Ryko is pretty much hit-and-miss on their
soundtrack releases. Some of them are pretty incredible. The Pink Panther
Strikes Again and The Living Daylights releases were both
very nice, while the soundtrack to The Great Escape was very bare
bones consisting of around 30 minutes of playing time and bits of dialog
from the movie. It is unfortunate that their release of John Barry's score
to Octopussy follows that same formula. While it has some nice
fold-out linear notes, and some multimedia content (actually just a
completely laughable trailer for the film) that can be played on PC that has
a CD-ROM drive capable of reading the extra information encoded on the disc,
the selection of music is very limited and one can't be left with the
feeling that there has to be more than what's included.
I found this score to be pretty basic and repetitive,
which really surprised me since I've enjoyed a lot of the Barry music for
the franchise. Basically, you're better off skipping this one for The
Living Daylights as there is a lot of cues that were upgraded for that
much better score. In fact, the performance of the Bond theme sounds exactly
the same as it does in The Living Daylights. The main title song, All
Time High, is also unremarkable. What makes it even worse is that it
appears twice on the CD and both times the performances are exactly the
same, which is a complete waste of space. Most of the CD consists of
romantic underscore which never really seems to go anywhere, or make any
interesting use of the main title theme. The action cues are rather drab
and, as a Barry staple, just repeat over and over again. While it worked in
previous scores (and it would again), the action themes here are really
nothing special and it makes this little facet of Barry's composing a little
more irritating.
I guess I've really dumped on this score,
but it really isn't horrible. After listening to such excellent scores as Goldfinger,
On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and The
Living Daylights, I was really disappointed. It's still Bond and it's
still Barry, and that much alone makes it a good score, it's just that this
franchise has seen much better. ***
