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FILMTRACKS.COM
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VIEW 
Review of Star Kid (Nicholas Pike)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you can appreciate generic, but pleasant orchestral
fantasy music for B-rate children's films.
Avoid it... if you tend to overanalyze scores that exist in that purgatory between low budget trash and mainstream Hollywood form.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Star Kid: (Nicholas Pike) Indulge your pre-teen
boyhood imagination for a moment... You're a nerdy kid who has a crush
on a girl at school, your sister picks on you, and the schoolyard bully
likes making an example of you. Wouldn't it be great if a spaceship
crash landed in the junkyard next to your suburban home and had a cyborg
space suit in it that could make you into a comic-book superhero? That's
precisely what happens to the boy in Star Kid, a low budget
kiddie film written and directed by Manny Coto in early 1998. There's
nothing about Star Kid that is truly original; the concept of
having a normal person be given supernatural strength and other powers
by a costume has been done before, as well as all of the ideas about
bullies and girls at school. If this plot were to be made into a truly
original film today, they'd have to get Paris Hilton into the suit. But,
alas, Star Kid is a PG rated affair and the crotch of the outfit
has only a modestly-sized (and strangely fig leaf shaped) cup. When both
the aliens that created the suit and their mortal enemies show up in the
neighborhood for yet another chapter of their battle, the boy gets to
play a pivotal role as victorious protagonist, destined for a popular
life of sex, drugs, and, well... reggae, if he wanted to be really
interesting. But where would the adventures in a Phase I Assault
Cybersuit be if there wasn't some John Williams music to accompany its
exploits? In his more modest search for a composer, Coto turned to
Nicholas Pike for the orchestral score for Star Kid. Pike's
career has consisted mostly of television episode scoring since the
early 1990's, with occasional assignments on marginally noteworthy films
like Feardotcom and Return to Me. At the time that he
signed on to Star Kid, he was a veteran of scoring episodes of
"Tales from the Crypt," and it was on one such episode that Pike and
Coto first collaborated.
Pike would travel to Germany to conduct the Munich Symphony Orchestra himself for Star Kid, and the resulting score is surprisingly rich and well-developed considering the circumstances. Pike's writing evokes all the heroics of the large-scale fantasy/sci-fi scores of the 1980's without ever falling into the trap of regurgitating variants of famous scores for this new work. His themes are harmonic, pleasing, and appropriate in every sense, often set to slight, militaristic rhythms also typical in the genre. He spreads the wealth around in the ensemble, too, passing themes with ease through the sections in a competent fashion. What's interesting about a somewhat generic selection of pieces as we have here is that Star Kid is the type of score that would seem to have looked much better on paper than heard in its final rendering. Pike pushes all the right buttons throughout the score, offering several cues that could stand well in concert performances, and you can't help but get the feeling that a film as potentially dumb as Star Kid has no right to music of this conceptual size. And yet, the weakness of Pike's music is that it doesn't reach the level of excitement that you'd expect from writing of this quality for a fully orchestral ensemble. There are no obvious mistakes in the physical performances of the music, but there's something stale about those performances that causes Star Kid to lose steam. The recording quality is not to be blamed, for each element is well balanced and a fair amount of wetness is provided on album. The transparent, tonal construct of the score may simply cause the ensemble to sound smaller than it actually is. The same phenomenon happens to Frederic Talgorn's music for the fantasy genre; you simply wish to hear a larger ensemble tackle the score. Overall, it's admirable and pleasant, but rather generic in its realization. The album release contains two obnoxious rock songs at the outset, the latter of which is marginally listenable. ***
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 70:42
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert includes a note from director Manny Coto:
"I first worked with Nick [Pike] on Tales From The Crypt. The music he produced for my episode was like something from an original Twilight Zone, a dark and cabalistic concerto that earned him a well-deserved CableAce nomination. Through the years, I'd wanted to work with Nick again. I finally got the chance on Star Kid. What Nick created goes beyond my wildest dreams. The music enhances and elevates the movie, yet stands as its own sparkling symphony. From the quasi-secret-agent ditty as Cy lumbers through the town fair to the sweetly melancholic theme when Spencer and Cy commiserate on an old wooden bridge to the edge-of-your-seat orchestral stampede when the Broodwarrior is pounding Cy into alien splinters, Nick's score is packed with enough great moments for five movies. I'll confess something: every so often, I'll pop my copy of Star Kid into a VCR and fast forward to the end credits so that I can hear the music without all that pesky dialogue and sound effects. I'm not only proud of what Nick has done here, I'm a fan. He is in every way one of the stars of this production, and I can't wait to work with him again. Maybe, with a littIe luck, Nick will choose me to direct the movie that will accompany his next score."
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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Star Kid are Copyright © 1998, Sonic Images Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 6/30/98 and last updated 4/1/07. |
