MovieScore Media release Panu Aaltio's score for The Island of Secrets. This Finnish-Greek co-production centres on a vacationing family whose children get involved in an exciting hunt to capture illegal treasure hunters. Our main heroes are Toni, Aleksi and Veeti, who really wishes he could be Indiana Jones - when the occasion arises, the three kids are more than happy to save artifacts and put bad guys behind bars. By teaming up with expert driver Adriana, the three boys are about to have the most adventurous summer of their lives...

Panu Aaltio's score for The Island of Secrets, like the movie's main plot, pays homage to Hollywood movie scores of the '80s/'90s.

So we have splashes of John Williams's Jurassic Park ('A Sinister Plot'); James Horner's Cocoon ('Hidden Treasure') and Alan Silvestri's Back to the Future ('The Rescue'). But don't, for a minute, think that this means Aaltio is simply mining old scores to produce his work. These moments are only fleeting, what he delivers is a truly original and wonderfully intricate soundtrack to a family action adventure movie.

The score opens with a memorable main theme, and you may be forgiven for thinking that the soundtrack has peaked there; that Aaltio couldn't possibly top that. But, as he's proven in the past (The Tale of a Forest; Dawn of the Dragonslayer; The Home of Dark Butterflies) his ability to write beautiful theme after beautiful theme is almost unprecedented. Many composers would have written one main theme and a handful of secondary pieces and then woven them around more bland, atmospheric music.

What Aaltio delivers here is 20 tracks (44 min, 03 sec) of beautifully orchestrated original material that is up there with Hollywood's finest.

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Darren Rea