Customer Reviews

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra [Score From the Motion Picture]

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

 

 

Far be it from me to suggest people lower their standards but let's face it: the new crop of score composers are great while the old composers are... well, old.

Alan Silvestri has fallen to what I call Horner-itis. The symptoms include repetitive cues, lack of a coherent theme and constant re-hashing of old material (and not the good old material). Now, this doesn't mean he is in any way a bad composer, or that his music doesn't have appeal. It's true, there's not much originality to Silvestri's "G.I. Joe" score, but it's been playing nonstop in my CD player all week and probably will for weeks to come.

"G.I. Joe" is a surprisingly catchy, action packed score that is incredibly enjoyable. I love it. I can't stop listening to it. It has the right action beats, sufficient variation in its "themes" and its length doesn't leave much to be desired, it's really all there. And best of all, having just seen the film, it plays superbly with the action on screen.

I do wish that when the marketing department gets together to sell these things, they don't bring up Silvestri's work on "Back to the Future" or "Predator". He just doesn't write that kind of music anymore. I can't remember the last time Silvestri created a really memorable theme. But that doesn't mean his music isn't easy to listen to.

I would normally give this three stars, but the extra star is for the replay value of the album. Don't expect a work reminiscent of past greatness, but do expect an established and well credited composer to do his job and deliver music worth listening to. It's worth a purchase, and guarantees to entertain.

This wasn't the greatest movie - it was basically glorified eye candy. However, this soundtrack really does make the action scenes pretty intense. I you like military-sounding action soundtracks, this is a pretty decent one.

Looking back at my childhood, I now realize that I was probably very unconventional in how I spent my time. I never read comic books. With the exception of the classic Kenner Star Wars ones, I never played with action figures very much. I was never really into guns and army toys and ninjas and whatnot. I played soccer and tennis, watched a lot of movies and sports on TV, read a lot, and wrote a lot. All this probably goes to explain why, when I first heard that they were making a big budget G.I Joe movie (and unlike several of my friends, who were positively giddy with excitement), my response was a disinterested shrug.

Having had to do some research prior to writing this review, I now know that G.I. Joe is a very popular military-themed line of action figures created by Hasbro in the 1960s, which has since spawned comic books, various animated TV shows and video games, and now a feature film entitled G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, directed by Stephen Sommers. The film stars Channing Tatum as Duke Hauser, the leader of an ultra-elite international fighting force created to stop the evil Cobra Organization, who have nefarious plans for world domination. The film also stars Dennis Quaid, Rachel Nichols, Ray Park, Marlon Wayans and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as the members of the G.I. Joe team, as well as Christopher Eccleston, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Sienna Miller as the operatives of Cobra. For the score, Sommers turned to his long-time collaborator Alan Silvestri, with whom he had previously worked on The Mummy Returns and Van Helsing.

Since writing one of the best scores of his career for The Polar Express in 2004, Alan Silvestri's recent output has been unusually disappointing. Scores like The Wild, Beowulf, and his two Night at the Museum scores were OK at best, and unfortunately G.I. Joe continues the run of comparative flops. More than anything, G.I. Joe was tiring; it runs for just over an hour, but feels like double that, such is the relentless pounding and jackhammering from Silvestri's orchestra. It has a large ensemble, a wide scope, lots of electronics, a frenetic pace, and of course it's written by the usually superb Alan Silvestri, so you would think that all the ingredients would be there - but, for some reason, far too much of it just comes across as annoying and loud.

Part of the problem might be the lack of a memorable theme. Of course, having strong, front-and-center themes are not and have never been a prerequisite in any score, but when you have as much comic book energy and ambitions to appeal to a younger target demographic as G.I. Joe does, there's usually some kind of thematic catch on which to build everything else around. There is a main theme, of course, but it's so unassuming that you barely notice it's there. It's first prominent appearance is actually somewhat misleading, when it features as a gentle string interlude in "What Happened To Her?", one of the score's few soft moments.

For the rest of the time, listening to G.I. Joe is like listening to a long 70-minute action cue, a combination of the more frenetic stylings from scores like The Mummy Returns, Eraser, and The Long Kiss Goodnight, with an occasional bit of Predator's nervous percussion, Van Helsing's relentless rhythms and The Cradle of Life's glory thrown in for good measure. But, whereas with these other scores, there's usually a melodic payoff at regular intervals, on G.I. Joe you feel like you're waiting for a statement of a theme which never comes.

Having said that, on its own terms, some of the action music is actually pretty good. Early album cues such as "Delivering the Warheads", "The Pit Battle" and "The Joes Mobilize" have a heavy electronic element in addition to the large orchestral forces, and are certainly exciting, albeit in a slightly over the top heroic way. Also, "King Cobra" introduces a menacing 5-note motif clearly intended to represent the evil Cobra organization and its agents of destruction, but which gets sadly lost in the mire as the score progresses, and is barely heard again. Conversely, cues such as the opening "Clan McCullen" and "They Intend To Use Them" feature brooding suspense music underpinned by muddy electronic pulses, while other efforts like "MARS Industries" and "General Hawk" are even less successful, pseudo techno/rock tracks with wailing electric guitars that have little redeeming value other than to amp up the adrenaline.

The album's second half fares much better, and from "Who Are You?" onwards, Silvestri dispenses almost entirely with his synthesizers and relies on old fashioned orchestral action writing to get his point across. The score never becomes more subtle, and is never anything less than in-your-face bombast, but at least you can hear the composer at work instead of him being clouded by the electronica. Cues like "Deploy the Sharcs", the patriotic "Final Battle" and the rousing "Just About Close Enough" are breathlessly exciting, lifting the score, and providing an enjoyable 20 minutes or so which stands apart from the sludge that the first half of the album inhabits.

By far the best cue on the album is the last one - "End Credits" - which takes all the energy and dexterity of the preceding action music and wraps it - finally - around the huge, heroic performance of the main G.I. Joe theme that you have been waiting an hour to hear. Part of the problem here is to do with the structuring of the album; if Silvestri had perhaps kicked off the CD with a concert performance of the main theme, listeners would know what to listen for as the score progresses. As it stands, the score seems to meander along for an hour with no clear thematic core, and it's only at the end that you actually realize what the main theme sounds like. Of course, from then on, you can go back and pick it out with repeated listens, but by that time you may have lost the will to live.

One thing I noticed while listening to this score is that, once in a while, you hear a turn of phrase or a certain chord which makes you go "aha!", and brings back memories of some of the classic Alan Silvestri scores of old. However, by the end of the score the cumulative effect of all these little nostalgic flashbacks is simply to remind you what a great composer Silvestri can be, and what a great score G.I. Joe is not. Perhaps I'm being unkind; when you compare G.I. Joe to scores like Transformers 2, and Watchmen from earlier this year, Silvestri's music is clearly light years ahead of anything Steve Jablonsky and Tyler Bates can write: Silvestri at least has interesting orchestrations and some clever instrumental combinations, and more than a little bit of panache in his writing. But this really is a case of damning with faint praise: Silvestri could have recorded himself whistling "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and had it show more compositional nous than either Transformers 2 or Watchmen.

Mr. Silvestri does a great job with this soundtrack by capturing the mood of the movie in this collection of music from the movie.

this is a fairly decent action score, but nothing too impressionable, or memorable....
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There were moments that reminded me of Silvestri's work from the '80s and '90s (most notably, "Predator"), and it was nice. Great action cues and character moments. I usually don't like the packaging for Varese Sarabande albums, but they did a good job on this one.

If you watch GI Joe and Van Helsing around the same time you will swear they have the same score. Neither seem to emotionally fit with the material. Both movies could have benefitted from a stronger score. Movies can be made and broken by their scores.

First off If your a fan of Silvestri's work including Mummy Returns, Van Helsing or
Cradle of life you should really enjoy this score!

I have been listening to this score non-stop since I got it. It has a variety of themes
but no "main theme", which to me doesn't really matter but to someone else they might not like it. It all has to do with taste.

The score is over 70 min long.

All of the music flowed with the film perfectly none of the music seemed out of place in the film whatsoever.

Out of all the tracks I would have to say the End Credits are amazing
but their are lot of action cues in tracks like
Delivering The Warheads
The Pit Battle
Deploy the Sharcs
The Joes Mobilize

Their is a whole variety of music in this score!

In closing I would have say this is a must buy for any Alan Silvestri fan!

See this movie!
It was the Best Summer Movie since Star Trek!

Let me start of by saying that this is not a great score/soundtrack. Sorry, but it isn't.

With that said the "End Credits" is a disturbingly epic track. A tad short at a little over 2 minutes but it really drives the point home of how great this could have been. The swoons and overall changes in this track are great and definately feels like an updated GI JOE theme. Something that isn't cheesy and fits into "now times". It just works.

Now the rest of the album is ho-hum with generic action/summer movie theactrics that gives the initial impression of greatness, yet never fully capitalizes on the set-up that "Mars Indistries" lays out with it's synthesizer driven, catchy loop. It starts strong there, but then dies in "Delivering the Warheads". Picks up a tad in "General Hawk" and is then down again for a quite a while.

"The Pit Battle" is ok and would be better accompanied by some random explosions and such embedded into it. "Snake Eyes" is a let down and a terrible theme for the great ninja commando. "The JOEs Mobilize" is not bad and has a taste of epicness built in. I liked that track quite a bit actually, but even though it was a long track (over 6 minutes) it never really goes anywhere if that makes sense.

There are some other tracks that have generic action movie themes in there ("Final Battle", "Deploy The Sharks", "King Cobra") but really they are not that fun to listen to unfortunately.

I guess that is my main issue with this score. It isn't very fun or deep. Nothing here makes me imagine an action scene or some-type/any-type of emotional outcry. The pacing is bad and at 70 minutes and some change it isn't short. It is essentially a long, drawn out snoozefest not something to go along with a summer blockbuster

"Transformers 2", "Star Trek", and "Jumper" (yes it is a great score in my opinion) are how you do action film scores. Even "SWAT" or "MI:3" would be ok to follow as well. They all have a structure and format to create emotion and just a general sense of being in an action flick.

Unfortunately, "GI JOE" does not overall. Sure there are a couple of bright spots and the amazing "End Credits" but I just can't recommend this score. Too inconsistent, too long, and not enough "oomph" to justify a purchase. I kind of wish I had just bought the one track instead of the whole CD.

Man, i am so disappointed! What is the matter with Alan Silvestri? The film scoring industry is dominated by Hans Zimmer and his army of clones. There is so much of that "Zimmer sound" now that it has almost become the standard in action films. Alan Silvestri, who was grossly replaced by a clone of Mr. Zimmer on "Pirates Of The Caribbean" had the perfect opportunity to show the enemy that there was a possibility for another sound out there. The Alan Silvestri sound. You listen to some of his previous action work and you could only be excited. Yeah! He's gonna show the Zimmer gang how it's done! There will finally be a equilibrium in the film music industry. People are going to say: "Wait a minute, what is that music? Hey, that doesn't sound at all like Hans Zimmer! How is that possible? Gee, i almost forgot that there was other styles of music out there!"

Well, for "G.I. Joe, The Rise Of Cobra", Alan Silvestri has come up with something very... very... normal. Less than normal. Yes, the music has some sort of appeal to it at some point ("Mars Industries", "General Hawk", "Final Battle" and "End Credits") but darn it! Is that it? That is the best Mr. Silvestri could come up with for such a film? "G.I. Joe" for Christ's sake! You'd think that he would have put his best effort into it, no? All his talent in service of one big blockbuster. A clear message to Zimmer. But no.

In my opinion, Danny Elfman failed with "Terminator Salvation". Michael Giacchino failed too with "Star Trek". Nicholas Hooper didn't impress with "Harry Potter 6". And now, Alan Silvestri also lost the battle with "G.I. Joe". Those four scores are decent, well-made and full of good ideas. Along with the film they each support, they manage to be even emotional at times. But in the end, they are not classics. Nothing to show the Remote Control gang what a score can also be. Might as well let Zimmer and his clones score all the films from now on.

I know. The role of a soundtrack is to accompany the images on screen. Not to go to war with another musician or style of music. And i exagerate my wrath against Zimmer. He is my favorite composer and i love his music. Personally, i could listen to endless variations of "Roll Tide". But i also like diversity. And we are not going to get it with scores like "G.I. Joe". We need something big. A score that will stand out. An anthem that will be hummed by millions. Alan Silvestri had the opportunity and failed.

Even "End Credits" is not THAT good, like a lot of people seem to think. C'mon! Listen to "Lara Croft", "Beowulf", "Van Helsing" and other action stuff Silvestri composed like "Predator", "Judge Dredd" and even "Delta Force". The main theme for the G.I. Joe is ONLY the begining of something very good. And as soon as you start to get into it and actually are enjoying it, well then it stops! Too short like the rest of the music.

No. This score is a big let down. A missed opportunity. With a movie like that, it could have been the action score of the year.

"G.I. Joe" for Christ's sake!

What is wrong with you, Alan Silvestri?