Sunday, July 18, 2010

Music Trivia #03 the music of: Die Hard

Here's another installment of my music trivia!
With the kind of blog updates, I hope, you can keep for later when you have time to enjoy...And listen to, calmly sometime, be it at work (well,that is if you have the kind of work where you can listen to music, or while working on homeworks...) or while reading, etc..

Come out to the coast, we'll get together, have a few laughs..

Today's topic, as you can guess, Die Hard!


I'm a huge fan of Die Hard!
It's a great action/cop franchise, one of the more fun entries to the genre, specially for hollywood blockbusters! (which tend to be too similar or too cliché)

One of my favorite parts of these movies, alongside Bruce Willis' fantastic character, is perhaps the music itself!
Briliant, epic and pretty intense for all 4 current entries!

I specially love how all the Die Hard flicks starts off with mostly the same kind of overture.
Let's simply dig into the original Die Hard's opening theme:



Wow!
Just wow! This is a fantastic opening! The theme is a lil' ambiguous.
The movie start, but something's quite not right... problems arising in the distance...
The three original Die Hard were scored by the amazing composer Michael Kamen.

When the sequel, which I love, hit the screens, it was great to hear the same kind of overture open the title screen with:



Die Harder, while not using the exact same theme, opens on a similar tune.


As soon as it starts...we're following the bad guys... they're scheming some plot...which will end up badly...
And John McLane will have to kick the bad guy's ass as usual...
It's a very nice throw back to the first movie and a great way to open a new chapter of "John McLane's Classic Xmas Holidays".

Found at: FilesTube

Die Hard With A Vengreance then starts as well using the same motif.
By this time, you know where there's John McLane, there's trouble.
I like how iconic this opening became by this third film.

For as much I don't like Die Hard 4, for reason I won't discuss in this article, I'm Marco Beltrami was chosen to succeed after Michael Kamen.
Well, I would have prefered Kamen to come back to the franchise (maybe having him out of the movie was a sign for how...the movie would turn out...), but Marco Beltrami's a great composer as well.
I'm glad he kept all the themes and the same kind of composition for the movie.



Live Free Or Die Hard starts out exactly like Die Hard 1, but things get a bit more epic this time, so does the score a second after the initial ambiguous note plays out~


All in all, the four Die Hard movies sound very similar and keep all this great tension and suspenseful atmosphere.
Of course, we didn't hear everything here, this was a mere "overview" of the series, from a musical point of view.

I'll leave you now with this kickass tribute to Die Hard:


Guyz Nite - Die hard