The Hunt for Red October

The first of Tom Clancy's thrillers about agent Jack Ryan was the submarine thriller The Hunt for Red October, the Red October being the name of a top secret Russian submarine that may, or may not, be about to defect under the captaincy of Sean Connery and his Scot-o-Russian accent and hair piece. Unlike the later films starring Harrison Ford and recently Ben Affleck, the real star was Connery, with Alec Baldwin's Ryan a supporting character, but the results still stand as the best to date, a genuinely thrilling thriller, which should be expected coming from the director of Die Hard. McTiernan hasn't really stuck to any particular composer and so it fell to Basil Poledouris to pen the score and the result is one of his most popular efforts.

I don't know whether it's simply hope over expectation, but Basil Poledouris' most popular works are usually the ones I find the least interesting (Conan the Barbarian excepted) and while The Hunt for Red October has plenty of fine moments, it isn't nearly as engaging as its popularity might suggest. The album is front loaded with the best music in the first couple of tracks, notably the Prokofievian Hymn to Red October, which is effective and with a suitably Slavic accent, even if the arrangement, particularly the bizarrely abrupt ending, isn't as good as it might be. Nuclear Scam is a lengthy, action, suspense cue that builds on Poledouris' favourite ticking synth percussion, adding brass and a reprise of the Hymn towards the end. While superficially exciting, it doesn't quite have the gravitas that maybe Jerry Goldsmith or even Hans Zimmer might have brought to it.

The choir is prominent in several other cues, although the somewhat thin sound rather dissipates the full impact that it ought to have. Compared to, for example, Zimmer's Crimson Tide where the male voices have a deep, menacing richness, Poledouris' ensemble sounds just a little feeble. The suspense tracks are reasonable, as are the other action cues such as Chopper and Kaboom, although the former has just a few too many percussion crashes to be fully convincing and bringing to mind a second rate Alan Silvestri action score. Many of the ideas here are partially reprised in later and more successfully in more recent scores, notably a few passages in Nuclear Scam are expanded upon in Starship Troopers.

Kaboom is a simplistic and bombastic finale, although the synthetic percussion bouncing between speakers in the closing moments is just a trifle tacky. Don't feel that I find Hunt for Red October a bad score, far from it, the overall impression is favourable and Poledouris' Russian flavour is well sustained and effective. However, the best ideas here can often be found more convincingly elsewhere, so the score almost feels like a testbed for ideas that are later improved upon. Still, in the sub-genre (as it were) of submarine thrillers, it is more even than Zimmer's highly variable Crimson Tide (even if that score's high points are sublime) and more original than Richard Marvin's Goldsmithian U-571.