Star Trek IV: TVH expanded score is out!
- Thread starter ScottDS
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That's the European prologue, right? The one recapping the previous films?
Yup. Sort of wish we got it as a DVD extra in the US release, but no biggie since it can be seen on the 'net.
It stands out perfectly. It's probably always been my favourite track.
I already loved the soundtrack Rosenman did for Bakshi's "The Lord of the Rings" and I recall playing that album over and over and over, between seeing the advance work print of ST IV and the gala premiere of ST IV a few weeks later.
I don't mind Chekov's Run so much as stand-alone music, but that cue, as well as the Hospital Chase piece, just yanked me out of the film. I'm a film score affectionado and I will hear them when most people don't pay attention. There are times, however, when I don't. When that happens (and it happens often these days), it's a serviceable and adequate score for the film. It does the job and it usually "eh" on album. If I do notice, it's either because it's so damned good I just have to take note, or it's so over the top and obvious that it pulls me out. This movie had the latter happen at least twice. To me (and only to me, I'll admit), that is not the mark of a good score. It may be good music, but I personally found it too obvious and inappropriate. Chekov's Run isn't as bad since it's tied to the character. Hospital Chase, however, is just hideous circus music to me. The situation was funny enough, it didn't need Rosenman to work so hard. It was like a musical laugh track. Imagine the bleats and "wah waah's" we would have gotten if Rosenman had scored the next film. Oy. Thank God for Goldsmith. :-)
A lot of composers think writing "funny" music to comedy scenes is gilding the lily and it is as annoying as a laugh track. I prefer the approach Elmer Bernstein took on Airplane!, which was to write serious music that was soooo serious it went just over the top and worked beautifully.
That was pretty much the filmmakers' approach to the whole movie. (Largely because it was a parodic remake of the 1957 film Zero Hour!, which strove to be ultra-serious but was so hamfisted about it that it was unintentionally silly.)
But I'm not sure that kind of deliberate, satirical ultra-seriousness is the best scoring approach for a comedy scene in an installment of a generally serious franchise. In that context, you probably want to play up the humor rather than play against it. And TOS itself had its share of comedy cues -- see "Shore Leave," "The Trouble with Tribbles," even "City on the Edge of Forever" at some points. Although Rosenman's cues were, err, rather more unsubtle than those.
I disagree, in my opinion the cues in TVH are no less unsubtle, to coin an awkward phrase, than those silly TOS cues. I think they fit in that tradition quite well and that the success of TVH is well deserved. Its score, effects, writing and direction marked a golden moment in the Trek franchise.
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