Alan Silvestri's Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - The Cradle of Life original score receives re-release "Deluxe Edition" treatment

Varese Sarabande provides Tomb Raider and film score fans with an unexpected expanded catalogue release of Alan Silvestri's original score to Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - The Cradle of Life. Nearly 20 years later, the 2003 film and its 2001 predecessor starring Angelina Jolie do have quite the cult following. Four respective soundtrack albums were previously released, two alongside each film, being both original scores and various artist feature compilations. 

The "Deluxe Edition" album includes approximately thirty minutes of unreleased music, more-or-less constituting an unprecedented complete score release for the franchise's second film entry. This album is immediately available across all streaming and digital music platforms, which is unusual for such a niche project, as well as a limited edition physical 2-CD run consisting of 2000 copies only. The latter collectible is out on October 28th, 2022, available to pre-order at Varese Sarabande today.

MoTR of course has secured a copy for archiving and the album is published in our Commercial Discography. Full tracklist supplied after the jump below - we've taken the liberty of highlighting the previously unreleased material. Notably, Craig Armstrong's "Lab Scene" has been included as track 14 "She Escaped - Break In". This may or may not be as previously suspected an ultimately unused, Silvestri-embellished version of the piece, regardless, Armstrong goes conspicuously uncredited. "Shoot Her Between The Eyes" appears to be the Silvestri substitute, denoted here as ultimately unused in the final film. 

Both Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) & Cradle of Life (2003) are notorious for having hired composers at very late stages of production. Silvestri, according to the DVD featurettes, famously borrowed and varied Nathan McCree's original Tomb Raider video game motif for the second film. Following expansion of the hour-long album of 2003, new liner notes from Silvestri himself are included in the 2022 Deluxe Edition - issued to those first lucky two-thousand owners.    

A notational look at Alan Silvestri's "Pandora's Box" from Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - The Cradle of Life

With a new Tomb Raider film on the horizon inspired by the 2013 video game reboot of Tomb Raider, guest author Tudor Tulok looks back at the most recent Lara Croft: Tomb Raider screen media - 2003's The Cradle of Life. Composed and conducted by Alan Silvestri and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, the musical score to Cradle borrows and expands upon Nathan McCree's original motif from the first Tomb Raider video game score in 1996. "Pandora's Box", however, an intensely emotional track that accompanies the climax of the film, is a fresh composition of Silvestri's:

Unearthed Cradle piece by Silvestri, missing from score album

Academy-Award-winning Alan Silvestri composed the score to Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - The Cradle of Life (2003), borrowing Nathan McCree's original motif from Tomb Raider (1996) in his own arrangement as the "Main Title" and for subsequent uses and developments throughout the film.

The Original Motion Picture Score album is still available via both Amazon & iTunes. The motion picture itself happens to run for 112 minutes; while there are segments of the picture without music and other lengths using peripheral music not by Silvestri, the 59 minutes of material present on the soundtrack CD is cut rather short.

One interesting piece is a transitional cue that plays at about 5 minutes and 40 seconds into the film, during the boat ride to the Luna Temple dive. At only 24 seconds in length, it is a beautiful composition offering depth to the opening of the film and further expanding the leitmotifs of the Cradle of Life score.

This piece in mention unfortunately isn't present on the published album, but via methods of interpolation from the DVD audio we are able to stream a sample for our readers. The tune has since graced the landing of our (now under construction) Commercial Discography page. Do take a look!