good start when the epic opening cinematic debuted in September 2015 and the composer’s new ascending fanfare theme for Spartan Locke powered his team’s race down a combat-intensive mountainside (another pantheon-level musical highlight of the franchise). A few weeks later, another cutscene debuted featuring the Master Chief and his team which had Jinnouchi providing new takes on his 117 theme and the classic Halo action sound.
Cutscene one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44oJi5w2Wjc
Cutscene two: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0bYEToC0zA
Unfortunately, things got unbalanced from there. The decision to have a new sound for Locke - arguably the game’s main character - led Jinnouchi to push things more in a modern hybrid orchestral-electronic action direction. You sometimes get a level of symphonic magnificence leagues beyond what O’Donnell ever provided, which was probably why you can find evidence of me saying this was the best score of the series back in 2015. But you also get a lot of familiar-sounding action and suspense material that isn’t too far removed from what someone like Brian Tyler, Henry Jackman, or James Newton Howard might’ve done for a non-Halo property; indeed, Jinnouchi’s affinity for Howard’s music was suggested in a few parts of Halo 4 and is much more obvious in the orchestration here. And if you loved 117, you’ll be sad to find that its role is surprisingly minimized, as are the legacy theme quotes (a pity as most of those were terrific, Jinnouchi showing he could mess around with many of O’Donnell’s tunes to generally satisfying effect).
The issue with this score isn’t as much execution as it is proportionality; in making the choices they did, Jinnouchi and 343 accidentally anonymized the music of the franchise. If all you wanted from a new Halo score was more sophisticated orchestral writing you’d have been happy, but if you wanted anything else you were bound to be disappointed. Compounding the problem was the gargantuan album release that came in at 2 hours 12 minutes - the longest of the series to date - and likely exhausted many listeners. Sequencing might have solved some of these issues; around a half hour of music was clumped together in a conclusive Osiris Suite which contains some of the the score’s more interesting music (including an intriguingly ghostly take on one of O’Donnell’s secondary themes with some Jerry Goldsmith-like electronics) but also some of its weakest (namely a protracted and obnoxious electronic pulse in the wake of a Zimmer-like belch of the Locke theme which takes the album program out on a dull note).
Halo 5: Guardians: *** - https://open.spotify.com/album/6pdsDEWBozSiKc5G5MGTRG
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Buried in the limited edition of the game was the hour-long animated film Halo: The Fall of Reach, an adaptation of a 2001 novel covering Master Chief’s origins and activities prior to the events of Halo: Combat Evolved. Tom Salta got the call to score the game, amusingly right after his non-gamer wife had finished reading the book to understand what all the fuss about the franchise was about. The budget seemed about the same as what he had for his earlier handheld game scores, with a handful of organic elements (including solo cello this time) mixed with synthetic material here. He essentially extended the O’Donnell-adjacent sound he’d done for Spartan Assault into more of a dramatic context. An early cameo of Jinnouchi’s 117 was a nice touch. On the whole it’s a minor score in the series with a nebulous thematic core and action/suspense mannerisms that lean a bit rote at times, but as with his game scores if you approach the album with measured expectations you might have a decent time.
Halo: The Fall of Reach - **½ - https://open.spotify.com/album/6fpqsi5mFO4Dyd2TYeJ2sX
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Disappointment with the score for Halo 5: Guardians aside, Jinnouchi’s Halo 4 theme and his extensions of Bungie-era ideas were still entertaining enough to make you think that if the subsequent entry in the franchise was more Master Chief-centric that he could provide a knockout score. Unfortunately, we only ever got one more piece of music from him for the franchise.
But first there was an unexpected sequel.
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Next time: “We are just one ship… and an old one at that. But here we are.”
