John Frizzell – Alien Resurrection (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

John Frizzell exploded onto the scene, in a cloud of ash and fire, with Dante's Peak in March 1997, a score I rather enjoy and frequently blast through my home theatre. A mere eight months later he was given the reigns to the Alien franchise (considered dead by most at that time) and struggles through a score that mimics the sonic aura and instrumentation of what came before him, but ends up being soulless wallpaper.

Goldsmith, Horner, and Goldenthal were established composers before they tackled the Alien series (the first two getting Oscar nominations for their scores) but Frizzell fails to inject any life, suspense, dread, any melody or theme, any mood, or literal alien dissonance into this score, occasionally letting loose with cheap action fury and mindless noise that sounds like recycled leftover cues from Dante's Peak.

Alien: Resurrection gets a bad reputation but I enjoy it as trashy fun (and its certainly better than ALL of the movies that followed). John Frizzell has not had much in the way of work for the past decade and its likely because he's just not that talented. It seems that with this movie, his second big feature, he was already running out of ideas.

This RCA album runs 45 minutes with 5+ of those minutes being made up of "Priva Son D'Ogni Conforto" from Georg Frideric Handel's Julius Caesar, so what you're left with is a 40-minute album. La-La Land Records released an expanded edition in 2010 but why even bother? 40 minutes of ugly late 90s textures and chaotic din is enough for me.

The album is in chronological order though, which is unusual for the era.