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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you're tired of James Horner's more recent, seriously weighty dramatic scores and prefer the unrestrained enthusiasm of his early adventure works, among which The Rocketeer is one of the best. Avoid it... if the overly-consistent innocence of Horner's soaring themes only serves to remind you of a composer rolling shamelessly in a bed of his own favorite musical constructs. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Two primary themes and one auxiliary motif for Timothy Dalton's villain are used almost constantly in the work. The title theme embodies the magical elements of the rocket and its aviator, serving as the basis for almost every action cue. With concert arrangements of this theme bookending the score, its consistent, extended statements do beg for some variation, and Horner provides some changes in tempo in the score's two ambitious action highlights. In "The Flying Circus" and "Jenny's Rescue," Horner offers the kind of explosive thematic expositions that made Willow so engaging. Here, he augments the brassy statements of the theme with an active percussion section, using cymbals, chimes, tambourines, triangles, and other light metallic elements to highlight the positive spirit of the story. In "The Flying Circus," the action motifs mirror Horner's early Star Trek writing, but translate them into their most flighty forms. Late in that cue, some hoedown attitude from Fievel Goes West appears in the form of banjo, fiddle, and other instrumentation meant almost as a parody of such sounds. For your money, however, "Jenny's Rescue" is easily the more enjoyable cue, partly because of the bass-staggered performance of the title theme two minutes in. The more fluid performances of the title theme in the opening and closing suites feature more of the magical atmosphere, however. The tingling sensation starts immediately, accompanying the film's opening take-off sequence with an elegant combination of light electronic tones (closer to Jerry Goldsmith's style than Horner's) under a gorgeous solo piano introduction of the theme. The storybook personality would continue through both suites; Horner's theme is so fluid and aerodynamic that it's built upon drawn-out peaks and valleys meant to accentuate the thrill of flying. Detractors often attack the perpetual use of this theme in the suites and beyond, though Horner does adequately shift its performances between all four corners of the orchestra, often with grand results. More troubling would be the "trademark" Horner finale at the end of the film, a progression first introduced with a bang at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, although its performance concluding The Rocketeer is among the better variants. The love theme in The Rocketeer also soars with innocence, and easily eclipses the quality of many of the romantic string themes that Horner would provide for films later in the decade. Heard in the form of short interludes in the two suites and during the action cues, this theme receives a lengthy performance in "Jenny." From the solo horn to the full string ensemble, this theme moves as gracefully as any in Horner's career, and its strikingly gorgeous layering amidst so much enthusiastic action material will remind of the same role the love theme played in Horner's early score for Krull. Its appeal in The Rocketeer is much the same, serving also as a tie to the source music of the era that is performed on screen by the love interest herself. The villain's theme (for Neville Sinclair) is perhaps one of the weaker points of the score, never developing with the kind convincing menace that you would hope from a score that delineates good and evil to such extremes. The theme is led by a rising four note motif that barely registers in the bland underscore in "Neville Sinclair's House" and makes an impact only in the latter half of "Zeppelin," in which the theme's layering is reminiscent of the Queen Bavmorda material from Willow's climax. Overall, critics often lump The Rocketeer in with Willow and The Land Before Time as simple, adventuresome children's music of significant orchestral volume. But there is one major difference between The Rocketeer and those other efforts. The Rocketeer is a larger-than-life comic hero, and therefore falls under a different classification of fantasy. Horner appropriately bloats every element of his score to create the needed level of comic-based fantasy; the brass play a little louder, the strings perform themes at a slower tempo, and the percussion section is absolutely exhausted of every metallic resource imaginable. Together, part of The Rocketeer seems slightly exaggerated, and that is the key to its success. A relatively short album with only 50 minutes of score and the two decent recordings of vintage jazz vocals ("Begin the Beguine" is as fluffy as it gets) was a rarity in the early 1990's but re-pressings have made this superior Horner score available once again. Only a flimsy villain's theme and the inevitable lack of variation in tone keep The Rocketeer from the highest rating. ****
The insert contains no information about the score or film and is difficult to re-fold into its original form. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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