Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #2,358
Written 5/19/25
Invert Colors
Buy it... only if you seek to complete your collection of pretty
Alan Silvestri movie themes, Allied offering of muted beauty that
is as pleasant as it is anonymous.
Avoid it... if you expect anything in this music to really
emotionally connect with you, a tremendously wasted opportunity for a
poignant wartime romance score.
 |
| Silvestri |
Allied: (Alan Silvestri) In any good tragic romance
film, you absolutely must cast the right leads to spark a fire on
screen, but veteran director Robert Zemeckis somehow managed to hire
actors that totally failed the most basic chemistry tests. The story of
Allied is one of espionage in World War II, a Canadian pilot and
intelligence officer teamed with a French spy to conduct a mission in
Morocco while posing as a married couple. The two fall in love, move to
England, and have a child later in the war, but the British inform the
man that the woman is actually an impostor and German agent. The
desperate investigation and tough choices of those characters yield
events that are extraordinarily depressing, leaving audiences basking in
the movie's lovely sets and costumes but loathing the dearth of
compassion. The project wasn't a monumental failure for Zemeckis like
some of his subsequent pictures, but the awkward pairing of Brad Pitt
and Marion Cotillard was an avoidable mistake. Among the many aspects of
the 2016 film to badly underperform is Alan Silvestri's minimal score,
which marked the sixteenth collaboration between the composer and
director since the middle of the 1980's. Along with his original
orchestral music, Silvestri also supervised the arrangement of new
recordings of London big bands performing fresh versions of classic
1940's songs. Sadly, the inherent spirit in these songs has no impact
whatsoever on the score, which instead opts to follow the mould of
Flight and The Walk in its introspection within typical
Silvestri norms and do nothing to address the time period. The 80-piece
ensemble is enhanced by synthetics and ethnic percussion, including the
composer's trademark, eerie electric keyboarding that echoes throughout
"Essaouira Desert." Any learned Silvestri collector will recognize all
the ingredients, but it's rare to hear the composer execute them with
such bland and passionless intent. Nothing in this work suggests the
size of that orchestra whatsoever. It's clear that restraint was the
strategy from the director, but by limiting the tempos and performance
inflection of the music to such a great degree, Silvestri drains all the
life out of the composition and ambience. During each of the dramatic
and suspense portions of the work, you hear nothing engaging from this
recording, leaving only the action late in "Trust" to appeal. And that's
a frightfully brief moment of interest.
There are two themes developed fairly well by Silvestri
throughout
Allied, and where their performances fail to impress,
their constructs are actually somewhat interesting. That's because
Silvestri introduces both of them in deconstructed form and allows them
to gain more structure as the score goes on. The main family theme of
sour romantic ambivalence consists of eight-note phrases of moderately
yearning but subdued drama, with zero romance to be heard in each of the
performances. The deconstructed version of the theme conveys echoing
fragments on the eerie electric keyboarding throughout "Essaouira
Desert" and a little more focused in "Main Title." This mode continues
on solemn woodwinds in "What Are Our Odds?" and hints of electric
keyboarding at the end of "German Embassy." The fully developed theme is
heard formally at the outset of "It's a Girl" on strings, where its
secondary phrasing is attractive but, like the main phrases, too slow
and passionless to suffice. Here, it shifts to solo piano over
restrained strings, later exploring a variation slightly in the first
half of "Trust." The family theme starts "Best Day Ever" on solo oboe
and expands to the rest of the orchestra (but still in muted form), and
it barely occupies the beginning of "Confession" in sparse woodwind
form. The theme begins "The Letter/End Credit" on solo oboe again,
reprising "Best Day Ever" almost wholesale before the "End Credit"
portion of the cue opens with piano and builds some loftier string
presence. These signs of life come too late to save the theme and score,
however. The other theme is one of menace, rising three-note
progressions that repeat endlessly without much harmonic variation.
Debuting at 2:36 into "Main Title" on tense strings and later brass,
this idea ascends out of more thumping synthetic rhythms and slapping
percussion in "German Embassy" but never evolves during this cue or
takes the listener in any new direction. It finally expands into a
broader, more engaged, action-oriented expression of force in "Trust,"
and this longer development continues a minute into "Confession/Escape."
There's not much else in this short score, however, and its drab
demeanor is worsened by the album's (reportedly admitted) mastering
errors that cause the soundscape to shift into mono sound in the middle
of "Essaouira Desert," most of "Escape," and a brief moment in "The
Letter." The whole experience would be dreadful if not for the pretty
and soothing nature of the family theme's marginally deeper renditions.
If anything, listeners will find themselves seeking the song recordings
more readily than the score.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
Bias Check:
For Alan Silvestri reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.43
(in 44 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.31
(in 40,283 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
