Is it just me, or did the score sound a lot like Alfred Newman ripped off Barber's Adagio for Strings? (For those of you who don't know what that piece is, it plays during Elias' death scene in Platoon.)
The definition of insanity is to marry Charlie Sheen and expect the results to be different.
The first couple bars are similar if not identical to the Barber piece, but the theme as a whole is Newman's. However, I wish he had not borrowed it. My respect for Newman prevents me from calling a "ripoff". Additionally, Hollywood composers have been doing that with both classical and popular music from the beginning. But it's a bad habit to be sure.
shareI doubt Newman consciously "borrowed" anything. There are at least as many examples throughout classical music history of unintentional similarities between composers as there are of borrowing. One example from movies is in another George Stevens film, A Place in The Sun. Franz Waxman's music when Monty Clift starts to run away into the woods bears a striking resemblance to the fugue in Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony; but it was written before the symphony, and it's certain Shostakovich couldn't have seen the movie. It's just an accidental similarity.
"The value of an idea has nothing to do with the honesty of the man expressing it."--Oscar Wilde