I was really impressed with this film when it came out. Rewatching it now and am overwhelmed by the heavy soundtrack playing in every tense scene. It’s too much and distracts from the scenes. Also the music sounds like a mix of tunes from other movies’ soundtracks (Schindler’s List motif and King Kong ‘76).
shareInteresting. Like you when I caught this movie I thought it was pretty good ... in fact I remember it as being very good. I watched it again somewhere along the line, but don't remember the music. I thought it was an interesting movie to take the Russian point of view in WWII. Americans know so little of history, but especially their images of Russia/Soviet Union. What seemed to really be happening was that the US was the new international base of fascism, and created an enemy out of Russia as soon as the war was over - in which Russia did, by far, the lion's share of the lifting.
share"US was the new international base of fascism". It seems a pretty big statement and I'm not sure where it's coming from.
It was not a big surprise that West World and Russia had bad relations after WWII. They were two opposed political system. They only teamed up to fight their common ennemy : Germany. West World and Russia were far from being friendly before the war. It's just that after Russia had more power and the atomic bomb.
There were plenty of pro-fascist "oligarchs" in America, and supporters of Hitler and facsism. When FDR was elected, he turned out to be the most popular President in American history, but as soon as he died, the forces of reactionaryism kicked in to try to reverse what FDR had done.
The CIA was infiltrated by German Nazis that the US needed to keep control of Germany, and also to catch up in some technologies, like rocketry with Werner Von Braun.
The West world as you call it hated Russia ever since their revolution and tried to infiltrate and overthrow it, and were hoping Hitler would destabilize Russia enough that it would be easy for them after the war to knock them over.
Russia did not get the bomb until secrets were smuggled to it. Then almost immediately it was claimed that they jumped ahead of us in bombs and missiles to justify our military industrial complex. Then came Korea, then came Viet Nam.
The score is fucking awful. Check the moment where the sniper takes the final shot, right after meeting Ralph Fiennes' characters. It's so out of place.
shareThe music is terrible, one of the most egregious examples of James Horner's bizarre autokleptomania in his soundtracks. Motifs from 'Wolfen', 'Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan', 'Glory', and 'Titanic' abound, and are repetitive, distracting, and hopelessly overblown. That silly trumpet triplet figure is played over and over and over until it becomes comic and ultimately meaningless, even as it echoes over the two snipers' final encounter like a Hornerian version of Ive's 'The Unanswered Question'. Regrettably there will likely be little change over this in the future, as Horner's publicist stated shortly after his untimely demise that writing music wasn't really what he loved- apparently that was flying airplanes.
shareHorner was one of the most bizarrely overrated film composers in the history of cinema
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