> National Treasure (2004) - ***
> Trevor Rabin; add’l music by Don Harper & Paul Linford;
> orchestrations by Gordon Goodwin, Tom Calderaro & Trevor Rabin

> This score is about as unsurprising as this music can get. Brassy themes
> straight out of the 90s. Chopping string sounds that occasionally bleed
> into chopping keyboard sounds (sometimes hard to tell). A few moments of
> big background harmonies courtesy of a choir. And it also has those
> classic Rabin elements: cool guitar moments, rock drum hits, extremely
> pleasant chord shifts during character moments.

As endearing as the cheap synth sound is, I think this and the sequel are two of the scores you're reviewing that would've most benefited from either a fully orchestral recording or at least having access to the synths they have now. Just doesn't feel like the personality of the music and the production match during those intimate or huge anthemic statements of the main theme. Shame, because it detracts from some of the best moments to ever come out of MV/RC.

> Rabin: “This was a great experience, although Jon Turteltaub, the
> director, was a bit impossible – charmingly impossible, I should say. He’d
> come in and listen to a seven-minute piece of music, and he’d say, ‘That’s
> fantastic! It’s done.’ He’d rave about it and then say, ‘OK, let’s listen
> to it again and I’ll make some notes’ – by the time he was done, the notes
> were 30 pages long. A week later, half of the notes would go away without
> me changing anything.”

I bet this is pretty common, directors having lots of notes but not having the ear or interest to recognize whether those changes are made.

> Rabin: “I’d written the main theme and played it for Jon, and he said,
> ‘It sounds like a cowboy theme.’ So I told him, ‘Have a listen to Star
> Wars. If you put that music against a western, it’d be perfect.’ I didn’t
> really see what Jon was saying as a negative – one could be used for the
> other. Luckily, Jerry was there, and he said, ‘No, I love it,’ and it
> stuck. Otherwise, Jon would’ve gotten rid of it.'

> It’s undemanding, predictable fun.

At his peak he was writing themes with the best of the group, but he doesn't have a single score I enjoy listening to start to finish (except maybe Remember the Titans, which is frustratingly not available to stream outside YouTube).