Alan Ritchson leads a team of Marine trainees who find themselves as the first line of defence against a giant alien robot in War Machine (based on true events). It’s quite entertaining in its way, and I think Ritchson is such a watchable leading man. Director Patrick Hughes has made a name for himself directing big action spectacles and has worked with various Hollywood composers but back on his first film he worked with his Australian countryman Dmitri Golovko and the pair are reunited here. The composer cites Total Recall and Aliens as his influences in an interview I read but to my ears the score more resembles those by some of the other composers who have worked on Hughes’s films like Brian Tyler and Ramin Djawadi.
Aside from a couple of brief emotional moments early on, it is pretty much non-stop action for the 80-minute duration of the album. I admire Golovko’s commitment: he sets his stall out with a central motif that he then gets an extraordinary amount of use out of, and some of the action pieces are really very impressive (“River Crossing” a particular favourite). When the enemy fully reveals itself (“Massacre”) the composer introduces bracing electronics to represent it and these then mix in with the orchestra for the bulk of the dramatic ups and downs that follow – by design some of the noises are really somewhat unpleasant and so appeal rather less on album than they do within the film (where the music is consistently impressive). It does tend to get all a bit too samey – this album would benefit considerably from being half as long – but I do like it and I hope Golovko gets a few more high-profile projects to work on. A couple of late cues are really worth hearing: in “Machina dei Mortis” the action reaches its zenith as a chanting choir joins in (it’s breathlessly exciting) and the titular finale makes for a satisfying conclusion with its canter through the score’s main ideas. The composer is on well-trodden ground throughout but it’s an entertaining piece of work with some fine highlights.
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