Soundtrack Review: 10,000 B.C. by Harald Kloser & Thomas Wander (2008)
Welcome back! Have you subscribed to my RSS feed yet? Make sure you don't miss anything by getting all Soundtrack Geek posts by Email. Also check out Soundtrack Fans, a new social network for soundtrack fans. Thanks for visiting!
Roland Emmerich, love him or hate him, he does produce nail biting action. There’s sci-fi action, monster action and well, sci-fi action so why not ancient action? It’s been 4 years since he directed his last movie The Day After Tomorrow and this time, the theme couldn’t be much more different. The movie has no big names, but the concept is exciting and the videos look great. What I noticed is that Roland Emmerich wrote this movie with the composer Harald Kloser. This is the first time I have seen a high profile composer write a movie, and so you expect him to have given his blood and soul for the score to 10,000 B.C.
Harald Kloser composed for the Roland Emmerich movie The Day After Tomorrow 4 years ago, and now they are back together. Since then, Mr. Kloser hasn’t composed for much except AVP in 2004. This score is probably not going to be released, at least not in CD form. I didn’t see it on iTunes either, but I suspect that if the movie becomes a huge success, a release will be forthcoming. The movie itself is still about 4 weeks away (opens in theatres on March 7th), but now is a chance to get an audio preview of this much anticipated movie. The promo score consists of 19 tracks and total playtime is 41:44. The track list is as follows:
- Front Titles
- Mountain Of The Gods
- Spoken Truth
- Passage Of Time
- The Hunt
- Celebrating
- Never Brave
- Eve Of The Tiger
- A Leader Comes
- Terror Birds Attack
- The Blood Of Hunter
- Food Found
- Moving
- Oceans Of Sand
- Wisdom Earned
- My Father
- Sign Of The Hunter
- The Mannaks
- End Credits
So what can we tell from the track list? The titles are in the front, well done Mr. Kloser! There is a God mountain who speaks the truth about the passage of time. Then the hunt begins and they celebrate that they are never brave. Then Rocky shows up, and being punched in the head so many times he can’t get the letters sorted. A leader arrives, but is attacked by terror birds, and the blood of hunter fills the desert. It’s looking up because some food is found, and they are moving across the oceans of sand and even get some wisdom earned in the process (Don’t walk barefoot in the hot desert sand). Then dad shows up… Dad!? What are you doing in this movie? The hunter was not dead after all as they find a sign but the alien race Mannaks invade the earth, the end… or is it? I feel a sequel is coming, it’s called 10,000 A.D.
Oh I’m way of (sound)track now, but I have to say this score is so hard to review. It’s overall a really good score, but there is blatant stealing going on, most notably from Transformers by Steve Jablonsky as you can clearly hear in Spoken Truth and Oceans of Sand. There’s a lot of other songs in there I have heard before, but I can’t quite place them. There’s a lot of good original stuff in there too, lots of ethnic chants and heavy drums. Should I punish Harald Kloser for stealing or should I praise him for stealing what’s good? I feel that although I haven’t seen the movie, it fits the theme very well. It’s like a lighter version of Transformers, but with an ethnic theme. You know what, the bottom line is that it is a good score, stealing or not, and who knows? Maybe it’s this Wander guy whose actual name isn’t Wander at all, meaning he stole the name from some poor Wan*er. The thing is, do we all suddenly think Jonny Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood is a terrible score now that we now that there is about 46 minutes of pre-existing work from other composers? Screw that I say. Listen to the music, if it is well composed, well put together, sounds great, the score itself should be rewarded, not punished. Listen to 10,000 B.C. below:
Other articles of interest:
Loading ...If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
I don’t know, I enjoyed Independence Day and Day After Tomorrow. Yes they are totally stupid, but it’s fun ‘innit? Sometimes you just want to be entertained and I think this is such a movie. Yeah, isn’t it supposed to be 10,000 B.C. with cavemen or whatever? Did the pyramids even exist by then (I do suck at history).
Yep, the score is pretty enjoyable, and I hope they release it in some form.
Great blog post, keep it up 
Daily Celebrity Gossip’s last blog post..Spice Girls Cancel Rest Of World Tour
This soundtrack was a total rip-0ff of Hans Zimmer’s score for the movie “King Arthur”. It is so similar I was amazed he wasn’t sued.
You mean like Zimmer got sued by the Holst estate for using “The Planets” in his Gladiator score? Yep, it’s a total ripoff of different scores (which I happened to like).
I just can’t get enough of the soundtrack, it’s so great for the film. To be honest the score made the film worthy watching. Thanks for the review.
By the way, is it possible to download the full scores for any website or program? I’m lost, can’t find it anywhere.
Please help this poor sucker 
Jorn Tillnes Reply:
January 10th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Great score and I thought the movie wasn’t as bad as many critics said. Well the score should be available everywhere by now, Amazon, iTunes, Walmart etc. Take your pick
You mentioned listen to 10,000 below but nothing is showing for me?
Jorn Tillnes Reply:
January 13th, 2009 at 7:10 am
Are you using Firefox and Adblock? If you do it won’t show because it’s a Amazon MP3 widget. That is probably the reason.
[...] of movie and music right? They did that in 10,000 B.C. and it was really good. Here’s the review of 10,000 B.C. if you have forgotten. So what about [...]
Soundtrack Seek
I can’t say I’m very pumped about seeing this film, as “Independence Day” and “Day After Tomorrow” aren’t exactly on my list of masterpieces. Well…pieces maybe. (Though admittedly watching Will Smith punch an alien in the face was funny) I’ll probably end up renting it just to see some woolly mammoths and saber tooth tigers thrash some Aztec’s in Egypt…or whatever the heck is going on in the trailer.
From what I heard from your samples though, it does sound like a pretty enjoyable score. I’ll have to track it down and see about getting it on the air soon.
Reply