MEDAL OF HONOR

MICHAEL GIACCHINO

Rating:

Game Zone Review by Jonathan Broxton: Normally, I don't go anywhere near video game soundtracks, but if Michael Giacchino's score for Medal of Honor is anything to go by, I think I ought to start. My preconceptions of video game music normally amount to it taking the form of tinny, tacky synthesised rubbish going round and round in an endless loop. Let's face it, most games are not sophisticated enough to enable each scene to run to a certain length, thereby preventing a "cue" as we know it to be played. Scenes, levels and encounters can be pretty much infinite, dependent on what the player is doing at the time. These limiting factors are not normally conducive to producing naturally flowing music that can be heard and appreciated away from your PC but, although I'm not sure how they've managed it, Medal of Honor breaks all the rules, and turns out to be an absolute revelation.

Very occasionally, game music crosses over into the realm of the soundtrack, with comparatively successful scores such as Randy Miller's Riven, but I've never heard anything as good as Medal of Honor before. Michael Giacchino, a graduate of The School of Visual Arts and the Julliard Institute in New York, is a producer at Dreamworks Interactive, and previously wrote the music for the Playstation game based on the movie The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which was subsequently released as a limited edition CD. When Steven Spielberg came up with the idea of producing a new video game inspired by his movie Saving Private Ryan, Medal of Honor was born, and again Michael Giacchino was brought in to provide the game's audio accompaniment.

Fully orchestral and enjoyably bombastic throughout, the score's main theme is introduced in the first track, unsurprisingly entitled 'Medal of Honor', in which a plaintive lone trumpet is accompanied by snares, slowly building to encompass the majority of the orchestra in a large-scale, highly patriotic statement. Somewhat surprisingly, the Medal theme is not the driving force of the score. Instead, the Nazi theme which first emerges during 'Locating Enemy Positions' is the key motif, continually signalling the omnipresent danger inherent in the game's narrative. Driving, dramatic and actually more musically satisfying than the main theme, the Nazi theme appears several times throughout the score, notably in the nervous 'Attack on Fort Schmerzen', the awesome, anvil-driven 'The Radar Train', the musically overwhelming 'Panzer Attack', the incredible string scherzo 'Rjuken Sabotage', the suspenseful 'Securing the Codebook', the icily wondrous 'Nordhausen' and the seemingly unstoppable 'Stopping the V2 Launch'.

Despite all this intelligent mixing and merging of themes, Giacchino still never passes up on an opportunity to deliver a rip-roaring action cue, many of which stand up there with some of the best blow-outs I have heard in the last few years. In addition to the aforementioned 'The Radar Train', 'Panzer Attack' and 'Rjuken Sabotage', the low cello motif at the beginning of 'Taking Out The Railgun' expands to massive proportions as the cue progresses, incorporating immense brass fanfares and thunderous percussion elements. In addition, 'Rescuing the G3 Officer' is sharply dissonant, with ground bass cellos and shrieking woodwinds conveying a real sense of dread, while 'The U-Boat' introduces an oppressively eerie theme for the giant submarines which terrorised the waters during World War 2, and the conclusive 'The Jet Aircraft Facility' ends things on a high note, with a sparkling and heroic final performance of the Medal theme. He even manages to engage in some wonderful Cole Porter style jazz in'The Road to Berlin', further highlighting his versatility.

Kudos should go to the people at Dreamworks Interactive for putting together such a superb showcase for Giacchino's work. With an encouraging note from producer Peter Hirschmann and an excellent track-by-track analysis by Paul Tonks, the whole package is excellent. Also, at around four minutes each, the tracks are long enough for both the thematic and emotional content to be developed fully, and for recurring orchestration techniques and motifs to become recognisable. This is not simply "mood music". It is carefully structured, expertly crafted, and emotionally potent. In short, it sounds like a really good film score. The other thing that strikes me as being impressive is the fact that none of Giacchino's music is pastiche. Although there are a couple brief phrases which recall the opening moments of Apollo 13, and while his action style is quite obviously straight out of the John Williams school of writing, this is Giacchino's true original voice at work here.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Michael Giacchino's music for Medal of Honor is superior to a lot of the actual film music released in 1999, and quite how he has gone unnoticed by Hollywood for this long without being asked to score a movie is, quite frankly, shocking. The film music world desperately needs bright new talents like Giacchino to breathe life into an arena which many believe is starting to stagnate. Make no doubt about it: Giacchino is extremely talented, with a keen ear for the things that make a score work. Medal of Honor is a web exclusive CD release, and may be purchased on-line from Amazon.

Track Listing: Running Time: 73 minutes 11 seconds

Dreamworks Interactive FM-17689 (1999)

Music composed and conducted by Michael Giacchino. Performed by The Northwest Sinfonia. Orchestrations by Tim Simonec and Michael Giacchino. Recorded and mixed by Steve Smith. Album produced by Michael Giacchino and Peter Hirschmann.

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