Customer Reviews

Alien 3: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

One of the first things that struck me when seeing Alien 3 was the music. It is quite scary and melancholic, and catches the mood of the film perfectly.

If you haven't seen the movie yet, I suggest you do that first. Then buy this record. Otherwise you probably won't understand and appreciate it fully. Also, in my point of view, this is a whole-record experience. Just grabbing a single song and listening to it might not give you as much as listening to the whole CD. Not in the beginning, anyway.

All tracks are great, but the standouts are the ones with strange names (latin?), Agnus Dei, Lento and Adagio. Also, check out Lullaby Elegy, The Dragon and The Entrapment (The Dragon just might give you a hard time sleeping, so I advice you not to listen to it at night... or do that, whatever your pleasure ;-). My absolute favorite, however, is the grand finale Adagio, a majestic piece that will bring tears to your eyes and make you appreciate life on earth.

A truly worthy soundtrack to an excellent film. Don't miss it!

This soundtrack is one of my earliest collections of film music. The Adagio is certainly my favourite. I was really amazed by how well the music fitted into the film. The ascending 3-note theme (l-t-d') is simple while working extraordinarily well to portrait the tragic ending. When Ripley was diving down to the liquid metal, the baby alien queen burst out from her belly. Music turns to very dissonant at that point but then, looking at Ripley's face, she looked like a mother giving birth to her daugther( She asked Bishop whether she could have children later if she let him to take the alien away from her body). The high string sound suddenly gives me an impression of a mother.......Ripley must wish it would have been a human baby coming out from her body...i guess..........when she disappeared in the fire pool, which meant the destruction of both herself and the alien, the 3-note theme turns to its retrograde form (d'-t-l), resolving to the tonic. Finally, after the climatic resolution, the soft coda leaves the scence in peace.

. . .but Elliot Goldenthal's score to Alien 3 is undeniably harsh, frightening, and one of the most unique scores ever to be composed! The action cues still frighten me and chill my bones each time I listen to them, and the calm interludes of soft, flowing melodies are still, in their own special way, chilling and foreboding. If you're a fan of Elliot Goldenthal's music, like me, then buy this score! You won't be left disappointed! Otherwise, make sure you preview this score before you buy it. It's very different, and not a score that everyone will enjoy. But it is one that Goldenthal fans will continue to be scared by forever.

No offence but... never trust a negative review by someone that spells stereo "sterio" and tries to correlate this soundtrack to some mtv music video.

Truth is that in order to understand this score, not to mention the film history which, in my view is an intergalactic via crucis, you've got to be acquainted with the whole Alien saga.

Alien3 itself is a journey into purification and the score is hauntingly beautiful, full of melancholy, gloom and resignation in the face of a very tragic an unavoidable fate that becomes a part of cursed Ripley from the very outset, some 25 years ago.

There are beautiful passages in the script, such as the words pronounced during the funeral by Dillon, at the furnace pit. The whole scene lets out this incredibly hot and heavy industrial, metallurgic doom and gloom infernal feel where salvation seems to be anything but....unattainable.

The same score not only enhances that scene but is revisited once more as it gives Ripley a very heartfelt farewell in the end sequence, almost like seeing an angel falling in that final rictus that is, in many ways, a re-enacted crucifiction. I found it a very moving ending.

I agree it may not be easy listening music, it's rather dark and very moody, bordering on nightmarish and it could very well annoy or even upset anyone in a living room, particularly by the shocking, loud and disturbing contrasts. But it has its special moments, here and there...such as the ones i mention above...and it serves its purpose in the film more than well, i feel.

That said, Elliot Goldenthal recycles not only the same instrumentation from Interview with the Vampire, but the same haunting, lonely church choir voice, from "Libera Me", once again. I understand he found the two tales of damnation very similar. I don't have a problem with that. It worked out pretty well in the end...and few would remember this similitude anyway.

In my view.... 5 stars.

Um...wow...what do I say? This soundtrack never ceases to amaze me in both its orchestral arrangement and its musical beauty. It is very unsettling, thus very moving. The opening track Agnus Dei (latin for Lamb of God), perfectly sets the mood for the whole movie (and CD); the contrast between the boy soprano and the booming alp-horn is enough to shatter any sense of security or safety in you. Bait and Chase's segmented action (each segment with a new arrangement) conveys a sort of "hurricane's eye" mood. The Beast Within is a simple set of progressions that build to a hesitant climax, ingeniously creating tension and then failing to fully resolve it. The fourth track (done in the tempo of Lento) has two distinct parts, first of the simple quasi-Gregorian chant of "Dona nobis pacem (Grant us peace)" displaying the shallow affair between Ripley and the doctor, then compared and contrasted with a poignant scoring of the funeral accompanied by the birth of the alien (the last minute is enough to make your skin crawl off of you). Candles in the Wind uses muffled horns and muted basses to display an almost unreal seige. Wreckage and Rape... how did he get that voice there in the end? It freaks me completely out. Umm... I'm running out of space. Death Dance is a splendid trade off between arhythmic tremolo strings and pounding synthetic drums, fitting for a frantic chase. The last minute of The Entrapment is one of my favorite string arrangements ever, falling like rain (or like emergency sprinklers in this case). Adagio is beautiful in every sense, climaxing with a glorious crescendo, but then dwindles for about another minute, almost nostalgically, making it sound regretful, mournful and unresolved. Rarely do you hear this much passion and mastery put into a contracted film score, nor do I feel that this mood could ever be emulated. This is a one and only in music business, a must for anyone who can listen with more than their ears.

Watching Alien3 in the theater, I learned how an average film can be completely overshadowed by a fantastic musical score. This is haunting, powerful, brilliantly scored music. Goldenthal probably composed much of this for a major concert work, but sacrificed it to meet Alien3's deadline. Reading the negative reviews here, I'm struck by the fact that the lowest ratings are attached to the least eloquent reviews. Maybe it's difficult for some people to appreciate music as modern as this, with its seemless interweaving of the human voice, orchestration, recorded sounds, and electronic sounds, but even with the thousands of CDs I own, this soundtrack still occupies a unique musical space and takes me places where no other music could possibly venture. This is Goldenthal at his young and idealistic best. His newer scores are great, but he's learned to play the game now. If the concert hall were any place for a composer to have a successful career (while still living), the Alien3 score shows us just what we all missed by sending Goldenthal into the movie studios to put food on the table. This music is a life-changing experience.

A definitive Goldenthal CD. Almost completely atonal and arhythmic, it serves spooky orchestral sound effects that ream the human mind. Of special note is tracks "Bait and Chase" which has a fightfully errie string fade toward the end of the track, "Wreckage and Rape" which has a blisteringly loud and assaulting guitar riff and "Adagio", a moving finale for the film's resolution.

This CD is definitely not for everyone, but it's worth every red cent.

A must for any collector of film scores. This one definately ranks with the best of em'. Never before and rarely since as Goldenthal's intentions been so fully realized. His score is unnerving, disturbing, thought-provoking, mesmerizing, melacholy, and beautiful. Sphere comes close, but this one is definately a grand work of art.

The first time I heard this soundtrack was when I first saw the excellent movie Alien 3. Adagio stuck in my hed for days. So I finnally bought and WOW! Superp, fantastic, foreboding, dark, gothic, and depressing perfectly describes the music. The first track, Agnus Dei, is extremely haunting and dark. Bait and Chase is an edge of your seat thrill ride of music, The Beast Within is very dark and gothic, Lento will chill you to the bone and make you cry all at once, Candles in the wind is haunting with a loud and noisy finale, Wreckage and Rape is kinda strange, but I love it, The First Attack is haunting and terrifying, Lullaby Elegy is a beutiful, haunting and dark peice. Death Dance is an excellent action peice. Visit To the Wreckage is a strong peice, which is followed by the Pseudo-Action peice The Explosion. The Dragon is very haunting, then comes the third best track on the CD, The Entrapment. And the last track, surely one of the most beutiful peices of music ever written. It goes deeper than Beetovhen ever could. The legendary track, Adagio. It is gaurenteed to jerk tears from your eyes and will make you feel how lucky it is that you exist.

Elliot Goldenthal's music for Alien 3, remains one of my favorite horror/scifi soundtracks but works for me as a stand alone composition as well. Goldenthal studied with John Corigliano, who did a seminal score for Ken Russel's Altered States, another excellent soundtrack. Both scores depict the decent into horror and madness reflected by the narative, while revealing sub themes of fragile human tenderness with in the psyche of the suffering protagonists. Alien 3 is a flawed film from a brilliant director, David Fincher, who struggled against powers beyond his control in trying to add his vision to the Alien Franchise. However one should not let the flaws of the film take away from the accomplishments of the score. The intense energy of the thrilling musical narrative carries the listener on a runaway journey into the dehumanized world of failing humanity and monsters from the id, a voyage that mirrors some of the darker themes in avant-garde modern music. Use this music as a writer's soundtrack and write your own dark horrer story.