• Composed by Jerry Goldsmith
• Varèse Sarabande / 120m (score 90m)

Back in more innocent times (1997), we liked to imagine US presidents doing things like fighting off terrorists on aeroplanes. If the president in question is played by Harrison Ford, all the better. Wolfgang Petersen’s very silly film (and please note that all I typed was “Wolfgang Petersen’s film” – WordPress’s autocorrect helpfully added the other text, redundant though it is) was entertaining enough to be very succesful. Like I said, more innocent times.

Quite what was going through Petersen’s head when he hired Randy Newman to write the score I’m not sure – he was hardly a natural-seeming choice. He put his heart and soul into writing music, wanting to prove he could do something different, but sadly it never worked out and he was fired very, very late in the day. Jerry Goldsmith was brought on board so late that he decided he couldn’t do the whole score himself; his son Joel was unavailable to help with the heavy lifting as he had done a year before on Star Trek: First Contact, so it was a different Joel – the very talented McNeely – who was brought on board instead to flesh out Goldsmith’s themes and provide some original material of his own for the scenes the legendary composer was unable to do himself.

The score’s main theme is unbelievably rousing and patriotic – Petersen is not known for being a fan of subtlety – and it’s a genuine marvel, one of Goldsmith’s most memorable of the 1990s (and the list of memorable Goldsmith themes of the 1990s is not a short one). It crops up all over the place – a bit martial, a bit presidential – indeed it cropped up in a rather different place not so long ago in a political context, which brings up some associations when I hear it these days – but this is a film music website not a political one, so let’s leave that there. Its most rousing performances of all come at the start (“The Parachutes”) and end (“Welcome Aboard”) but really, it’s all over the place.

A beautiful secondary theme is heard in “No Security” – pastoral, almost bucolic – but really it’s action music that dominates. The star of the show is “The Hijacking” (helpfully retitled “The Hijacking (parts one and two)” on the deluxe edition) – an eight-minute tour de force showing that no matter what time constraints he was working under, Goldsmith could push those buttons like no other. The piece is built almost entirely on a single, simple rhythmic phrase and repeats it almost ad nauseum but this composer’s skill is such that you don’t really notice – it is just so exciting. Make no mistake, it is seriously loud: don’t listen to this one if you’ve got a migraine coming on (I would also suggest you don’t take to social media to announce that you’ve got a migraine coming on, but suspect that advice will fall on deaf ears).

Elsewhere, the action highlights are numerous – the early “Parachute Attack” (now divorced from the opening “The Parachutes”), pounding low-end piano “Empty Rooms”, brilliant “Free Flight”, frantic finale “Escape from Air Force One” – it’s all great. There’s a purity of sound there that does set this apart from Goldsmith’s other action/thriller scores of the same period, good though they are – I suspect part of it is because he had so little time he stuck far more to just using the orchestra on this one without so much synth accompaniment, and while that situation may not have arisen in the most ideal circumstances, it did bring that benefit.

Back to that innocent time, 1997 – reuse fees were such an issue for soundtrack recordings made in the US, it was quite rare for albums from all but the most high-profile films to run much beyond 30-45 minutes and Air Force One was no exception. (Ironic really that in the days of Jerry Goldsmith and co we got short albums and in the days of rather less illustrious composers today we get every last note, but such is life.) Over two decades later, the changed landscape has meant that Varèse Sarabande has finally been able to give Goldsmith fans what they wanted, on a two-hour deluxe edition (the score itself runs about 90 minutes, with various bonus cues padding out the length).

I will be a complete dullard and say that actually the score’s best 35 minutes were those released on the original album, but Goldsmith scores are certainly better-served by expanded versions than other composers’ usually are, and what you get is bulked-out and more rounded. The one track that seemingly every man and his dog was clamouring for ever since 1997 (“Radek’s Release”) is finally here and is certainly a highlight of the previously-unreleased material – a rousing Russian chorale, it’s great to finally have it (even if it doesn’t even run to two minutes).

We do also get all the Joel McNeely material, which makes up nearly half an hour. Goldsmith evidently kept most of the musically-interesting scenes for himself (and nobody can blame him for that) and McNeely makes a good attempt to make his material blend in (in almost all cases including at least some quote of either the score’s main theme or its main action motif, sometimes even relatively obscure passages from the Goldsmith cues – which McNeely clearly studied very hard) – though seasoned Goldsmith listeners will have no difficulty discerning which tracks are by whom without needing to glance at the album credits. The highlights without question are the frantic, frenetic “Target Air Force One” and even more so “Air Force One In Trouble”, a great piece of action music which appears just before the finale. (Of all the composers who appear on those “I don’t understand why this guy didn’t end up with a more high-profile career” lists, McNeely is the one that would top mine.)

There’s been some chatter about the sound quality on “Air Force One In Trouble” and specifically some peculiar volume issues – it’s not enough to harm my listening experience, but beware. Air Force One contains some prime Goldsmith action music, a great main theme and the deluxe edition essentially gives you more of the same, so it’s clearly an important purchase for Goldsmith fans. Now… any chance of the Randy Newman score (which, regardless of its association with the film, is a sumptuous standalone listen) getting an official release?

Rating: ****

facebook.com/moviewave | twitter.com/MovieWaveDotNet | amazon.com