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In his scores for The Avengers and Soldier, Joel McNeely finally scratched at that mainstream barrier that many score collectors had waited for him to burst through for several years. But both films failed so miserably that almost a decade later, McNeely would still be making a career off of films that most people never hear about. In the case of Soldier, the disappointment on screen as not due to a lack of effort by McNeely, who infused a devilish amount of creativity into a score that ultimately wouldn't matter. That's life, no? Clearly evident to any regular film score listener is the connection to Goldsmith in Soldier. McNeely had finished the score for Air Force One a few years earlier with an easy translation of Goldsmith's sound, and he obviously uses it as a basis in Soldier. At the outset of "New Soldiers vs. Old Soldiers," McNeely immediately pours on the rhythmic brass and percussion that had become trademark Goldsmith action material in the mid-1990's. With the lack of a distinct theme, McNeely stops short of violating copyright, but everyone in the room knows what he was up to. But he doesn't stop there. His almost non-stop bombast from the orchestra uses techniques from the books of Elliot Goldenthal and Bernard Herrmann to spice up the personality of a potentially stale product. So frenetic is the action music in Soldier that you can't help but admire the performances and recording. The brass section in particular is directed with a different approach, utilizing eighteen horns, twelve trumpets, twelve trombones, and six tubas arranged so that the trumpets in particular would feature a unique sound. McNeely mutes them for shrill, dissonant tones and splits them into three groups through the orchestra, allowing their ripping, ostinato-paced performances to tear over the highly percussive rhythms back and forth between the front two speakers.

An outrageously large percussion section hammers home the point, with the amount of noise from the combined performances so brutal that they're almost mesmerizing. McNeely borrows influences from a few other places as well: John Barry progressions in "Todd is Exiled," Goldenthal horn techniques in "The Final Battle," and a finale inspired by John Williams' Spacecamp in "Redemption." The wailing mid-range brass elements in James Horner's Star Trek III Klingon music are presented later in the score as an accent to the mind-boggling rhythms. None of these references are particularly bothersome in Soldier, if only because McNeely is so relentless in his brutally layered variants on those concepts. There is no central theme in the score, with fragments in "Todd is Exiled" and "Redemption" never developed with any satisfaction; these ideas are not integrated into the frantic action pieces, either. As such, Soldier is a score of technical marvel but little overarching effectiveness. The same could be said about the film, of course, but you can't help but wonder how McNeely could spend so much time in the process of creating a unique sound for the score and simply brush aside the basic issues of cohesion. At some point, the more mainstream Goldsmith-like aspects of the score become freakishly extravagant, and the mass majority of listeners won't be able to tolerate it for great lengths. Indeed, with the trumpet battles in "The Chain Fight," your friends will flee the room, the neighbor's dog will start barking, and babies down the street will wail in distress. The outrageous arrangements in the score will impress you, but between their quickly tiresome antics and the score's lack of a coherent theme, Soldier is a tad overrated by other film music critics. Appreciate it if you can, but even the most avid fan of film score deconstruction could be beaten by the majority of this music.  ***   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Joel McNeely reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.38 (in 16 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.14 (in 8,446 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.

Total Time: 29:08