3 out of 5

Label: Milan Records

Produced by: Nick Wollage (recorded by)

The opening track on Ramin Djawadi’s The Great Wall score – Nameless Order – sets up the musical threads one will find for the remainder of the soundtrack: some choral chants (done in Chinese, befitting the film’s production and setting); layered strings; pounding drums. You’ll hear the arrangements and motifs that will be reused, and it is a very bombastic, notable tune, doing the job of a movie theme effectively, especially for what would seem to be a pretty high-flying historical epic. That said, there’s something about it that also feels somewhat more intimate and stripped down than the composer’s big themes, perhaps Djawadi trying to balance out what’s clearly of the “make it sound like Game of Thrones” variety and a desire to pare the actual playing down to some key performers. This is novel, and works really well for Order, but then… mostly doesn’t do much thereafter.

A big problem is the production, or possibly the orchestration, possibly both: with this more limited approach, I’d want the instruments sharper in the mix, playing off against each other, but instead, much of this gets really buried behind those more traditional blockbuster big strings and big drums, when it’s also not always clear that the latter two are meant to be employed in that manner. This leaves nearly the entire soundtrack in a rather wishy-washy territory of smaller-scale tracks zoomed in to blockbuster levels, which they can’t quite support.

Taking in all of that criticism, it’s a well-sequenced bit of cues and thematic layering, with no track shorter than 1:30, meaning even cues get their moment to establish a beat. The “story” told by the music is admittedly fairly generic, in a way that suggests the movie may be somewhat tonally middling as well, though I haven’t seen it to confirm; it’s just that things get dramatic and quiet, but beyond the opening (and a probably late-film climactic moment – Tower Tactics – and occasional flourishes of different instrumentation, or sudden changes in pace), the feelings affected are rather surface level – it sounds like, again, someone just wanted a GoT score, and whatever subtleties may be in the tracks were recorded and mixed out in favor of that bolder GoT sound.

The Great Wall is not an unpleasant listen by any means, acting as plenty serviceable for a movie, and for your background listening. As a Djawadi soundtrack, I can hear some ideas in there, but outside of the theme – which, even there, could be said to be somewhat covered elsewhere – it’s not especially noteworthy.