 |
|
 |
|
 | |||||||||
| • | Newest Major Reviews: | . | • | This Week's Most Popular Reviews: | • | Best-Selling Albums: | ||
| . |
1. Nim's Island 2. The Life Before Her Eyes 3. Horton Hears a Who! 4. Leatherheads 5. The Spiderwick Chronicles | . | . |
1. Moulin Rouge 2. Gladiator 3. POTC: Curse of the Black Pearl 4. Star Wars: A New Hope 5. Edward Scissorhands |
6. Pearl Harbor 7. Schindler's List 8. Titanic 9. Braveheart 10. Home Alone | . | . |
1. Varèse Sarabande 25th 2. The Last of the Mohicans 3. Legends of the Fall 4. Schindler's List 5. LOTR: Return of the King (Set) |
 | ||||||||
|
|
|
Review of the Commercial and Promotional Albums:
Where the film's plot and acting failed to deliver even an adequate performance, David Arnold did. The score for Godzilla didn't play as big a role in the film as all of the composers' prior efforts, and was drowned out by many of the sound effects and curious edits in the final product. Arnold's earlier scores had each blasted across the screen with glorious thematic intensity, but the Godzilla music fizzled in the film to much of the same extent as Matthew Broderick's miscast role. Compounding the problem is that the commercial album contained roughly four minutes of Arnold's score. When the song album was publicized by Sony, the label had leaked the news that a score-only album would be available later in the summer of 1998. But when the film failed to live up to expectations, the prospect of the score-only album was eliminated. Arnold had a promotional album pressed for Academy Award consideration in January, 1999, and the bootleg market in turn began pressing their own copies of the promotional score almost immediately. The commercial album was produced by Devlin and Emmerich themselves, and the blame for a horrendous outcome of its contents rests on their shoulders. Despite selling like hotcakes for a number of months, the album was slammed by rock and metal song critics in nearly every major publication. Even Entertainment Weekly --a publication not known for its detailed coverage of orchestral scores-- stated that "...it's telling when the best cut on this mostly pop soundtrack is an orchestral one..." Fans quickly changed their minds about the disappointing song performances and the album began filling the used-CD bins by the thousands. Meanwhile, whereas Arnold's original promotional albums disappeared quickly, the bootlegs of Arnold's score continue to proliferate madly in the growing online marketplaces. The identical 50-minute promos and bootlegs will surprise many film score fans, making one wonder how such good music could become so lost in the film. While not as robust in scope as Stargate or Independence Day, and not as eclectic as Tomorrow Never Dies, the score for Godzilla is still a very strong entry in Arnold's career. It eclipses most modern day action scores in its sheer noise and monstrous themes. The score picks up some enormously entertaining and driving action music during the scenes as New York prepares for the arrival of Godzilla, with brass and snare dominated cues of fully orchestral bombast of the best Arnold kind. In the central portion of the film and score, when the main character is taken off the case, Arnold kicks in a dramatic secondary love theme that prevails in several cues later in the score. The brooding theme for the lizard itself, highlighted in the opening credits of the film, is ironically the least interesting. It goes to prove once again that Arnold is best at his patriotic and victorious action themes and lofty love themes with strings galore. The closing titles offer a fantastic suite of all three themes. The promo/bootleg is littered with grand performances of Arnold's bombast, making it very consistent in its elevated volume and major key resolution to every heroic measure. Several uses of scrappy, metalic instrumentation carry over from the popular Tomorrow Never Dies score in the previous year as well. There are likely a lot of people who sampled the two Arnold tracks on the commercial album and then gave up on trying to acquire the whole score. People who did that, however, are fooling themselves. For some reason, and one which can make no sense whatsoever, Devlin and Emmerich decided to include the first two cues from the score (mixed together with several seconds overlapping) on their commercial album. Unfortunately, these two cues are among the weakest of Arnold's work for the project. In fact, the first three cues on the promo/bootleg are the only uninteresting entries on the entire album, making the choice of the first two for the commercial album even more curious. Had Devlin and Emmerich filled those four minutes with the promo/bootleg tracks 4 and 10 ("Exit Manhattan" and "The Foreign Legion"), which would occupy the same time as the two tracks which made the cut, then I suspect that Arnold's score would have been in much greater demand from the start. But as fate would have it, the majority of film score fans wrote Godzilla off as a loss and forgot about it. With so much hype surrounding his successful move to the James Bond franchise at the time, that's partially understandable. But if you happen to find the promo or bootleg of this score online or in a soundtrack specialty outlet, don't hesitate to pick it up. The sound quality of both score albums is equal to that of the commercial album; it isn't spectacular (likely because of the contraints of the Los Angeles recording stage on which it was performed), but its choral cues are clear and the accoustics are reasonable. The song compilation is a complete waste of time, and with the prospect of a commercial album for the Godzilla score now officially dead, the promo or bootleg is the way to go for film score fans.
Score as Heard on 1998 Sony Album: * Score as Heard on 1999 Promotional Album: ****
* Previously unreleased material (Alternate bootleg titles in parentheses)
Neither album contains any information about the film or score. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
