Film Reviews

Soundtrack Review Round Up

• 14th Jul 2015

Woman in Gold

Is a well crafted and beautifully arranged soundtrack that has the typical characteristics of Hans Zimmer, flexing a mixture of grand orchestral pieces, diving and in to dark and dramatic elements with Fleeing Vienna, to change to sweeter more elegant pianist moments that spiral and drive the soundtrack. The arrangement and composion by Martin Phillips and Hans Zimmer is pleasant, welcoming and playful to the ears and though aspects of it seem to flicker with modern tints, its use of the cello, piano, violin male the music effective and emotive for the controversial and important story of love, loss, art, family and family rights which Woman In Gold is centred around. All round a very well arranged and crafted soundtrack, even the beginning song, which very folky is catchy song ‘O Mary don’t you weep no more.’ and decent.

Outlander

For a historical time traveling English-American Romance series there has to be bagpipes, pipes,  with Scottish tenor drum and beautifully songs sang with mezzo sopranos, making you imagine wonderful green hills and wild beautiful lands where the Scottish man and woman live, with passion and unbounded hearts like their lands. In many regards The Outlander soundtrack is diverse and not completely dissimilar to a CD you could buy in a Scottish tourist information office, but this doesn’t make it bad, it simply means its purpose of loud and lavish pieces that swing and swoon with passion and emotion ,like a bird flying over a mountain, work very well. There are pieces on the soundtrack that change from being standard Scottishesque music to pulling away and breaking in with less romance beat and rhythm, but it is one to listen to reading about Scotland or driving your four wheel drive over the highland like the American oriented audience of the series will want to, because musclar Scottish man from the past are there waiting for them, as the series would have you believe ‘aye.

Marco Polo

Marco Polo is series with a main character who is Italian and who travels to central Asia and China, so the soundtrack has to have a various mixture of cultural influences and styles throughout, using flutes and zithers, intermixed with violins and vocals. To be fair to the soundtrack by Eric V. Hachikian, is some very original uses of throat vocals and the fact that the not all the songs are long and tortuous to listen to and those are longer than 3 minutes are worthwhile enough to be listened to. What is decent about the songs, even without knowing to much about how the series, is there is a very good use of suspense that is played out by the eery creepy edging of some of the songs, then a crash and smash of spiralling music, back to the eery beginning. This is soundtrack that is wild and diverse as the what the story of the series follows, not too over blown or all over the place, its a soundtrack that in its entirety is interesting to listen to but would be better to  but to listen to each song individually for their own merits, rather than as the whole soundtrack, simply because its differs so much.

The Order 1886

The Order is  soundtrack which is begging to show itself proud and strong, songs build and bash, like on a quest to your ears to scare and impress them. Drums and wordless monk like choirs sing, scary creepy violins and a slow creep tuba make this soundtrack seem like it wants to be as a grand soundtrack as Lord of The Rings, but though is not as grand it is definitely impressive and even without having the game to play, the soundtrack alone, you can imagine epic battles and scenes of carnage, monsters, fighting and glory, though with a lot of songs on it soundtrack, there is nothing which standouts, many of the songs are very similar but it doesn’t differs from a lot of soundtracks it does standout as being a very well orchestrated soundtrack for a game, there has been a lot of skill and a lot of polished skill put into this game soundtrack, which is shame because soundtracks for game aren’t the main interest of the gamer.

Antonia McGuire