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Rating: The piece I am about to review is a soundtrack, yes, but surprise, it is not the soundtrack of a movie, but rather of a video game. Indeed, Medal Of Honor Underground is a video game, perhaps a bit old by now, released in the distant year of 2000. Its predecessor, Medal Of Honor, released in 1999, was inspired by Saving Private Ryan and crafted by Spielberg himself. Not only was it an excellent video game, but it was also one of the first games with a true orchestral soundtrack, in this case performed by the Seattle orchestra. The tracks were composed by Michael Giacchino, a composer then relatively unknown, particularly influenced by the works of John Williams (for those who may not know, he is the composer of almost all of Spielberg’s film scores). However, I chose to talk about the soundtrack of the second chapter of the now long video game saga that Medal Of Honor has become, subtitled Underground, because in my humble opinion, Giacchino surpassed himself and his already excellent previous work here by adding several "ethnic" instruments and a children's choir to his compositions, creating something absolutely exceptional.
To help you better understand the beauty of this work, I will progressively talk about the video game, which not everyone will be familiar with, and how various events unfold which Giacchino accompanies with his music. "May 10th, 1942" opens the disc, containing the two main "themes" that Giacchino would use to compose most of the subsequent tracks, which you will find cited many times. A threatening and oppressive opening, a variation of the "Nazi Theme" from the first game, which represents the Nazi occupation of France, spills into the "Manon Theme," the main theme, representing not only the perspective of Manon, a French resistance fighter and the game’s protagonist, but also a much larger viewpoint, that of occupied France, as in this case. But it is with "The Streets of Paris" that the actual game begins: it is night in occupied Paris in 1942, and the streets are patrolled by Nazi police and the French collaborator militia. The atmosphere is very well rendered by very low string notes, and the tension is almost palpable. Manon and her brother Jacques attempt to steal an ammunition truck hidden in the courtyard of a music academy to aid their resistance comrades. Suddenly, in an unexpected finale, the tension created by the strings breaks, the orchestra explodes, and Manon witnesses the police ambush that kills her brother. Manon finds herself alone and flees to the catacombs: "Amongst the Dead" is another eerie and slow track, where wordless choirs, bells, and a very "lugubrious" sound, evoke a sense of claustrophobia while Manon ventures alone into the dark. After regrouping with her resistance comrades in a small village, Manon finds herself fighting and fleeing with them like rats during a raid in "Fleeing the Catacombs," a very lively track where the "Nazi Theme" and the "Manon Theme" are intertwined. Escape routes are blocked, and the partisans are trapped and driven into the village by the arrival of German Panzers. This track ("Panzer Blockade"), like the previous one, is characterized by the alternation of two themes, the "Manon Theme" and a theme representing the irresistible advance of Nazi tanks, which is both majestic and terrifying in this instance. Months after the events (during which Manon managed to escape the raid), the O.S.S., the old CIA, recruits her as a secret agent (this serves as a pretext for the writers to shift between vastly different scenarios throughout the game).
Leaving behind the oppressive atmosphere of occupied France, the action moves to North Africa, where Manon is sent to sabotage a fuel depot of the Panzer V army to facilitate the Allies' landing in Tunisia. "The Road to Tobruk" is a very slow track, where we follow Manon as she infiltrates the depot in the back of a truck and, disguised as a Nazi propaganda photographer, seeks a radio to transmit the depot's location to the Allied fleet. There are phrases introduced that will be given more importance and emphasis in the subsequent "Escape from Casablanca," a track that can’t help but evoke the music from an "Indiana Jones" movie, serving as the backdrop to the escape through the sun-drenched and narrow Tunisian alleys (note the introduction of "ethnic" instruments, such as maracas and other particular types of percussion, which make it quite "exotic"). The same template (a slow track to represent infiltration, followed by a powerful one to depict the ensuing action) is also applied to the game part set in Crete, in a sort of homage to "The Guns of Navarone," an old 1960s war film. Again, in the slow "Passage to Iraklion," Manon, disguised as in North Africa as a propaganda photographer, reaches her target, which this time is the Knossos palace, where German guns are hidden that fire upon Allied ships passing through the area. And once again, undisguised, Manon finds herself fighting, this time along the palace corridors, attempting to reach the guns in a frantic track endowed with a certain drama, dominated as usual by strings ("Labyrinth of the Minotaur"), where the "Nazi Theme" makes occasional appearances. From Greece, the story moves to Germany, where this time Manon is tasked with penetrating a castle that Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, had rebuilt to indulge his medieval fantasies, Wewelsburg Castle, where many Nazi secrets were concealed, including a roundtable where Himmler and the 12 most important SS generals of the moment would gather in a sort of Nazi reinterpretation of Camelot, and where the Nazis conducted their studies on the origins of the so-called "Aryan race" with the aid of a 12,000-volume library. "Ascent to the Castle" is dominated by strings and aptly portrays the sense of occultism and mystery hiding behind those never-opened doors with its hesitant air and the occasional inclusion of the "Nazi Theme." It is, in my opinion, with the last piece where the work reaches its peak: the action shifts once more, this time to the Monte Cassino Abbey. "Last Rites," a tragic march characterized by children's choirs (with small nods to those of Bach) and cellos, catapults us into the devastated woods beneath the abbey. The sky is black as Manon moves through a forest of trees decapitated by explosions. Giacchino now depicts the war no longer as a sort of Indiana Jones adventure, but as something tragic, and one gets this feeling a bit when listening to this touching piece.
The writers, in an effort not to be historically accurate for the sake of drama, have Manon infiltrate the abbey, where she must free the pilots held prisoner inside before dawn, when the abbey will be razed. "Battle of Monte Cassino" takes up the central part of "Last Rites" as the main theme and speeds it up, without, however, losing the drama of the previous piece, managing to give it a certain emphasis and pomp, while the choir now chants a "Fiat Lux," and the "Nazi Theme" attempts to counter the main theme of the piece. "The Motorcycle Escape" is, in my opinion, another of the most successful tracks. Manon, returned to France, flees on a sidecar, like in an action movie, after having destroyed a V1 plant; the track can be divided into three parts: in the first, initially slow, stealthily, but with a certain speed, the main theme is introduced, only to burst into the usual "Nazi Theme." The second part introduced by drums reprises the first, enriched, repeating the same structure, concluding in a crescendo, after which the third part begins, even richer, concluding with a triumphant version of the "Manon Theme," leaving the listener utterly breathless. By now we reach the end, Manon returns home to fight street by street and house by house with the Parisians to liberate her city. "Returning in Paris" alternates powerful and emphatic parts with slower, more hesitating parts, in continual crescendos and diminuendos. "Beneath the City," the finale, sees Manon engaged in a race against time to stop the SS demolition squad VIII before it can reach Paris in the metro, a very fast piece where at the end comes, much sped up, the "Manon Theme." Added to all this is a sort of extra, "Each Night He Came Home To Me," sung by Bettina Spier, a song that revisits the old Marlene Dietrich songs of the '40s, which appears in the game during the final Paris skirmishes, sung in German. You can listen to this version ("Er lässt mich niemals allein"), which is available on the CD, complete with typical gramophone crackle and a German announcer.
Having reached the end of this review, I can't but sum up and recommend the purchase, whether you have the game or not; if you want to listen to an orchestral soundtrack on par with those legendary ones by John Williams, this is the disc for you.
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