Watertower Music / Decca, out now

Alan Silvestri’s score to Steven Spielberg’s VR adventure romp is as indebted to pop culture references as the on-screen action and is non-stop succession of ‘big’ music.

At 85 minutes, the 22 tracks on this soundtrack release barely let up. It’s a kinetic, brassy and propulsive score, and Silvestri seems to be having a blast. Composers have signature sounds – that’s just the way their fingers fall – and it’s often used as a criticism that scores can sound too similar (James Horner’s Aliens vs Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan as an example) but on this occasion Silvestri not only uses riffs that sound like his back catalogue, but riffs that are actually from his previous films – the flourish of Back to the Future when the Zemeckis Cube is activated during track Why Can’t We Go Backwards?

Spielberg’s regular composer John Williams wasn’t available to take on this project, but Silvestri is a perfect alternative, some of his brassy fanfares sounding very much like they’ve been taken out of Williams’ oeuvre. This is one of those rare occasions where you don’t condemn a score for being too derivative, but actually revel in the number of callbacks and references it manages to squeeze in; the inclusion of Akira Ifukube’s 1954 Godzilla theme is a lovely surprise. The musical reference to a certain horror movie that’s used in the movie is not included here – possibly for licensing/ copyright reasons?

Judged in relation to Silvestri’s other action-heavy scores, there’s definitely a feel of Judge Dredd, The A-Team and more recently The Avengers. In between the aural Easter eggs let’s also not ignore some smart original themes. The Main Title is a triumphant anthem that could have been plucked from a World War II movie with diversions of Americana. This, and End Credits, are sequenced as the last two tracks on the album, the latter being an eight-minute distillation of the movie’s core cues.

Verdict: Knowing references, cheeky refrains and a good solid base of new anthemic material, it’s the perfect score to a kaleidoscopic film that cries out for a whole extra bunch of pop culture soundtrack references. 8/10

Nick Joy