War of the Worlds - Expanded

Track Listing Legend:
*previously unreleased
**contains previously unreleased music

Intrada's latest release features John Williams' music to Steven Spielberg's 2005 sci-fi thriller, War of the Worlds. Based on one of H.G. Wells' most famous novels, this version of the story stars Tom Cruise as an irresponsible deadbeat dad who must protect and guide his young and terrified daughter (Dakota Fanning) and estranged teenaged son (Justin Chatwin) as an alien invasion quickly reduces American—and world—society to chaos and ruin. Williams created a dark, threatening work, steeped in fear and tension. It is complex, fierce and wholly unlike the other sci-fi entries from the composer's pen. Nevertheless, as Jeff Bond notes, Williams leverages similiar techniques he used in the more friendly-alien environment of Close Encounters:

...exploring the lowest and highest ranges of both the orchestra and choir to create eerie, disturbing atmospheres. Incredibly low, rumbling chords from double basses precede the sight of towering alien tripods; guttural, sustained tones from the male choir herald the entrance of frog-like, tripedal aliens into a house basement, and high notes from the female choir warp upward in hair-raising pitch bends as the aliens and their technology terrorize Ray and his family.

Action music abounds, pounding with dramatic rhythm, capturing both the power of the seemingly unstoppable alien extermination effort and the hopelessness of the human pests. And with no easily recognizable melody, the audience has no safety net to tell them it's going to be okay, leaving them, as Bond notes, "adrift and uncertain" along with the onscreen characters.

For this new edition, courtesy of Paramount and Universal Music Enterprises, album producer Mike Matessino used the high-resolution audio data preserved back in 2005 at the scoring sessions. Perhaps one of the most complex assemblies of any Williams album, Matessino documents the intensive process in the liner notes to bring this stunning work into a new, 2-CD edition. The first disc features the complete film score in film order and does not include the narration overdubs from the previous release. The second disc includes a remastered presentation of the original release, featuring Williams' unique assembly and sequencing, in addition to 15 minutes of extras.