SkyWorld

The realm of Middle-Earth returns once again in musical form. And what a glorious visit it is. The incredibly talented Howard Shore has crafted yet another musical masterpiece. I was initially very hesitant to grab this soundtrack (don't mock me, guys) due to the little bit I had heard seeming rather bleak and dull. Several weeks ago, I finally decided to give it a try. Howard Shore, I'm sorry I ever doubted you. If you are at all familiar with Shore's work, you know he consistently takes thematic approaches to whatever movies he scores. In the soundtrack for An Unexpected Journey (a review will be coming for that one soon, Lord willing), he established a vast number of new themes, but many of the ones we heard predominantly were from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Here, this is absolutely not the case. Nearly every single theme we hear is a new one. The best of the lot is Smaug's theme. I could rave on about it for hours, but to put it briefly: It's incredi...

This is really an excellent effort by Hans Zimmer and his team. It's a vastly different approach to Spider-man than Horner's, but it's nonetheless quite good. If you're anything like me, you were tempted to lock yourself in your bedroom and cry for weeks when you saw that Horner wouldn't be scoring The Amazing Spider-Man 2. However, when I saw that Zimmer was replacing him I breathed a sigh of relief. Zimmer doesn't use (that I've noticed) any themes at all from Horner's score. He completely reinvents Spider-Man, and it's not a bad re-invention. Thankfully, he does keep one aspect of Horner's score, and that's a thematic approach to Spider-man. Electro's theme is pounding dubstep with predominant rap (yep, you read that correctly), the Goblin's theme is a haunting, reflective blend of strings and piano, and Spider-man's theme is a soaring, heroic melody. Another theme worth mentioning is the love theme. It's hear...

This is an outstanding score from James Horner. It communicates, in my opinion, everything that Spider-Man is. It has the action, the drama, the epicness, and most importantly, the emotion. Horner takes a largely thematic approach to this score, and it pays off big time. Unlike the Elfman scores, we actually have a recognizable, soaring theme for Spider-Man this time around which is heard many times during the soundtrack. While I haven't seen the movie in its entirety, in what little I have seen, the film and themes work incredibly together. The two main themes are Spider-man's and the love theme. (Yeah, pretty much every movie ever has one.) Horner has taken a bit more of an electronic approach to this score, which is a bit unusual for him. It works extremely well, however, as he effortlessly blends traditional and electronic scoring techniques beautifully. I should mention that this score is not, per se, strictly an action score. It's about evenly divided b...

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