Michael Giacchino, 2003
Among Michael Giacchino’s World War II scores, Secret Weapons Over Normandy is conceptually and emotionally the most straightforward. There is none of the anguish and tragedy of Medal of Honor: Frontline, none of the subtle character shading of Medal of Honor: Underground, and not even the occasional touches of solemn patriotism found in the original Medal of Honor. The viciousness of Call of Duty, released at almost the same time, also feels worlds away. Instead, Secret Weapons Over Normandy takes Medal of Honor‘s “war as adventure” aesthetic and pushes it to an intensely entertaining, bombastic extreme.
Secret Weapons Over Normandy is best understood as a return to the original Medal of Honor‘s brash, gung-ho spirit — filtered through Frontline‘s more assured command of orchestral colour and stripped of that later score’s tragic undercurrent. This suits the game’s arcade-like nature perfectly: music of operatic emotional range would have been a misfit here. The score’s harmonic language reinforces that directness — the heroic mission cues settle into major keys almost without exception, while the more dangerous and tense passages stay in minor, the harmony tracking the emotional register of each mission with unusual consistency.
The score is all about the exhilaration of tearing through the skies and hurling oneself into dogfights, and it is hard to imagine a more fitting accompaniment for that fantasy than Giacchino’s music. Secret Weapons also makes for an interesting counterpoint to the other great orchestral score for a World War II combat flight simulator, Jeremy Soule’s IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey. Both are lush orchestral works, but they pursue very different ideals. Where Birds of Prey relies on majestic masses of imperial sound, Secret Weapons is a breathless rush of excitement — a hotbed of orchestral activity held together by an unquenchable sense of heroic bravado.
As on Giacchino’s Medal of Honor scores, the opening track immediately signals where the music is headed. “Main Theme” presents a melody that, despite superficial similarities, differs significantly from the Medal of Honor theme. This is not a calmly confident gesture of courage, but a gladiatorial, brass-heavy call to arms. From here, Giacchino launches into perhaps his most densely written and colourful game score. Deliciously excessive, Secret Weapons feels like the young composer testing just how far he can push his own language.
The sheer abundance of primary and secondary themes matches the score’s exuberance. This dense network of motifs permeates almost every minute of the soundtrack, and it is far more than a decorative bonus: it is essential to the score’s success. These sprawling, hyperactive soundscapes need strong recurring material in order to remain coherent, and Giacchino provides exactly that.
At the centre is a patriotic main theme — memorable, if hardly subtle. Its sheer triumphant fighting spirit makes it an effective marker each time it returns. The German Nemesis flying squad, meanwhile, receives an aggressive, fanfare-like motif that is functional rather than distinctive. Surrounding these two omnipresent ideas is a host of secondary themes that give the score much of its energy and flexibility.
The effectiveness of this thematic interplay is especially clear on “Copenhagen”. There, a flighty secondary motif first heard in “The Rescue of Pauline” follows a particularly brutal statement of the Nemesis theme, breaking the suffocating atmosphere created by the latter’s ferocity. To make the score denser still, Giacchino also relies on a technique familiar from his other works: building individual cues around motifs unique to that specific track. The exotic flute idea in “Zuara” and the propulsive string figure driving “Fjords of Norway” are especially good examples.
The soundtrack’s “more is better” philosophy extends naturally to its orchestral palette. Recorded with a large orchestra, choir, and taiko ensemble, Secret Weapons takes Giacchino’s music into various distant corners of the globe, even more boldly than Medal of Honor: Underground. “Zuara” introduces lithe North African hand percussion, while “The Siamese Coast” and “Midway” bring in the taiko drums to respond to their Pacific setting. Elsewhere, the choral colours of “Stalingrad”, “East Prussian Factory Run”, and “Fjords of Norway” lend those cues a suitably icy breadth — and “The Siamese Coast” and “Fjords of Norway” are easily the score’s darkest-sounding cues, their warm, shadowed timbre setting them apart from the brighter palette that surrounds them.
There is not a great deal of emotional depth to all this. But Secret Weapons Over Normandy stands as a singular testament to Giacchino’s compositional control. Although the score spends nearly seventy minutes drawing on essentially the same expressive mode — all-guns-blazing battle music — this whirlwind of ideas, colours, and themes rarely turns tiring. Giacchino’s achievement lies in bringing real structure to what could easily have become a great deal of sound and fury signifying little.
The experience resembles Kinect Star Wars — another near-continuous barrage of furious action cues that somehow never grows stale. It also helps explain why Giacchino’s later game scores, such as Medal of Honor: Airborne and Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, sought new directions. It is difficult to imagine Secret Weapons Over Normandy‘s crammed-to-the-brim aesthetic being pushed much further.
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