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| • | Newest Major Reviews: | . | • | This Week's Most Popular Reviews: | • | Best-Selling Albums: | ||
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1. Nim's Island 2. The Life Before Her Eyes 3. Horton Hears a Who! 4. Leatherheads 5. The Spiderwick Chronicles | . | . |
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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you would enjoy fifteen minutes of light dramatic cloudiness led by a romantic piano and a solo string theme over eerie synthetic tones. Avoid it... if those fifteen minutes aren't worth another forty-five minutes of electronic clanging, aimless droning, and stark atmospheric suspense. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Spoiler Note: To describe the score in any detail, and especially the use of the synthetic elements, it would be nearly impossible not to divulge the "major twist" that caused the polarization of critics and audiences of the film. If you don't wish to know the ending of The Forgotten, then stop reading here and stick with the recommendation of Horner's score made in the "Filmtracks Recommends" section above. If you don't know anything about the end of The Forgotten, and you listen to Horner's score "cold" on album (meaning that you are a Horner collector who buys the scores for the music, not because of anything relating to the film), then you could easily be left scratching your head about why the score relies so heavily on the synthesizer programming by Randy Kerber and Ian Underwood. After two cues of emotionally gorgeous piano, solo violin, and fully orchestral, thought-provoking dreaminess (reminiscent of contemplative moments in the Deep Impact and Bicentennial Man era of Horner's late 1990's work), the score becomes an odd mixture of The Name of the Rose and Beyond Borders. The electronics are pervasive, harsh, and intentionally disrupting at every opportunity, built and sustained by Horner as counterpoint to the solo piano and violin that obviously represent the motherly love at the heart of the film. In the case of The Forgotten, Horner knows the twist at the end while composing the beginning, and has scored the film appropriately as a science-fiction effort. Perhaps James Newton Howard better masks his efforts when films fall hopelessly back upon the "aliens theory" resolution, as The Forgotten does. In this case, the use of jarring electronics by Horner foreshadows the highly technological and futuristic twist of tale, and that's why the score is not your typical Horner psychological drama, as House of Sand and Fog was. It could be argued that Horner did a rather poor job of integrating the futuristic and family elements in his score; outside of the double metallic clangs that hover over the performances of the title theme, the romantic notions of family --which offer a compelling theme existing most often throughout the score as one of Horner's favorite, free-flowing progression of keys-- are abruptly shattered during the moments of chase and science fiction. Thus, there are two different scores here: the one that Horner fans will love for its fifteen minutes of light dramatic cloudiness, and the one that meanders hopelessly through a myriad of atmospheric, electronic banging and droning. The largely synthetic cue "Containment of a Darker Purpose" is among Horner's most loud, obnoxious, and intolerable music of the past ten years. If you purchase this album, do it for the performances of the title theme in the first, tenth, and eleventh tracks, all of which contain the sound of playing children at either the start or end of the cue. The score can be best summed up by the second track, "Remember...," a cue that serves up the fullest, most romantic performance of the addictive title theme (complete with eerie, Mark Snow-like electronic accompaniment in the high ranges), and then spoils that listening mood with electronic interruptions and stark tonal changes. Whether this juxtaposition works in the film or not, it leaves the album with only about fifteen minutes of truly enjoyable material. Copy tracks 1, 2 (the first half), 10, and 11 onto a compilation and you have a high three-star suite of music. But you cannot help but get the impression that Horner could have made a far more eloquent and interesting merging of his tender family motifs and the futuristic science fiction ones if he had integrated his electronics more creatively into the mix. **
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