Soundtrack

What are the hallmarks of a Christopher Nolan film? Immense IMAX imagery. Starry ensembles. Long takes. Tight, geometric compositions. Nonlinear story. And, of course, a booming score. For the music to Oppenheimer, a sprawling epic about how J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) became the so-called “father of the atomic bomb” and Nolan’s most ambitious picture to date, the revered filmmaker turned to none other than Ludwig Göransson. The composer had worked on Nolan’s previous film, Tenet, and the director knew he was the right man for the job.

The Limited Deluxe Edition features 23 songs (an additional 7 songs) including all the original songs performed in the film by Jeff Bridges and Colin Farrell, "The Weary Kind" performed by Ryan Bingham (the theme song heard in the film's trailer and closing credits) and music featured in the film by Waylon Jennings, Lucinda Williams, Buck Owens, Sam Phillips and many more. It is packaged with a 12 page booklet featuring liner notes, lyrics and photographs. The soundtrack was co-produced by 10-time Grammy Award winner T Bone Burnett. Burnett, who co-produced the soundtrack with guitarist/songwriter Stephen Bruton. Synopsis Four-time Academy Award® nominee JEFF BRIDGES stars as the richly comic, semi-tragic romantic anti-hero Bad Blake, a broken-down, hard-living country music singer who's had way too many marriages, far too many years on the road and one too many drinks way too many times.

This is a tremendous soundtrack. What especially stands out is the inclusion of film dialogue in some of the instrumental tracks. Another neat thing is the "Natural Mystic" version on this album has a nice ambient intro, with bugs and birds chirping as the rhythm kicks in, it really adds to the etheral nature of the track. The track by Human Cargo is a wicked sound-system smasher. Don't pass over this because it has alot of BMW tracks that you already own, there are some bonafide gems on this one. "Mosman Skank" is the original rhythm made famous later by Dennis Brown's seminal 80's cut "Promised Land".

For fans of Jerry Goldsmith's score for Ridley Scott 1978 movie Alien, this two-disc Intrada set is the ultimate fantasy. Everything is here and then some. Disc 1 contains Goldsmith's entire score as he originally intended it with every cue in place, including those that were later cut from the film plus his recomposed versions of cues the director made him change (Goldsmith's original main theme, for example, appears without its signature heroic trumpet melody because the director thought it wasn't creepy enough). Disc 2 includes the original soundtrack as issued on LP plus six other bonus tracks of demonstration takes and even the brief except from Eine kleine Nachtmusik used in the film. The stereo sound here is fabulous, the performances definitive, and the liner notes exhaustive. And the score, like the film, is a classic of its genre. With its mixture of the ecstatic chromaticism of Scriabin, the skittering strings of Penderecki, the harmonic waves of Ligeti, and the atmospheric percussion of Herrmann, Goldsmith's score became a template for all subsequent science fiction/horror movies. But as this splendid release so amply shows, the original still can't be beat.

Fledgling film composer Harald Kloser laid waste – musically – to the world for Roland Emmerich's environmental disaster pic The Day After Tomorrow, so it comes as no surprise that he's up to providing the soundtrack for the latest "humans in peril" popcorn diversion, Alien Vs. Predator. Following in the footsteps of previous Alien franchise composers like Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner, Kloser brings the symphonic dread through a winning combination of orchestral vastness and tried and true action-film dynamics. He also introduces a myriad of electronic elements into the mix that bring to mind the works of contemporaries like Hans Zimmer and Thomas Newman – the "Alien vs. Predator Main Theme" is particularly striking and serves as a continuous creative source for the composer to dip his baton in. There's nothing groundbreaking here, and why should there be? Kloser is just building his resumé, and what better way to do it than scoring big-budget – and hopefully big paycheck – Hollywood pap.