Soundtrack: Age of Heroes
Composer: Michael Richard Plowman
Label: Moviescore Media
Release Date: May 17, 2011
Before he became famous as the author of the James Bond stories, Ian Fleming served in British naval intelligence during World War II, mainly as a planner of various operations and missions. At his disposal was a unit known as “30 Commando,” a precursor to modern Special Forces, made up of commando teams whose job was to go where Fleming said to go and capture whatever enemy documents or equipment Fleming said to bring back. Age of Heroes is director Adrian Vitoria’s upcoming film based on the exploits of this group, starring Sean Bean as the commander of a team sent by Fleming, played by James D’Arcy, into Nazi-occupied Norway. Accompanying the action is an epic score by composer Michael Richard Plowman, whose soundtrack experience up to this point has mostly involved television programs, including movies and documentaries.
According to Plowman, his goal was to create a soundtrack that would combine “the melodic strength of the great old war movies…[and] the aggressive, percussive and thick orchestration of today’s film scoring sound.” While this soundtrack thankfully manages to avoid a place high on the “annoying earwig potential” scale (I’m thinking of the robust choral anthems that grace the opening and closing credits of movies like The Longest Day and The Green Berets), it fails to reach the ranks of the truly great soundtracks of the past with instantly recognizable tunes like The Great Escape and Bridge on the River Kwai.
“Aggressive, percussive and thick orchestration” it has in abundance, however. Overall, it sounds exactly the way you would expect a war movie score to sound — you have your appropriately big, heroic tracks with grand, sweeping string melodies that go over the opening and closing titles, your slow tunes in a minor key that start quietly and either stay low and brooding or build in threatening intensity, and your action tracks that feature fast, driving beats, punctuated by chimes and occasionally interrupted by sustained dissonant sounds when there is a lull in the battle. Some tracks manage to rise above the clichés, with interesting rhythm patterns played by the drums and low-pitched instruments or unusual metric choices. Other times, however, the sound between different parts is just not cohesive, and it is not immediately obvious whether this is done on purpose to create dramatic tension to mirror the onscreen action or a weakness on the part of the composer.
For the casual listener, Age of Heroes is not a bad soundtrack, and the cuts that contain the main theme are especially enjoyable. It does not stand up to the scrutiny of a close listening, however, and while it does the job as intended, it is just not unique enough to cause it to stand out from similar types of soundtracks for similar types of movies.
Track Listing:
- “Age of Heroes” (1:19)
- “A New Hope” (1:17)
- “A Heroes Elegy” (1:00)
- “Battle of Dunkirk” (2:22)
- “March Across the Snow” (0:48)
- “The Last Request” (1:01)
- “Attack on the Ship” (0:41)
- “Heroes” (2:00)
- “Dark Heart” (2:27)
- “Dunkirk Mist” (5:09)
- “The Farm House” (1:32)
- “The Team” (1:16)
- “A Battle of the Fallen” (4:37)
- “Line Them Up to Die” (1:06)
- “Escape, Escape Now” (3:18)
- “Mission and Tower Fight” (4:10)
- “Heroes Last Stand” (1:08)
- “Age of Heroes Suite” (4:05)
Rating: 3 / 5 Stars
