In 1979, one year before
Jerry Goldsmith's landmark
Star Trek:
The Motion Picture score would come out along with its ill-fated
film (although how ill-fated will only be known once the Director's Cut
DVD is released later this year), Ridley Scott's own science fiction
project was released. I have heard this film dubbed as a "haunted house in
space" and that description fits quite well. It was the film that started
all of the lame rip-offs and the space/horror films that have not been able
to come anywhere close to duplicating the success of Alien.
Originally, Scott had wanted
Howard Blake, who had scored his 1977 film,
The Duellists, to score Alien as well, but the Goldsmith
was ultimately picked. Goldsmith scored the film almost like a horror
movie, but with a soaring main title that spoke of the film's otherworldly
setting. Unfortunately, the main title is one of the few cues that
actually made it into the finished film. Like James Cameron would do with
Horner's score to Aliens seven years
later, Goldsmith's cues were either altered, moved, or dropped out
all-together. Scott even went so far as to include portions of Goldsmith's
score to Freud in the film, and he replaced the end titles with an
arrangement of Howard Hanson's Symphony No. 2.
For the soundtrack release,
Goldsmith decided to arrange his own score as he originally intended it.
First released on LP in 1979, Silva Screen Records later reissued it on
CD. The CD has now become increasingly difficult to find. Thankfully, the
DVD release (which I highly recommend) contains both the isolated score as
it appeared in the final film, as well as Goldsmith's complete original
score. Of course that entails either purchasing the DVD and doing your own
rip, or finding a bootleg somewhere that someone else has already put together.
Alas, neither option is very easy, but at least the DVD does have that
rather nice addition.
The original CD release is
no slouch however, and given the style with which Goldsmith scored the
film, the 35+ minute runtime may be quite enough for some. Think
Planet of the Apes done with a more
horrifying twist and that is the gist of this score. It is one of the more
atonal works that Goldsmith has done, and it is quite different from the
scores that would follow after in the series. Still, this is one of those
scores that manages to be hauntingly beautiful as well as terribly
horrifying, sometimes even simultaneously.
The score opens with Main
Title, a track that signals his later work on
Star Trek: The Motion Picture. This track presents the main theme as well as some of the
motifs that Goldsmith employs throughout the run of the score. It is a
beautiful track that portrays the wonders of space, but at the same time
realizing that this wonderment is about to be shattered. This tranquility
is quickly forgotten with Face Hugger, though it is a rather abrupt
change that due to
the fact that the CD is not arranged in chronological order. It does keep
a nice listening balance between the shrieking atonal cues and the more
romantic, quieter moments, but it causes the loss of Goldsmith's
development of the score from the grand main title, to the unnerving
undertones, to the
full-fledged carnage.
Though this score manages to
become quite atonal sometimes, between Goldsmith's use of the main theme
and the numerous little motifs which may take three or four listens to
pick up, it's not as unapproachable as same may make it out to be. There
will be definitely those who, in the end, just don't care too much for
this score, but if you can get past some of the more extreme cues on this
CD, you will find that this is definitely one of Goldsmith's classics that
stands alone among itself, totally separated from the other works in the
Alien film series. ****1/2
