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•	1997 Album

The finished music for Starship Troopers constitutes a soundtrack that very much resembles the film: wildly hyperactive and lacking centralized development. In short, it's the perfect definition of a "thrill of the moment" score, its many sub-themes mostly lost in the wash of brazen orchestrations and pounding attitude. Poledouris' ballsy recording for Starship Troopers, explosively powerful and extremely heavy on the brass, is mixed in a very straight forward, in-your-face manner. The very flat recording accentuates the score's tendency to reach out and punch you in the face, though it understandably detracts from whatever elegance the music might have mustered. The orchestral ensemble is standard as well, with practically no instrumental or synthetic color. In fact, notable solos are difficult to discern apart from the mass of the ensemble. The "wall of sound" approach differs from David Arnold's Independence Day, with which Starship Troopers was often compared at the time (not to mention a few Goldsmith temp-track adherences), because Arnold made much more flamboyant use of his themes. Poledouris' music, rather, develops countless themes but does so in such a muddied atmosphere that you have difficulty recalling any of them after the fact. There are several military-related themes, as well as two love themes, and most of them follow individual characters in the soap opera, but while they recur as needed, none is particularly memorable. Thus, the score's strengths are those individual cues that really knock you out with their propulsive, harmonic ruckus. For the ridiculous faux-fascist Federation Network and its propaganda, Poledouris writes an extremely trite military march for rolling snare and high brass heroicism straight from the newsreels of the 1940's, with even a slight Western genre wink of the eye to make fun of the perceived innocence of the call to arms. In the popular "Klendathu Drop" cue, accompanying the opening to the human invasion of the bugs' world, Poledouris' main theme for Starship Troopers opens the scene on harsh brass tones, and while the brash, patriotic nature of this theme feels sincere, it's too structurally simplistic to be taken really seriously. It's a theme meant for popcorn testosterone, disposing of any notion of complex design in favor of brute force. Still, the theme is satisfying enough in context, and equally robust performances of this idea would extend into "Destruction of the Roger Young" and the conclusion of "Brainbug/Nuke Cave," among others. Note an added bass region drone to this theme's performance at the outset of "End Titles," an intriguing addition not present anywhere else.

In "Klendathu Drop," Poledouris systematically alters the main theme of Starship Troopers for an interesting variant. At 1:45 into the cue, he changes the second note in the theme so that it forms a distinct precursor for the dramatic progressions of Les Misérables the following year. This more ominous version of the theme's opening bar provides a more serious edge to the remainder of "Klendathu Drop," aided also by frantic violin counterpoint that lends another dimension to the work. Rattling percussion in this cue sets up a premise of using the percussion as representation for the bugs, and while Poledouris does indeed do this in subsequent tracks, he bypasses the use of creative layers in a cue like "Bugs!!" with a more simplistic bed of timpani stylistically similar to Goldsmith's use in L.A. Confidential and other heavy suspense work. This "Bugs!!" cue in particular is yet another example of Poledouris' choice to overwhelm the listener with noise rather than give him or her any lasting musical idea to associate with the nasty aliens. A few plucks on strings here and there are largely washed away. Among other singular moments of note, the string section provides relief in the love theme performance heard in "Dizzy's Funeral" (after a likely accidental reference to John Williams' catchy Close Encounter of the Third Kind fanfare at 0:10 into the cue, started on violin and finished by horn) and "Brainbug," which treats the massively ruthless and ugly creature with an almost religious, organ-aided crescendo. The "End Titles" recording is, for those seeking out the score's major themes, an excellent summary of them. Overall, Starship Troopers is ambitiously rowdy ear candy, taking the heroic style from Robocop and magnifying it to nearly silly degrees that are engaging if only in their volume. But the score lacks much impactful development of its themes and the soundtrack unfortunately contains two grungy songs performed by Poledouris' daughter, Zoë. Fans of the score long criticized the half-hour length of the original 1997 album, and even its label, Varèse Sarabande, lamented the circumstances that caused it. Double-CD bootlegs based on the isolated DVD score for the film offered extensive additional material, including the film versions of all the cues that were remixed or rearranged for the Varèse album. The label finally rectified the issue in 2016, providing a limited, 2-CD presentation that better illuminates the score's thematic continuities. Although this album exposes more of the intelligence beneath the score's brutish surface, the experience remains somewhat incoherent in the whole, an explosion of monumental bombast perfect for the next time you find yourself in a fascist mood.  ****   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Basil Poledouris reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.54 (in 35 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.3 (in 36,800 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.