Here is another James Horner score that fans can
praise and detractors can lament. As for just Horner himself, he's at his finest
here, delivering a score that can proudly stand among his more notable
works. For those that truly dislike his frequent borrowings of his own work,
they will find that he hasn't changed in the least.
In the technical areas, this is an excellent
album, topping in a just a few seconds under eighty minutes. How those
engineers at Sony Classical even dared to churn out at disc this long is a
marvel. Horner fans have generally been blessed with such long releases and
this one doesn't disappoint in that area. The tracks do tend to go on for a long time, but
they are still nicely sequenced and they break at appropriate points. The
score abounds with thematic material and a lot of the themes are really good
with a majestic main theme that gets a little too much playing at times, and
a really cool theme that blends a trumpet line with a banging electronic
guitar (almost in the spirit of Hans Zimmer). Horner succeeds brilliantly in
indwelling the music with the spirit of the man vs. nature. The music always
conveyed the sense of something larger and impersonal being the antagonist
and not just a personified villain. Of course, some of the themes are derivative
from some of Horner's other works. The style of the music is almost
identical to Apollo 13, especially in the
use of the brass section. In addition to that I also encountered moments
from The Mask of Zorro (the second biggest influence on this score), Krull,
and Star Trek II (that little string-based suspense cue for the
arming of the Genesis device seems quite popular with Horner).
I don't have a very extensive collection of Horner
scores, so this list should be considered a minimum. I have long maintained
that Horner's borrowing doesn't bother me as long as the music is good, and
that continues to be the case here. I found the intertwining of those
moments to be quite interesting, and even entertaining at times, especially considering some of the themes are
replayed with differing instruments. Though some of them (like the dark
motif from The Mask of Zorro) get a little annoying because they pop
up a lot are hardly differ at all from their original version.
While there will be those that dismiss this
score as another Horner rip-off, I found it to be quite enjoyable. Definitely
recommend to Horner fans. ***1/2
