Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Too Short!, January 27, 2004
The movie "Alive" is one of my all time favorite movies, and I found the music absolutely stunning, so I went out of my way to find the soundtrack CD. How disappointing to find then that from a two-hour movie, they only managed to extract 25-30 minutes of music for the CD. And missing is the haunting "Ave Maria" by Aaron Neville from the closing credits, which is the highlight of the soundtrack. I do still love the CD, but it's pretty much over in a half an hour.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
5 stars for that spectacular theme, July 28, 2005
The other tracks are good and all, but it was the "theme" of this album that made me fall in love with it from seeing it on film. Then, I searched for the score and it was out of print. I finally found it on amazon and got a copy, whether it is a real one, promo, cutout, I don't know lol. But, what is the difference? It all plays the same music from the film, and it has that theme that made me feel soooooo good inside, that gave me that magical feeling. Thank you James Newton Howard. This wonderful theme that you created has played a part in my life. It is up there with the other three themes that have captured me: theme from glory, braveheart, and dragonheart. I have all these scores and these themes have been used on trailers and other commericals and are soo good, or else why would they be recycled on all these other film trailers and shows? THIS is music, The theme from these scores and especially "alive" to me can never be beaten by ANY band or rap group. Beautfiul, dramatic, glorious, magical triumphed, etc. That is all I can say about these movie score themes. And thanks to James Horner, Randy Edelman, James Newton Howard, and others, we get to hear these looks of loves.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very Much ALIVE, March 8, 2006
While I'll admit that it doesn't have enough of the film's music featured, let alone the interpolation of Aaron Neville's touching rendition of Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria" that came at the conclusion of the film, the music that James Newton Howard *did* compose for the 1993 film ALIVE is an unquestioned great asset to this terribly underrated drama based on the true 1972 saga of Uruguayan rugby players forced to resort to cannibalism after their plane crashed in the Andes.
What makes the score so effective is in the way Howard writes the music. Like Ennio Morricone's scores for director Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns of the 1960s, the music for ALIVE is often in minor keys, which gives the feeling of tragedy, bleakness, and isolation, things that are part-and-parcel of the story being told onscreen, though it does turn triumphant towards the successful conclusion. Of particular note is the cue "Eating", which so accurately captured the moment in the film when the survivors make that terrible decision to eat the bodies of those who had long since died.
Despite the shortness of the soundtrack, I'm still giving it a 5-star rating because of how it was employed in the film. Hopefully, an expanded version of the soundtrack will see the light of day in the near-future. For now, however, this will do well enough.
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~ John Williams
~ Craig Armstrong
~ Steve Jablonsky
~ John Williams (Composer)
~ James Newton Howard
by James Newton Howard 
