This is possibly the least surprising James Horner score he's ever written and while there's nothing wrong with it, there's not a great deal that stands out as being especially new or interesting. The highlights of the score occur at the beginning and the end where the somewhat slow pace is increased and varied. A lot of the score reminded me of the penultimate cue from Field of Dreams, especially the last track which builds from modest beginnings to a superb choral and brass conclusion that is beautiful and impressive indeed. The main themes are a lovely piano melody that perhaps seems a little too wistful for a score about, what effectively could be end of the world. The other themes are a noble and slightly threatening, but there isn't really the kind of apocalyptic grumbling of David Arnold's Independence Day score. That had a definite sense of doom, Deep Impact is fairly gloomy, but it's all at a character level. There isn't really a great deal of music that suggest widespread fear. It has to be said that Deep Impact isn't quite as immediately threatening as ID4, I'd have expected just a little more in the way of music for world wide Armageddon. The score isn't quite as patriotic as either ID4 or Horner's Apollo 13, even the President's Speech is subdued and not especially optimistic.
There doesn't seem to be much romance in the score, even if the love theme from Titanic appears in a slightly altered and fairly subtle form a couple of times. The character music would otherwise seem to underscore dialogue much of the time as they prepare for the impending doom, although as I mentioned the end of the world feeling isn't especially strong. Then again, the sinking of the ship in Titanic wasn't the crux of most of the music, it was the romance that carried it through. In this case, neither is really present and so the overall feeling is rather too much of there being no particular purpose to the music.
This is much more of a drama score than would probably be expected, the only action really occurs some way into Our Best Hope.... and while this isn't especially innovative, is at least a bit different to some of his recent action music (Titanic for example). The Comet's Sunrise starts with an urgent string and brass figure that sounds new for the Horner cannon, sadly it only lasts for a minute or so and then gives way to the slower material that pervades much of the rest of the album. It is difficult to recommend this score as an action score as there isn't a great deal of action in it. As a character, drama score it falls down because it just isn't very interesting for much of the time and were it purely a character score, the album would have probably been considerably shorter. Had the entire thing been cut down to the first four tracks and perhaps the last two, then it would have avoided some of the repetition present on this album and made the whole just a little more coherent. On first playing I suggest to start (illogically) with the last track as it sums up the entire score very well indeed and is a near perfect example of a long, building, final cue that Horner seems to be so good at producing.