I never knew James Horner wrote a cue for the marines’ prep sequence in Aliens until I heard it on Varèse Sarabande’s expanded album in 2001.
I assumed it was meant for the flight itself—when the marines are in the drop ship descending to the planet. And I think I saw somebody try to track it over that sequence on YouTube—which, naturally, didn’t work.
But no, it synchs perfectly to the prep sequence, cutting out at the moment the drop ship detaches from the Sulaco.
I love this piece and I marvel at Horner’s simplicity and innate dramatic knack of what to hit and what not to hit.
I do agree with the choice not to use it (in lieu of Harry Rabinowitz library music, a kind of ambient militaristic percussion piece). It’s good to experience the prep sequence more naturalistically, rather than with the theatricality of Horner’s muscular cue. It really makes you think, “Oh, man, these guys seem tough—I know they’re about to be Alien food, but how exactly? They have so many guns.” Music might make them seem like an unstoppable force of their own—when you want them to be slightly naked and exposed.
But what I’m really drawn to is Horner’s 1980s style, with those bold major chords on the lydian scale, which is all over his early sci-fi and space music. I’ll always wonder exactly how he to came to it, although it does seem quite obviously influenced by Goldsmith of that era (Capricorn One, Star Trek: The Motion Picture).
It’s kind of an obvious idea: there’s no gravity in space, no up or down, so there’s no key center either. So you can go from a major chord to the major chord a tritone away. Here it’s the marines’ theme: G major, A major, then—a tritone away—E-flat major.
I think Herrmann might have figured this out first in film, for The Day the Earth Stood Still? Steal from the best!
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