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.
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