PRINTER FRIENDLY VIEW
(inverts site colors)

•	2006 Album

•	1994 Album

•	2019 Album

•	2006 Album

•	1994 Album

It ironically took a young Brit to storm onto the scene and remind the industry of the glory of its own classic epics, drawing several comparisons in reviews to the popular works of John Williams. With sweeping themes and a grand orchestral style, Arnold approached the film from the perspective of Maurice Jarre's Lawrence of Arabia, taking the Oscar-winning sound from that score and spicing it up with a chorus for the fantasy element. In doing so, he captured the high swings of emotion that old adventure scores delighted in delivering to audiences, with themes flexible enough to both grace the quiet interludes as well as explode during raucous action scenes featuring computer-aided armies and pyramids. With the snare drum and layered brass already in full force, Arnold's flair for patriotic music would serve him well in Independence Day two years later. The action cues heard in the final fifteen minutes of Stargate indeed foreshadowed things to come for the composer, though the sound shared by these two scores was largely lost by Arnold in the ten years following them. A potentially more surprising reason for Arnold's success on Stargate is his seemingly total mastery of orchestral complexity. In addition to textured layers and exacting counterpoint, his effective manipulation of chord progressions to give the score an Egyptian twist is far more effective than its contemporaries... all from a man who had never written a note of anything like it before and had little opportunity to research the topic. Some film music historians attribute much of the score's success to Nicholas Dodd's orchestrations, and it is no secret that a fair portion of Arnold's best career work has resulted from a collaboration with the orchestrator and conductor that first flourished here. Their multilayered approach utilizes every corner of the orchestra and shakes the floor with power more often than not. The score's main theme is an Egyptian variation of a somewhat generic, heroic theme, its repetitive phrasing graced with a natural essence of epic scope that greatly compliments scenes that overlook massive landscapes. Secondary themes for the military element, love interest, and villain of the destination world are all well-developed by Arnold, though the love theme on woodwinds, as heard in "Daniel and Sha'uri," is partially lost amongst the glitz of the other ideas. The military motif thrives in early preparation cues, and the sinister villain's motif stews from "King of the Slaves" on.

The themes of Stargate are faithfully repeated throughout the work, though you have to forgive listeners that get distracting by the rendering of these ideas. A sizable adult chorus is beautifully integrated into a few select, key sequences; both "Stargate Overture" and "Giza, 1928" are highlights of the album because of the well-balanced mixing of the Sinfonia of London and Chameleon Arts Chorus. The solo voice of Natasha Atlas is sadly undermixed, however, in her two performances. Comparisons between Arnold and John Williams were likely extended by the similarities between "Giza, 1928" and the Ark's theme in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Arnold cue remains one of the composer's career highlights decades later. Several of what sound like ethnic instrumental contributions are simply standard orchestral elements rigged to seem exotic, including foremost the flute performances in the middle of "Going Home," and these techniques work rather well. After the film progresses through the gate onto the alien world, though, the score unfortunately loses some of its grip. Individual playful moments, such as the "Mastadge" cues (another tip of the hat to similar fun in Lawrence of Arabia), are standouts. But Arnold wouldn't completely fine-tune his straight action material until Independence Day, leaving Stargate as a score of two uneven halves. After the sense of awe and curiosity ("Unstable") established early in the score, it seems to finish its journey by simply going through the motions. On the whole, however, nobody expected Arnold to give the world such an adventuresome aural treat, and when combined with the merits of the score's stronger first half, Stargate is an easy recommendation. On album, 65 minutes of the score was available for a dozen years on the Milan label. While more music from the film existed, the demand for that material was never as great as the sustained calls for expansions of Arnold's subsequent scores for Emmerich and Devlin. The sound quality of the score was merely decent, however, and the "We Don't Want to Die" cue was included out of order near the end of the album. For most casual listeners, this 1994 presentation of the score offers everything really needed from the work, albeit in slightly muted sound quality. The original digital tapes for the score proved to be unsalvageable in subsequent years, unfortunately, leading to the use of analog backups for the remasterings on album.

In 2006, the Varèse Sarabande label issued a "deluxe edition" of the Stargate score, selecting nine more cues (from the 58 recorded for the film; five reportedly remained missing until the next album) and placing the overall offering of 72+ minutes in film order. The sound quality was refined on this product as well, making the album a more tempting product for fans of the franchise. The additional cues, however, are not spectacular inclusions; only seven became self-contained tracks, and most of them are particularly short. The action-oriented "Execution," "Against the Gods," and "Transporter Horror" near the end of the film are the only notable additions (though the opening to the end credits is a fun repetition to hear as a bonus track), and the insertion of the dissonant and uninteresting "Wild Abduction" in between the score's two best cues at the opening is startling and disappointing. Equally dissonant and irritating is "Bomb Assembly," a sharp contrast to the jubilance in the following cue. Still, the presentation on the Varèse Sarabande album, whether it makes for a better listening experience or not, is more faithful to the score and film. Despite the general weakness of the expanded 2006 presentation from Varèse, an even longer product was assembled by La-La Land Records in 2019 for the movie's 25th anniversary. For this 2-CD set, the label provided the film versions of recordings that were necessitated in later editing of the picture, breaking apart the combined cues of the Varèse product and adding the remaining missing cues. The appeal of the all-new music on this set is mainly the film and other alternate versions of several cues, for the newly included moments such as "Send in the Probe" and "Spread Out" generally reflect the more dissonant and abrasive side of the work. In all reality, though, most listeners won't notice a significant difference between the alternate or film versions of the cues and those they recall from the original album. The sound quality is great on the 2019 set, though brass layers are rather raw in the forefront when joined with the choir. Ultimately, the expanded presentations are decent souvenirs from this important film score, and Arnold collectors won't be able to easily shake their nostalgic affinity for it, but Stargate has always been a work with immense highlights dogged by lengthy sequences that languish by comparison. Approach the longer albums with a specific intent to create your own 20 minutes of tremendous highlights from this rowdy adventure.  ****   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For David Arnold reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.47 (in 15 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.27 (in 43,684 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.