Sahara

Although looking like jolly good fun, I don't think Sahara made quite the splash (if you'll forgive the ironic turn of phrase) that it should have done. Despite thinking that it looked promising, I still have yet to see it, but I feel a DVD rental coming up. The film is based on a novel by Clive Cussler whose only other work that has made it to the silver screen is, wait for it, Raise the Titanic. Still, nice John Barry score. Curiously and by way of a very thin connection, Clint Mansell's score for Sahara is almost Bondian in places, albeit more John Barry as filtered through David Arnold for the recent Brosnan outings. It brings to mind how Arnold might have scored The Mummy instead of Jerry Goldsmith. Mansell's most notable film music credit is for Requiem for a Dream (which I always thought was by Elliot Goldenthal for some reason), plus The Hole, episodes of CSI and, I note from my list, Abandon to which I assigned a single star rating. Fortunately, Sahara is a whole lot better.

The aforementioned Arnold styling is immediately obvious from the brass blasts and suitably excitable percussion section that opens Ironclad. Fortunately, unlike so many scores, the full potential of the orchestra remains the driving force and the opening four minutes or so are striking and memorable. Beach Attack! and Here We Go! are as exciting as their names imply, setting the tone for the rip roaring action music that sprinkles the album. Things then settle down a little, with some obligatory ethnic vocals - nothing too egregious and perfectly appropriate - and some exotic percussion licks. It's always a bit of a worry when a track is designated as a 'theme' and isn't in the least bit memorable, but Kazim's Theme is one such example. Moody and percussive, but not a fat lot else, if truth be told. The gas re-ignites for Hold Tight and Tighter! which makes liberal use of the terrific main theme. Not quite Indiana Jones memorable, but the kind of full bodied horn melody that one might have hoped the usually very reliable Alan Silvestri might have penned for Lara Croft: Cradle of Life.

The second half builds the momentum further, culminating in the quarter hour blow out of Burn Tower, Bomb Alley, right through to the conclusion, Celebration. The Bondian licks are again very much in evidence here, some of the wailing brass makes a stylish addition to the more usual flourishes. Even the OTT remix of the opening in Rock On!, which concludes the album, works well as a bracing bookend. Unsurprisingly, for such a long album, there are few dead spots. Some of the percussion based cues do start to sound a little alike and I would suggest that 15 minutes of so could have been dropped to no detriment. Fortunately, the pacing is such that nothing ponderous lasts too long. That and the odd unexpected surprise such as the witty, but exciting, vocal and percussion of Truck Escape.

In its biggest moments, there's little subtle about Sahara, but it is undeniably great fun and has some good tunes. More than one reviewer has noted the role of Nicholas Dodd, who has orchestrated most of David Arnold's output and the brass writing is certainly very reminiscent of Arnold's. The influence of Dodd's orchestration on both composers cannot be ruled out. The exciting finale leaves an abiding memory of a score wall to wall with energy, but in honesty, the aforementioned pruning would have ensured less a feeling of repetitiveness in the quieter passages and a tighter album. However, there's still a fairly solid hour of material here and that's more than many can muster these days (witness, The Island, reviewed the same week as Sahara which has a couple of minutes of entertainment crammed into a full hour). Good enough not to be a guilty pleasure, but just a pleasure. Fun and recommended.