Buy it... if, simply put, you were an enthusiast of James Horner's style of representing the spirit of space flight in Apollo 13.

Avoid it... if hearing another composer cough up an obvious temp-track variation on Horner's work is an irony you'd prefer to mock from a safe distance.

The Dish: (Edmund Choi) Few people know that Australia played a pivotal role in the broadcasting of live images during astronaut Neil Armstrong's historic step onto the moon in 1969. The film The Dish is the story of the Australian satellite complex, located on a sheep paddock, which served as the backup transmitter for the live images from the moon to reach the rest of the world. When the primary NASA satellite in America malfunctioned during the mission, the Australians served a silent, heroic part in the adventure by ensuring that the iconic imagery from space could be seen. A character drama with a decent cast, the film is a lightweight tale that received primarily positive reviews from critics in 2000 but failed to win the hearts of audiences. Director Rob Sitch was familiar with the music of composer Edmund Choi, who had been director M. Night Shyamalan's first collaborator on two projects and had worked to re-score a Sitch film a year before. With Choi's career still in its fledgling stages, his music for Wide Awake had been heard on an album circulated around the film score community at about the same time. For The Dish, Choi would be given the task of writing a friendly, patriotic score for the hometown Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and a local choir. He indeed accomplished this feat, but at a cost. Every once in a while, there are productions that rely so heavily on their temp tracked music (usually at the hands of the director) that it cripples their finished products. This is a picture-perfect example of this phenomenon. The temp track influences in Choi's work for The Dish are so pronounced that the score translates into something of an oddity. Choi's finished score, albeit pleasant and undemanding, is a mirror image of those temped scores: James Horner's Apollo 13 and, to a lesser extent, Bill Conti's The Right Stuff. While Conti's work was a well-known staple of 1980's cinema, Apollo 13 remained NASA's musical calling card throughout the 1990's and into the 2000's. The combination of nobility and yearning in Horner's Oscar-nominated 1995 score has proven to perfectly encapsulate the spirit of space flight, and it's obvious that Sitch (or someone else on the production team) agreed.

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It is difficult to say where a project like this goes wrong, if even at all, but the music is common enough in its genre to slip past 90% of the film's general viewership without much notice. The other 10%, the film score enthusiasts, will either cry foul immediately or scratch their heads in amazement. If a professor of film music composition at the college level wanted to choose a score as part of an exercise identifying the close adaptation of existing material, Choi's The Dish would be a perfect specimen. The themes, motifs, and instrumentation are just varied enough to avoid potential legal troubles, and yet the similarities to Apollo 13 in particular are a textbook study. The solo trumpet, tolling chimes, rolling snare drum, anxious piano, light choir, and stylish solo voice are all employed in very similar fashion, ensuring that every aspect of Apollo 13 was adapted into The Dish in some form or another. As blatant as it may be, the interesting aspect of the adaptation is that the music stands strongly as a coherent score, which perhaps serves as testimony to the strength of Horner's inspiring material. Despite the troubling structure of the score in several very short cues, few of which able to develop their own individuality, the listening experience is still quite stable. On the whole, with each passing cue, you hear another snippet of a Horner lovefest, culminating into the score's most blatant and massive Apollo 13 borrowing at the climax of the film. With the help of Tina Arena's voice, an angelic choir, and a rich, harmonic orchestral performance, Choi manages to completely recreate the Annie Lennox end titles cue from Apollo 13. In its own right, this piece, "The Day the World Stood Still," is an easy highlight of the score. Whether the average Horner collector can get past the similarities at the root of the problem is another issue. Those who despise Horner's tendency to lift his own material will find The Dish to be an ironic and potentially obnoxious twist on Horner's own habits. The album, which fell out of print quickly, contains less than 30 minutes of score and is tuned towards a collection of 1960's source songs in its first half. Probably for financial reasons, they are not songs from the era that you will likely recognize, but there will be a gem in the selection for any listener. Overall, The Dish is a bizarre listening experience, one that didn't help catapult Choi's career onto bigger and more original assignments. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download