Buy it... only if you desire to hear Jerry Goldsmith's first all-electronic score and are prepared for a badly dated and harshly grating rendering that firmly roots the work in its era.

Avoid it... if you expect the quality of Goldsmith's composition to compensate for the irritatingly raw electronic tones employed to give the film a futuristic edge.

Goldsmith

Runaway: (Jerry Goldsmith) Despite writing some of the most intriguing science fiction concepts of his time, Michael Crichton's career as a director did not flourish with the same success. His films of the late 1970's and early 1980's could all be classified as duds, failing to realize the potential of their concepts due to terrible adaptations into screenplays and, most devastatingly, Crichton's own poor direction. One entry in this series of disappointments was 1984's Runaway, the story of a futuristic society in which robots complete many of the mundane everyday tasks in the home and fields that are the domain of illegal migrant workers in current society. If Runaway had perhaps told its tale in a tongue in cheek fashion, perhaps explaining what happened to all the Hispanic illegal aliens in America upon the introduction of the robots into everyday society, then perhaps there would have been redemption for this production. There were oddities in the mix that suggested such an intent by Sony, however, including the casting of KISS bassist Gene Simmons (minus the make-up, thankfully) as the villain who reprograms the robots to comply with his attempt at world domination (what else?). Unfortunately, Crichton took the rest of the production seriously, casting Tom Selleck as the special unit police officer in charge of exposing and foiling the plot. Another serious aspect of Runaway was Jerry Goldsmith's score. The composer had collaborated with Crichton for several years, and the two agreed upon Goldsmith's idea to tackle the film with an all-electronic score. While Goldsmith had used electronics as part of his ensembles since the early 1960's, literally employing them as a fifth section of the orchestra by the 1980's, he had never attempted to create an all-electronic score that would consist almost completely of his own performances. He was quick to point out that this decision was not made for financial reasons. In fact, the troublesome and lengthy recording schedule for Runaway required the costly rental of a variety of equipment and a studio and turned out to be more of a headache for Goldsmith than he had anticipated. Programming electronics to emulate an orchestral score back in 1984 was not an easy task, and the composer employed his son, Joel, already an expert in synthetics, to assist him in arranging Runaway. The resulting score is admirable in intentions but, like Goldsmith's other two completely synthetic scores, Criminal Law and the rejected Alien Nation, nearly unlistenable on album.

Unlike many other totally synthetic scores of the era, Goldsmith's intent in his writing of these scores was to construct them as though they were to be performed by an orchestra and then apply the different lines to various tones in the synthesizers. Thus, you don't get the endlessly droning, atmospheric variety of dullness from Goldsmith for these assignments. You can actually imagine what a score like Runaway could sound like had it been performed by a symphonic ensemble, though the constructs in this case are so weak that such application may not have made a difference. The score does have thematic ideas and frequent references to these and other motifs, but the material simply cannot overcome its badly dated rendering. Goldsmith was just starting to experiment with the newer generation of sampled electronics in 1984, and Runaway unfortunately is a work that doesn't offer the same organic imitations that would function so well for him within just a few years. The extremely harsh tones of the composer's choices of sounds for this score make it very difficult to the ear, and the grating style persists even outside of the score's inherently staccato movements for the robots. Most cues in Runaway contain a taxing tone of raw synthetic grinding that could quite possibly be a recipe for a massive headache. The cue "Spider in the Toilet" is so awful that it's unintentionally humorous (watch out, Bernard Herrmann fans). The action material pounds with such ferocity on these keyboards that they aggravate rather than excite. Only in the finale cue, "No Luther (The Resolution)," does the composer develop the thematic material into a light rock variant that is equally dated but is at least tolerable to the same degree as Rent-A-Cop would be a few years later. When you step back and look back at Goldsmith's experimentation with synthesizers in his career, nearly all of his endeavors were masterfully rendered, but that success did not carry over to his all-electronic scores, none of which retained the composer's inherent styles outside of a few minutes in each effort. It's impossible to recommend Runaway to Goldsmith collectors because the connections between this work and the composer's others is so thoroughly dominated by the irritating synthetic soundscape that the listening experience offers few (if any) rewards. A 1985 Varèse Sarabande CD, reflecting the concurrent LP record, offered 36 minutes from the score. The label issued a 2,000-copy "Deluxe Edition" of Runaway in 2006, expanding the total time to 44 minutes. Both albums are out of print and will command $40 or more. Do yourself a favor and save that money for one of Goldsmith's many superior works. *   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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