Soundtrack Review: Pacific Rim

UNITED STATES - Hollywood can be a lazy beast.

Not to take anything away from composer Ramin Djawadi, but you suspect his name came up for this because he scored Iron Man.

So yes, Pacific Rim is the uber-upsized version and Djawadi has produced something great - from the title track onwards, it's adventure music. Bounding, thrilling and suitably grand. Djawadi drafted in Rage Against The Machine's guitar grinder Tom Morello to add some metallic crunch to his monster mash.

For this score, size matters, and tracks like The Shatterdome and We Are The Resistance cleverly use choirs to conjure up the idea of immense scale. On 2,500 Tons Of Awesome - this collection really wins the prize for best track titles - Djawadi even gives a nod to the film's ancestry and references the Akira Ifukube's Godzilla scores of the 1950s.

Not everything suggests crashing through a city. There are some gentler moments like Mako, which features the angelic tones of Priscilla Ahn. But for the most part, this is a monster-size smackdown of a score. As the movie's tagline says: Go Big Or Go Extinct.

Djawadi has gone very big.


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