John Woo's much-anticipated Windtalkers sees the director attempting to make a "serious" film in Hollywood for the first time following a string of action pictures. One of his attempts to attract a bit more credibility to the film saw James Horner being signed to write the music rather than Woo's usual Media Ventures collaborators. Horner's recent scores have all been somewhat subdued and therefore it was with some anticipation that his score for a war film was greeted; it comes as something of a surprise, therefore, to find that Windtalkers may be the most subdued score he's ever written.

If anything, the score is closest in tone to A Perfect Storm, but lacks that score's more exciting passages. Sure, one or two cues do engage, but for the most part this is music that passes without incident. As with his last score for a war movie, Enemy at the Gates, the main theme is repeated ad infinitum with no variation, and again as with Enemy at the Gates, its initial attractiveness is more than turned into stoic apathy by the time you've heard it for the thousandth time by the end of the second track, and downright irritation by the end of the score.

I always listen to a score several times before writing a review of it: it's only fair. I applied the same standard to Windtalkers. One of the credits in the album is for harmonica solos, by Tommy Morgan. Phil Ayling's Indian Flutes are prominent enough (they're the only other instrumental solos credited) but despite listening to the score many times, I am yet to hear Morgan's work. Now it is entirely possible that I have snoozed through large portions of the score each time (believe me, it's difficult not to) but this is still quite strange.

One of the great ironies about Horner is that, despite all the (more than justified) criticism he attracts for plagiarism/homage/call-it-what-you-will, his is a truly unique approach to scoring films. He writes long, moody cues that span numerous scenes. Other composers might do that, but to nowhere near this extent. Very few scores these days contain cues longer than six minutes (yes, some albums do, but they're mostly at least two cues edited together for the album) but Horner rarely writes cues shorter than that, and of the eleven tracks on this album, six are six minutes or longer. This strikes me as being Horner's way of saying "well, if there must be end-to-end music in this film, at least I'm going to write musically coherent cues" and it is an impressive way of going about it, and is one reason his scores are so effective. But the trouble is that scenes of excitement rarely last that long and so for action sequences, Horner tends to have a couple of minutes of build up to the action and a couple of moments of reflection afterwards, within the same cue. A case in point is "An Act of Heroism", which features some wonderful action material in the middle but so much build-up and reflection either side that it becomes lost. This happens with all the action material throughout the score.

Once again, predictably, I must say how much I dislike the practice of filling CDs with music just because you can. This score is simply dull and it would be dull - but with a reasonable amount of material around the dullness - on a 40-minute CD and it is just unbearably dull at 67 minutes. It's another of those Horner scores that starts promisingly and you wait for it to develop and at some point explode into quality but it just stays doing the same thing from the first moment onwards. And it's really, really boring.

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