Rio (Soundtrack) by John Powell - Review

Is Powell's Score the Rio Dio?
Review by Tracksounds Gang Tackle

After the overwhelming success of HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, expectations on the prolific composer could hardly be any higher. Somewhat stealthily, composer JOHN POWELL slid in an early 2011 project, MARS NEEDS MOMS and the effort was met with a general coolness. Perhaps it was because the marketing budget for the film was comparatively meager and people simply didn't have much advanced notice in which to let expectations build to an unfairly feverish pitch, or perhaps it was because Powell-fans were still stinging over the Oscar let-down. Whatever the case, by April most had moved on and were well into the music and movies of the new year. Unlike MARS NEEDS MOMS, Blue Sky's RIO has seen its share of publicity and so expectations on both the film and score are notabley higher.

In RIO, POWELL puts his talents behind the story of Blu (Jesse Eisenberg), a rare blue macaw, who ends up being snatched from his colorful world of the Brazlian jungle and tumbles into the slightly less colorful world of Minnesota. Domesticated and flightless, Blu is paired with a female blue macaw (Anne Hathaway) with the goal of propagating the species.  Snatched yet again and chained together, the two end up back in Brazil, but they must survive the dangers of the streets over the dangers of the jungle...

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