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•	2020 Album

•	2005 Album

Williams responded to the challengingly depressing narrative of War of the Worlds by providing music that is so enveloped in this chaos that he actually forgoes a discernible concert piece from the work, a major deviation for the composer. The base complexities of Williams' usual high standards are clearly evident in War of the Worlds. Flourishing woodwinds, explosions of timpani, and rapid brass bursts that would test any player's abilities are put on good display. The maestro opted not to employ electronics to any great degree in the work, leaving the tone organic but not really enhancing the music's accessibility as a result. The strings are as frantic as ever, sprinting over massive blasts of deep brass and rolling rhythms that keep you on the edge of your seat with persistent jumps, sudden stops, and desperate changes in direction. A steady momentum in these cues is conveyed by brutal rhythmic propulsion, chopping incessantly in the composer's typical way for this period in his career. This would be describing, of course, the action cues in the score. Interspersed with these walls of noise are the even more disjointed and dissonant cousins of those cues, representing the suspense in the film. Outside of "Probing the Basement," perhaps, the term "spine-tingling" isn't accurate to describe these cues, for Williams hits the listener with the blunt force of his Los Angeles ensemble of players rather than using particular, individual instruments mixed above the group to create his fright. Large washes of atonal sound, sometimes painful to the ears in their ability to take the ensemble and simply move its pitch upward in uncomfortable ways, effectively create a twisted atmosphere of panic, though they don't linger in the mind long after. The final elements in the score are those for the film's primary two characters, as well as humanity and its suffering. Surprisingly, Williams chose not to provide any specific character in the film with dedicated thematic development. Motifs representing the destructive Martian pods of War of the Worlds are scattered throughout the score, mostly consisting of brutal rhythmic pulses, but the people themselves receive the treatment of a lost piano and string section, "Refugee Status" passing those duties onto the composer's standard noble horn stature. Shadows of the melody in that cue creep into several conversational cues but never in full form. Only in the extensions of this material in "Epilogue" does the obscured melody barely reveal itself again.

Luckily, despite the lack of a major character theme, Williams is still able to inject some of the warmth in his solo piano writing without accessing available themes, so once again, the music suffices on a primordial level. Without a main theme, and certainly without any statement of resolution at the end, War of the Worlds is not a readily enjoyable Williams score, however, a reflection of the composer's clear desire not to resolve anything in this composition. The closest cue Williams has to adapt for a concert performance is "The Return to Boston" (and only portions therein), which resembles some of his Raiders of the Lost Ark franchise music in its better enunciated organization of rhythm, propulsion by snare, and finally tonal brass notes that take a page from Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Aside from the generally palatable "The Return to Boston" cue, however, Williams' music for War of the Worlds intentionally strays towards the cold, intellectual consequences of the attack on humanity rather than the bombastic alternative that would have made for better listening out of context. The epilogue cue is all the evidence you need to support this point; Williams provides the standard structure of a momentous string crescendo that you would expect in such a placement, followed by the solo instrumental sendoff, but he does so with continued dissonance up to the final note, leaving us to wonder if the tale is really finished (or if lessons were learned). With this challenging conclusion in mind, the irregular Williams collector will not be leaping at the chance to listen to War of the Worlds with any great frequency. You cannot fault the composer for producing a score that is so largely unmemorable outside of its context, for this path towards the atonal was obviously his merited intent for such a bleak film. At the same time, both the action and suspense material along these lines has been better rendered in his previous works, even at the expense of easy harmony, and many listeners will be reminded of The Lost World: Jurassic Park and the similarly interesting but equally unglamorous score for Minority Report when attempting to casually enjoy War of the Worlds. These efforts will not leave you humming a particular theme after their conclusion, and with a remake on the magnitude of War of the Worlds, you can't help but wonder if the same fright and despair over a billion human deaths could have been realized with a sound more readily identifiable rather than tactfully ambient.

Even with the inherent complexities of Williams' action writing for War of the Worlds, which you have to appreciate for their mere atmospheric prowess, you still are left wishing for just a little more structural continuity from cue to cue. The rhythmic pulses for the Martians, for instance, are not enunciated well enough to function as a bonified motif, and they are not consistently applied to scenarios in which the pods are either hinted with intrigue or shown in full-blown pursuit of human targets. Without the typically masterful threads of cohesion evident in most of Williams' work, War of the Worlds is merely an average if not tedious background listening experience apart from the film. The hour-long album from 2005 did offer Morgan Freeman's classy narration for the opening and closing of the film, featuring a few alterations from the original novel. With the score functioning in context much better than on its own, the narration is a welcome addition to the album (if not the highlight), supplementing Williams' disturbingly tense underscore with the deep, soothing voice of Freeman performing some of the story's most famous lines. In 2020, Intrada Records went to significant lengths to transfer the original digital masters into a form suitable for an expanded release on album. Their 2-CD set contains a fuller film presentation on the first disc and the original soundtrack arrangement on the second disc, followed by a handful of alternates that clearly show that Williams was having difficulty nailing down the tone of the final cues of the score. Regardless of the remastering, the longer film version of the score is extremely challenging to tolerate despite clocking in at less than 80 minutes, though purists will rejoice in having the music of the former narration tracks isolated. This opening and closing narration remains on the album arrangement on the second disc and sounds fantastic in remastered form. While admirable, the Intrada album presents an even greater challenge to the listener, forcing increased astute observation to an often murky and troubled soundscape. On either product, though, the score will remain an interesting listening experience for those film music collectors who appreciate Williams' general stylistic mannerisms despite how derivative they became by this point in his career. But the many "Williams table scraps" that form the nucleus of the work will more likely alienate the majority of his fans who prefer his scores to have strong lines of thematic cohesion, a clearer narrative arc, and an obvious concert arrangement. Approach this score with due trepidation and tempered expectations.   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

• Music as Written for the Film:  ***
• Music as Heard on Album:  **
• Overall:  ***

Bias Check:

For John Williams reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.68 (in 91 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.54 (in 363,495 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.