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Review of Allied (Alan Silvestri)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

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.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

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.  **

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 42:27

• 1. Essaouira Desert/Main Title (5:21) • 2. "What Are Our Odds?" (2:46) • 3. German Embassy (2:09) • 4. "It's a Girl" (2:16) • 5. Trust (3:07) • 6. "Best Day Ever" (1:51) • 7. Confession/Escape (3:49)

• 8. The Letter/End Credit (6:27) • 9. The Sheik of Araby* (2:32) • 10. You Are My Lucky Star* (3:06) • 11. J'Attendrai* (2:59) • 12. Sing Sing Sing* (4:09) • 13. Flying Home* (1:54)

NOTES & QUOTES:

The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.

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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Allied are Copyright © 2016, Sony Classical and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 5/19/25 (and not updated significantly since).