20 Things You Somehow Missed In Die Hard
2. Recognise The Music?
Sergeant Al Powell had a major shake to his confidence when he accidentally shot a child in the line of duty and therefore has not used his gun in the line of duty since.
The finale to Die Hard allows his character to redeem himself, when Gruber's lieutenant, Karl, is revealed to be alive and thirsting for revenge. Posing as a terrorist, Karl takes aim at John McClane and Holly; as people dive left, right, and centre, including the McClanes, Powell stands firm and shoots Karl down with his service revolver.
If the music in this sequence seems slightly out of place, especially when compared with the dark Christmas music and action cues provided by the film's composer, Michael Kamen, then there is a very good reason for this: it is not his music.
John McTiernan did not like Kamen's original score for this particular scene and filled the gap with an unused excerpt from James Horner's score for James Cameron's Aliens (1986). It was only meant to be a placeholder, but the music stuck, since nothing that McTiernan preferred came along. The heroic crescendo that the music reaches fits perfectly with Powell finding redemption at the end of the film, but jars slightly with the remainder of Kamen's soundtrack score. It does, however, segue quite nicely into Vaughan Monroe's 1945-46 song, Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!