Predators (Soundtrack) by John Debney - Review

Bittersweet Nostalgia
Review by Marius Masalar

For JOHN DEBNEY, who spent a great part of this year working to produce the score to IRON MAN 2 (the album for which was only recently released), PREDATORS was by his own admission a much more fast-paced and brief scoring project with significantly different challenges. Not the least of which was filling the shoes of the series’ first composer, Alan Silvestri, whose iconic music for the first film still represents one of cinema’s most accomplished action/horror scores.

DEBNEY’s score attempts to do two major and obvious things: serve as a strong homage to Silvestri’s original score, and integrate that with his own sound to reflect the new film’s contemporary feel. Unfortunately, whether because of time pressures or strange directorial initiatives or some other reason, he fails to adequately achieve either of his two goals, which makes the generous 66-minute album drag on unpleasantly. In fact it isn’t so much unpleasant as surprisingly uninteresting given that this is the man who brought us masterpieces of sophistication and musicality like CUTTHROAT ISLAND and, more recently, LAIR.

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