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If you don't know anything about the end of The Forgotten and you listen to Horner's score "cold" on album (meaning that you are a Horner collector who buys his scores for the music, not because of anything relating to the films), then you could easily be left scratching your head about why this entry relies so heavily on the troubling synthesizer programming of Randy Kerber and Ian Underwood. The score opens with two cues of emotionally griping and gorgeous piano, solo violin, and orchestral, thought-provoking dreaminess. It's reminiscent of contemplative moments in the Deep Impact and Bicentennial Man era of Horner's late 1990's work, and the eerie synthetic choral tones of "Remember..." are a strong foreshadowing of the brooding "Winter" sequence in the forthcoming The New World. Hints of innocence in the piano's performances will be vaguely familiar for those who enjoy House of Cards and Horner's other relatively early scores for familial challenges. The score becomes an odd mixture of The Name of the Rose and Beyond Borders in the science-fiction portions, representing the mystery of the alien forces and the desperation of the mother with extremely difficult passages of gloom. Some of the obnoxious pitch-falling vocal effects go all the way back to Vibes. The electronics are pervasive, harsh, and intentionally disrupting at every opportunity, built and sustained by Horner as counterpoint to the solo piano and violin that obviously represent the motherly love at the heart of the story. In the case of The Forgotten, Horner knows the twist at the end while composing the beginning, and he therefore scored the film as an unsettling science-fiction effort from the start. Perhaps Howard better masks the musical narrative when his films fall hopelessly back upon the "aliens theory" resolution, as The Forgotten does. In this case, the use of jarring electronics by Horner foreshadows the highly technological and futuristic twist of the tale, and that's why the score is not your typical Horner psychological drama along the lines of House of Sand and Fog. There is no sense of urgency to this music, though. The tone instead implies that the lead character has simply been bludgeoned several times and is conducting her search in a hazy fog rather than following a process of unraveling the tone and structures of the music as her world is turned upside down.

Although the disparate tones are layered extensively in The Forgotten, it could be argued that Horner did a rather poor job of integrating the futuristic and family elements in this score. Outside of the double metallic clangs that hover over the performances of the title theme, the romantic notions of family, those which offer a compelling theme existing most often throughout the score as one of Horner's favorite free-flowing progression of keys, are abruptly shattered during the moments of chase and science-fiction. It's basically effective, but not particularly intelligent. When you separate the music from its context, there are essentially two different scores here: the one that Horner fans will love for its fifteen minutes of lightly dramatic cloudiness, and the one that meanders hopelessly through a myriad of atmospheric, electronic banging and droning. The largely synthetic cue "Containment of a Darker Purpose" is among Horner's most obnoxious and intolerable pieces of music during the entire decade. The revelation cue, "Profound Emptiness... The Hangar," fails to collect Horner's previously stated motifs and twist them into a new reality or even, at the very least, some kind of slowly developed, emotional crescendo. If you purchase this album, do it for the performances of the main theme in the product's first track and final two tracks, all of which contain the sound of playing children at either the start or end of the cue. The electronic accompaniment in these cues will sound much like that from Horner's late 1980's equivalents, serving as a mock-up type of tone in contemporary times. Both halves of the score can be best summed up by "Remember...," a cue that serves up the fullest, most romantic performance of the addictively elusive main theme (with especially pronounced piano) and then spoils that mood with striking electronic interruptions and stark tonal changes. Whether this juxtaposition works in the film or not, it leaves the album with only about fifteen minutes of marginally enjoyable material. If you assemble the highlights of the album alone, you have a high three-star suite of music that sounds remarkably similar to the creepy Mark Snow music you might encounter in an episode of "The X-Files." Devoted Horner collectors will find much comfort in this material. But you cannot help but get the impression that the composer could have produced a far more eloquent and interesting merging of his tender family motifs and the futuristic science-fiction atmosphere if he had integrated his electronics more creatively into the mix and tended better to the narrative flow of the story.  **   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.15 (in 108 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.23 (in 203,346 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.

Total Time: 59:29