Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Music by Leonard Rosenman
MCA MCAD-6195 [36'16]For some, Leonard Rosenman's score for the fourth movie had always been the weakest in the entire musical corpus. It was considered too frivolous, despite the de rigeur brasses and timpani in the opening titles, to be taken seriously; the music was barely adequate, if totally lacking in distinction.
Perhaps this was part of a deliberate attempt to lighten the mood of the show, in keeping with the story's premise (after the more serious themes of the first three) to have the crew go back in time to 1984 to find a pair of humpback whales and return them to a future in which whales have been hunted to extinction, to save Earth from being destroyed by an ecologically militant alien probe. Or perhaps it was simply the manner in which Rosenman plagiarised the music from his own previous effort in Lord of the Rings.
(And before we go on, yes, The Search for Spock made so many tons of money that even the destruction of the Enterprise in that movie couldn't prevent the production of a fourth installment. That didn't prevent part five from drowning in red ink at the box office - but we'll get to that later.)
Worse still, the offering on this disc was even worse than what the fans had for The Motion Picture. It is scarcely believable that MCA had the temerity to put out this disc, running only thirty-seven minutes with shoddy engineering way below industry standards.
There is, for example, a very abrupt cut just twenty-six seconds into the first track, where Alexander Courge's fanfare from the original series jumps rather abruptly into Rosenman's main title. This sloppiness in editing is almost as bad as the final cues on the Special Edition reissue of the Return of the Jedi soundtrack.
(There, a new track was written for the Special Edition in place of the original Ewok "Nub Dub/Celebrate the love" choral track that accompanies the movie in its final scenes just before the credits roll. Where the original cue segues smoothly into the end titles, in the Special Edition version there is a pregnant pause lasting no less than half a second between the celebration track and end titles - which is absolutely criminal. Sorry for the digression, but it just couldn't be allowed to pass.)
Ironically, there is a catchy jazz number in mid-disc, the "Ballad of the Whale" by the Yellowjackets, which is the single redeeming number on the entire disc - but the music doesn't appear at all in the movie itself! (It would appear that this piece was merely inspired from the whale's leitmotif in the score). Even allowing for the "comic opera" vein that underlies this music, there are too many technical and creative flaws that makes this product unrecommendable to all but the most die-hard fans.
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
Music by Jerry Goldsmith
Epic EK 45267 [42'25]In an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, "The Omega Directive", Captain Janeway says that "there are certain final frontiers that shouldn't be crossed, and we're looking at one of them." She could have well been speaking about this movie when she made that remark.
The plot was weak, the cast made fun of in rather crass manner, and the visual effects - something which audiences have been spoiled on - amateurish. The Voyage Home might have been a comedy, but at least it was fun to watch. Deservingly, The Final Frontier had no such entertainment value and flopped at the box office, giving the producers a valuable lesson that putting the Star Trek® trademark on something does not automatically transmute lead into gold.
About the only remarkable product from this venture was the score, which Jerry Goldsmith returned to compose after a four-movie hiatus. He reverted to many of the motifs he wrote for the first movie, reinstating the Enterprise's theme as the main title with a bold, new orchestration by Arthur Morton - giving a fresh perspective, like a breath of fresh air, to an otherwise overworked theme. For the rest of the score, Goldsmith provides a kaleidoscopic array of music: "The Mountain" theme that accompanies Captain Kirk scaling the sheer face of El Capitan in Yosemite is reminiscent of John Williams' "Fortress of Solitude" in Superman the Movie, and the "God" motif for the quasi-divine entity, the object of this movie's adventure, who turns out to be less than benevolent, just to name two cues.
As before, he uses synthesizers and inventive percussive effects with a classical orchestra to great effect. And perhaps it is a testament of this film's overall mediocrity that Goldsmith's music plays better outside the movie, where it isn't sabotaged by the brain-dead storyline or flat visual effects.
As on the previous disc, there is a track, "The Moon's a Window to Heaven" (performed by the jazz fusion band, Hiroshima) which did not appear in the film, save for a snippet that was sung by Nichelle Nichols (as Lt Uhura) in one of the movie's more forgettable moments.
Less forgettable, though, was the Goldsmith-Morton reworking of the Enterprise theme - resulting in what can only be kindly described as musical conservation, with the end titles for this movie being recycled and ingeniuosly edited with new themes for subsequent Goldsmith-helmed Trek scores.
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Music by Cliff Eidelman
MCA MCAD-10512 [45'18]Ooooooo. It is considerably a huge gamble not to open a mainstream sci-fi franchise such as Star Trek with a rousing fanfare from the start - and the low, moaning theme that opens the final movie installment with the original cast must have made audiences wonder just what they were in for.
To begin with, director Nicholas Meyer (who previously directed The Wrath of Khan) wanted a score based on Holst's The Planets. When negotiations over copyright issues fell through, newcomer composer Cliff Eidelman was asked to produce something based on Holst's masterpiece - which he duly delivered. The result is a dark, melancholy soundtrack that underscores the turbulent premise of the movie: the Klingon Empire is on the verge of extinction after a planetary disaster and heading for an all-out war against the Federation, with traitors working within on both sides to bring matters to a head. A bright opening fanfare, as Eidelman said in an interview later, just would not have worked; it had to be dark and mysterious.
Eidelman approached this soundtrack differently than the usual listen-and-cue method: the entire score was conceived as a dramatic symphony that ran the length of the film, and with some prudent cueing, all the tracks have been deftly woven into a coherent, thematic unity. It is a remarkable achievement, if somewhat underrated, because it does not follow the usual write-the-music and join-the-dots formula other composers adopt.
It is also a score that grows on you with repeated listening, something which cannot be said too often of other music in the same genre. The ambitious inclusion of a male chorus during the critical assassination scene (to a pitchless, accentuated chant of "Tach Pach Tach Bet" - "To be or not to be" in Klingon - a reference to the Shakespearean allegories that director Meyer liberally littered throughout the film) is spine-chillingly haunting and effective.
When this soundtrack first appeared, there were many who felt - present author included - that this soundtrack was the best achievement of the six (as it was then). It might not have had the most hummable tunes or the most exhilarating up-and-at-'em fanfares, but it enshrined a deeper aestheticm and pathos that transcends mere aural wallpapering for cinematic images. If only for that reason, it should be part of every discerning fan's collection.
Benjamin Chee is, among other things, listed in the official Star Trek Encyclopedia.
Back to the Classical Index!... or read more starry starry reviews from the Inkpot Archives!
478: 16.5.1999 ©Benjamin Chee
Explore the Flying Inkpot
They're Alive!
Concert Reviews
Bit deadish:
Other Resources at The Flying InkpotHome
