Buy it... if you'd like to pass fifty minutes with pleasant, carefree, and likeable children's adventure music that makes no demands on you whatsoever.

Avoid it... if you expect any single aspect of the score, from the themes to the action cues, to stand out and distinguish itself in memorable fashion.

Doyle

Nim's Island: (Patrick Doyle) An adventure film aimed at girls under twelve years old, Nim's Island is about a young girl and her father who live alone on a South Pacific island. The father is a marine biologist, known to the real world as Gerard Butler, and the girl is imaginative in her activities while enjoying a nice house with all the modern amenities. When the father goes missing, the girl relies on her e-mail exchanges with a female author in San Francisco for help. This author, known to the real world as Jodie Foster, is the creator of a fictional adventurer in the form of Indiana Jones that the girl's father sometimes becomes in her imagination. While the author does come to the island to help, the overcoming of her own agoraphobia is the subject of her development. The girl, meanwhile, fights off unwelcome intruders to the island in Home Alone fashion. The plot devices in Nim's Island are predictable, even down to the obligatory volcano and storm sequences, and reaction to the film has been somewhat muted. Co-directors Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin relied on veteran composer Patrick Doyle to provide a score that skirts a fantasy genre in which Doyle has been exploring himself over the previous few years. Fans of the composer have often wished him more mainstream adventure scores, and he has consistently delivered with music that varies from "functional, but interesting" to quite engaging in a bombastic sense. For Nim's Island, Doyle carries over some of his developing sensibilities from those more serious ventures, but given the airy innocence of the story, he strays closer to Carl Stalling unpredictability as necessary. Doyle described the process as a "fantastic journey," inspired by the vast scope of the little girl's imagination, some of which pulls elements from as early in Doyle's career as Shipwrecked. For collectors familiar with the genre, perhaps the most accurate comparisons in style will exist between the music of Nim's Island and the numerous similar James Horner projects of the early 1990's. Like those Horner scores, Doyle's Nim's Island offers individual highlights but lacks a distinct anchor for its thematic and character material. It's a thrill of the moment kind of score with a tender heart.

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The biggest difference between Nim's Island and the aforementioned James Horner children's writing, however, is Doyle's inability to firmly establish and develop a primary set of themes. While Horner's children's scores could often become predictably obnoxious, he at least provided a distinct theme or two for each entry. Doyle offers plenty of pleasant harmony and swaying thematic ideas in Nim's Island, but never does he state one with authority and provide it with convincing or memorable treatment until the very end of the film. The orchestral ensemble is always whimsical and delightfully fluffy, a trait true to similar outings in Doyle's career, and that group is aided by acoustic guitar and synthetic choir in parts. The sound will never overwhelm you; there are no thunderous percussive romps like those in The Last Legion or other recent Doyle fantasy works. The thematic material that does shine through often dances close to the territory of Cliff Eidelman's light character dramas of the 1990's; a lovely theme slightly introduced in the opening "Nim's Island" and expanded upon significantly by woodwinds in "It's Empty" and full ensemble in "Nim Sees Jack" is especially comparable to Eidelman. Other themes introduced in "Nim's Island," "Become the Hero," and "The Great Outdoors" are sometimes singular, with Doyle following a thematic line that never seems to occur again in the score. The free-floating and hopelessly optimistic charm of some of these cues may simply be masking their more subtle nuances, however, and perhaps more important to the score's success is its ability to create a wondrous atmosphere without getting too specific. The conclusive "Nim Sees Jack" has all the explosively delightful and cheery attitude of the end to Much Ado About Nothing. The action cues in the middle portion of the score, from "Lizard Attack" to "Helicopter Storm," are a bit anonymous and underpowered. The slight reggae elements heard in the percussion of the latter half of "Nim's Island" isn't convincing compared to the infectious sounds of IMAX composer Alan Williams, which this emulates to a degree. The slight choral hints in cues like "The Great Outdoors" and "Alex Swims Away" don't provide too much infusion of fantasy into the mix. Overall, Nim's Island is an adequate score at every turn, though rarely more. Despite the thematic strength in the final two cues, the score is easy likable but ultimately forgettable. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Patrick Doyle reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.85 (in 26 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.48 (in 20,137 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.