Buy it... if you are loyal to James Newton Howard's sense for tense, ambient suspense, yielding to dissonant orchestral crashes after every three minutes of quiet, electronic atmosphere.

Avoid it... if you are expecting to hear a competent presentation of the score's music on album, for a large sequential segment of the work is not represented on the product.

Howard

Dreamcatcher: (James Newton Howard) A story of courage and desperation, the Stephen King best-selling novel was translated onto the big screen in 2003 by acclaimed director Lawrence Kasdan. The premise of Dreamcatcher is one supernatural power and the inner strength of the human soul, with the usual amount of gratuitous King gore thrown in for cheap thrills. Unfortunately, the film also involved a few very tired concepts involving an alien takeover of humanity, with the nasty visitors gestating in humans and in some cases controlling them. Being a suspense film set in a remote location, with little chance for help and an evil military to boot, the mood of Dreamcatcher isn't one of much jubilation. The overall adaptation is among the worst of a King novel ever to exist, which is saying something given that most of these cinematic versions of his stories are plain awful. The involvement of James Newton Howard on the project would allow the versatile composer to expand upon his increasingly popular ventures into the areas of horror and suspense at the time. Howard, whose score for The Sixth Sense raised eyebrows with its subtle effectiveness, won the hearts of many listeners with his more traditional horror score for Signs in 2002. For Dreamcatcher, Howard would be able to employ the same basic orchestral and electronic ideas from those previous scores but strip them down to their foundation, allowing the loneliness and helplessness of the film's primary characters to embed itself into the stark music for the production. The ensemble of the Hollywood Studio Symphony, performing for Dreamcatcher, is of decent size, though power and depth are not the goals of Howard's work here. The subtleties of solo instrumentation are the key to Dreamcatcher's success, and to that end, Howard achieves a level of paranoia and alienation in his music that enthusiasts of his other horror endeavors will be able to appreciate. Interestingly, given the Native American history of the dreamcatcher as a symbol, as well as the art for the film, there is no corresponding ethnicity to this score (the story is set in King's favorite location of Maine). In fact, the main detriment of Howard's approach to Dreamcatcher is the extremely generic tone of its character when compared to his other scores in the genre.

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The majority of the music for Dreamcatcher is tense, riveting ambience, punctuated by occasional, typical orchestral hits and sharp blasts. Howard manages to do this without allowing his work to fit snugly into a horror score stereotype by incorporating a wide range of electronic rhythms and somewhat interesting sounds that enforce the thrill of the moment with a touch of the supernatural. Especially evident at the start and end of the album presentation, these electronics serve to represent the young, contemporary men in the tale, the military involvement, and, of course, the spine-tingling environment that results when there isn't another sound in the film. These electronic elements may not have pizzazz, nor will they alone float the score. Only Howard's watertight tension, always prevalent in the orchestra (and usually the strings), causes the electronic loops to gain their edge. Several extremely difficult crescendos of dissonance are employed throughout the work to accomplish the task of fright, and the lack of harmony in the vast majority of less extroverted cues defines the score as a troubled one. Howard shies away from the use of a theme, instead opting for a two-note motif to represent the grander, fully orchestral moments of realization in the film. In the cues "The Weasel," "The Debate," and "Curtis and Own Battle," this motif is performed in full, with "The Debate" featuring the score's only awe at the same level as in Howard's majestic Atlantis: The Lost Empire and several other fantasy-oriented projects. At its best, though, Dreamcatcher best represents the ambience of a subdued suspense and horror score, potentially causing its listening experience on album to be difficult for the light-hearted. While arguably an effective score, Howard's work transfers onto album much like others in its genre have done before; if you can appreciate the delicate care taken in the use of the electronics and tolerate the usual orchestral blasting during ten minutes of the score, then Dreamcatcher may be a product of interest. For others, this score is a reminder that effective and interesting horror scores don't translate into readily engaging listening experiences out of context. A major detriment also to consider is the fact that Varèse Sarabande didn't have access to press a representative selection of music from the long recording, so many of the major cues from the latter half of the film are missing. On the whole, the situation leaves much to be desired. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For James Newton Howard reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.31 (in 53 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.16 (in 58,041 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.