Editorials
In Space, No One Can Hear Your Score: Exploring Jerry Goldsmith’s ‘Alien’
Imagine spending countless hours crafting one of the most ambitious film scores of your career, only to watch the film on opening night and hear something else entirely. Well, that’s exactly what happened to composer Jerry Goldsmith when he first saw Alien.
By the time Alien hit screens, director Ridley Scott had quietly replaced significant chunks of Goldsmith’s work in the edit. These changes included using Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2 (1930) during the film’s end credits and reusing cues from Goldsmith’s score for Freud: The Secret Passion (1962) elsewhere in the film, while sections of Goldsmith’s new material were cut, reshaped, and, in some cases, thrown out altogether. Goldsmith was, let’s just say, less than pleased. Honestly, he had every right to be.
Yet, even with all this taken into account, Alien remains one of the most haunting scores in cinema.
The 8th Passenger
Before we get to Alien, let’s briefly talk about Goldsmith himself. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he worked steadily in television in the 1950s and went on to become one of the most prolific and recognizable film composers in history. By the time Alien came along, Goldsmith had a résumé packed with heavy hitters like Planet of the Apes, Chinatown, The Omen, Patton, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (released the same year), and many more. He earned 18 Academy Award nominations over his career and won just once, for The Omen in 1977, which feels like one of the great injustices in movie-music history.
Goldsmith’s calling card was always his versatility. He never shied away from utilizing unusual instrumentation, found sounds, emerging technologies, and extended techniques in harmony with more traditional orchestral elements. Which is exactly why, when Ridley Scott came calling, or rather, Alan Ladd Jr., the president of 20th Century Fox, to be more specific, it seemed like a match made in the cosmos. Looking back, though, it was more like an acoustical beacon of unknown origin.
In space, no one can hear you scream
At the time, Scott was hot off The Duellists, and Alien represented a massive leap in ambition. Along with the sci-fi of it all, the Alien story bleeds body horror with its violation of the human body and use of reproduction as a weaponized mechanism of death. The complex alien Xenomorph design (conjured up by artist H.R. Giger) literally drips with terror, perfectly complementing Alien’s gritty, tactile, and industrial production design. As Ripley, Sigourney Weaver delivers a career-defining performance as one of the first female lead protagonists in a mainstream action/sci-fi/horror film, adding a powerful feminist undercurrent to the narrative. All that said, this mix of genre and narrative elements required an unconventional score to achieve balance, and it was a challenge that Goldsmith was uniquely suited for.
In many ways, what Goldsmith composed for Alien was a direct extension of the approach he’d used for Planet of the Apes a decade earlier. With that score, Goldsmith used the orchestra to generate vibrant texture and an atmospheric, alien soundscape. But Goldsmith had learned a lot in the decade between Apes and Alien, and he initially set out to capture a bit more of the wonder and romantic mystery of outer space (think Star Trek) before venturing into the horror realm. Unfortunately, Scott was hoping for a bit more of the former versus the latter.
Sometimes the scariest things come from within
According to Goldsmith in The Beast Within: The Making of Alien documentary, his original instinct was to write the opening “very romantically and very lyrically,” so the film could begin with the cold majesty of space before the horror surfaced, but Scott wanted that dread there from the jump. So, that first draft was scrapped (though it was used a little later in the film, as well as in Alien: Covenant).
The “Main Title” version actually heard in the film was Goldsmith’s rewrite of the piece and built on a foundation of eerie extended techniques, low drones, stacked minor 7ths, and an almost unearthly sonic palette to cultivate ambiguity. A shankha (a traditional conch-shell instrument) run through an EchoPlex provides a haunting uncertainty, as strings and flute emerge from the darkness with simple, slow, two-note progressions, seeping in like a foreboding fog, echoing into the distance as delicately as they appear. Rather than celebrating the beauty of space, this piece establishes the “alien motif,” hinting at darkness to come.
As we visually enter the Nostromo, Goldsmith’s “passage of time” leitmotif comes into focus with flutes, subverting the traditional I-V chord pattern, making it minor using Eb minor and Bb minor. It’s a comforting, almost tender motif, shared by multiple instruments throughout the film, that speaks to the humanity of the crew and to the ordinary rhythms of people going about their work in an extraordinary setting. Goldsmith uses it to humanize the crew before systematically dismantling them. This contrast with the horror or alien cues wasn’t simply a tonal choice; it was a deliberate narrative decision. When the aural warmth disappears, you feel it.
Alongside the general alien and time motifs, Goldsmith introduces two additional Xenomorph-centric motifs and really goes to war with conventional film scoring methods. Extended string techniques (col legno, sul ponticello, harmonics) create sounds that don’t register as music as much as they do biological processes. He also doubles down on non-traditional orchestral instruments, adding the didgeridoo, serpent, whistles, rattles, and heavy EchoPlex use to the mix. This juxtaposition of the familiar with the unfamiliar divides the film into human and inhuman spaces, us against them. Even when the Xenomorph is not on screen, Goldsmith’s textures make us feel its presence, lurking in the shadows.
A word of warning…
Despite delivering some truly great material, Scott requested that Goldsmith rescore 7 cues. Goldsmith begrudgingly obliged, but Scott still wasn’t quite thrilled with what he got. Scott and his editor, Terry Rawlings, had built the rough cut using temp tracks, as directors often do, and had kinda fallen in love with those. Ultimately, Scott found himself wanting something closer to what he already had.
The specifics of what Scott altered are worth mentioning because the changes weren’t minor. Beyond replacing the end credit piece with Hanson’s, Scott repositioned Goldsmith’s end title music to play over the climax aboard the escape pod, a placement Goldsmith had never intended and actively disliked. Some cues were cut (ex, the facehugger falling on Ripley in the med lab) and left silent, or moved, breaking the dramatic logic Goldsmith had built. Perhaps most shocking is the repurposing of Goldsmith’s prior work for Freud, being used for multiple scenes, including Dallas in the air duct, Ripley searching for Jonesy, and the acid floor moment. And don’t forget, Goldsmith wasn’t aware of any of this until he saw the film opening night. Yikes.
Goldsmith later spoke publicly about his frustration, stating, “Working on Alien was one of the most miserable experiences I’ve ever had in this profession. Ridley is a brilliant filmmaker, and I think that was just his second film, and he wasn’t as articulate then about what the music should do.” He felt the score was misused and that Scott was ultimately seeking more of a soundscape than a supportive emotional undercurrent. While not wrong, the final product makes it a complicated argument to win.
Scott, for his part, has never offered a particularly detailed public account of the creative dispute. His position seems to be that the director’s vision for the film took precedence, which is, of course, practically true. Perhaps attempting to make amends, Scott later hired Goldsmith to work on Legend (1985), but that creative endeavor ended very poorly as well, and is a tale for another day.
The irony with the Alien score is that this friction only deepens the, well…legend. Both scores, whether heard in full or as presented in the film, tell coherent, deeply unsettling stories. If you haven’t sought out Goldsmith’s original score, do yourself a favor and spend some time with it. With expanded editions, the isolated score available on the Blu-ray, and multiple, beautiful physical releases in existence, Alien fans are truly blessed.
Alien is, unavoidably, a score defined equally by what is and isn’t in the finished film. And that’s a strange kind of legacy to carry. But then again, that’s not entirely unlike the film itself. Alien is a movie about violation, isolation, about the terror of having something foreign enter your body and remake it according to its own agenda. So in a way, Goldsmith and his score were subjected to something very on brand, indeed. You have my sympathies, Mr. Goldsmith.
In this day and age, the word “troll” is often used to describe various online nuisances. Yet as abundant and irksome as the modern troll can be, they aren’t usually as fearsome as their mythological counterparts. I’m not talking about the small and gentler versions that have become more common to see in media. No, there are much bigger and scarier trolls out there—and André Øvredal’s movie Troll Hunter is one of the best places to find them.
It doesn’t take long for Troll Hunter (or Trolljegeren) to dump the Blair Witch Project-esque setup and aim for something a lot fresher. The trajectory of the story is augmented by Otto Jespersen’s character Hans, the titular Troll Hunter. The second he comes barreling out of the deep, dark woods and shouts “troll” at the camera, this movie takes a turn into what feels like uncharted territory. Not only subject-wise, but also conceptually.
For fantastical and made-up subject matter in cinema, found footage is a fast way to add a guise of believability. After all, what we accept to be the most crucial aspect of documentaries—the truth—rubs off on pseudo-documentaries, despite our understanding of the pretense involved. That is what Øvredal delivered with Troll Hunter: a movie so convincing that some viewers wondered if trolls really do exist. So, had this been straightforwardly made, it likely wouldn’t have been as effective. Conventional narratives would be more inclined to treat something like trolls as flat out unreal, and never try to convince the audience to think otherwise.
Hans petrifies the three-headed Tusseladd troll.
The viewers, like the characters trailing Hans, are quickly thrown into the deeper end of that extraordinary story. They have to process all this new information while staying on the go. So, although there is no significant amount of meandering, narratively or physically, there is still a good amount of atmosphere, not to mention tension building. It’s never anything frightful, but then again, Troll Hunter isn’t your standard offering of horror; it’s more on the low end of the dark fantasy spectrum. We aren’t ever spirited away to a faraway world—we stay in rather familiar surroundings, as well as dip into those less so. The outcome is a movie where you’re constantly more in awe than in terror.
As fantasy fiction might do, Troll Hunter prefers not to deal with incredulity. There is no time to waste on doubt, as interviewer Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), soundperson Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) all follow Hans around, recording whatever this character is willing to reveal about his bizarre job. Of course, the Troll Hunter himself is not an open book; in that respect, the diegetic documentary fails to fully capture and unpack the more interesting of its two subjects. Yes, all those giant, monstrous trolls are indeed incredible, but understandably, your mind wanders to their pursuer. What kind of person signs up for this gig and then chooses to stick with it for so long?
Reviews have called out Troll Hunter for its lack of character development. In regard to Thomas and his fellow documentarians, that criticism is valid, but bear in mind, they aren’t the focus of the story, either. Meanwhile, Hans is a well-crafted character. At least better than first realized. Before he was introduced, Hans had already grown tired of the troll grind. Fed up with that low compensation for his services, resentful of the bureaucracy, and wanting to expose his employer on a large scale, Hans’ discontent is glaring.
Then there are those finer details about the Troll Hunter, such as that indifference to both the natural splendor of his everyday surroundings and the affections of an obviously smitten colleague, that also suggest some level of despondency. So it is fair to say this movie doesn’t feature any sizable growth for its characters; however, the namesake isn’t underwritten. No doubt, putting a real-life character like Otto Jespersen in that role is partly why Hans is so fascinating—maybe even relatable.
Otto Jespersen as Hans the Troll Hunter.
There is always a small risk whenever using the term “mockumentary” to describe a found-footage movie, as the word could imply humor where there is none. In the case of Troll Hunter, the term’s usage is appropriate. Some folks have claimed the English-dubbed version has the more comedic tone, however, the Norwegian cut isn’t exactly humorless. Apart from the trolls’ absurd appearances, this is a movie where the characters nearly choke on the monsters’ farts, and Christians are like walking targets. Hans’ complete apathy towards everything is another cause of laughter. Overall, the comedy is intentionally dry and inconsistent. Unfunny, though? Absolutely not.
In a movie where endemic creatures are maltreated, as well as disavowed from living freely and peacefully, it’s hard not to notice the ecological message buried beneath the story. In addition to that is the unmistakable political satire. There is this whole business about intrusive and unsightly power lines—like trolls, they’re big blemishes on the land—that leads to what is perhaps the movie’s funniest moment. The scene in question is that one where certain electric lines, the ones secretly being used to keep the trolls at bay, go in a loop and don’t actually send power to any residents. Yet the monitors of said lines don’t find this at all weird. So it stands to reason that Øvredal was having a go at those who accept the government’s doings without question.
Looking past the fact that trolls aren’t actually real, this movie is an enlightening source of information. And not just for international audiences; Norwegians, too, get schooled about their homeland’s own mythology. It’s also evident from everything on screen that Øvredal and his crew were enthusiastic about the topic. The creature designs are the most indicative of that zeal; those imaginative yet myth-accurate manifestations are equally amusing and grotesque. One second you’re laughing at their phallic noses, the next you’re white-knuckling during a hairy sequence. Most surprisingly is how well the trolls’ visual effects hold up after fifteen years. It’s not all spotless, but on the whole, they remain impressive.
Vouching for a mockumentary about trolls isn’t easy, but those who do come around and give it a shot will more than likely be grateful for the recommendation. For Troll Hunter is a real find in that vast and varied genre we call “found footage“.
A bridge troll reaches up for food and finds Hans decked out in armor.
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