Dragonheart: A New Beginning

The original Dragonheart inspired Randy Edelman to produce one of his better scores and pen a theme which is almost constantly in trailers for anything epic or majestic. I was looking forward to Mark McKenzie's sequel score as his previous efforts have been generally rather good, but unfortunately this is not one of his more interesting efforts. I do wonder whether being saddled with Randy Edelman's original theme is the biggest problem. While not exactly being the greatest theme ever penned, it is very popular and quite striking, but much of McKenzie's thematic material sounds like uninteresting variations, although My Heart Goes With You is rather nice, if not exactly indelible.

The music itself is decent enough, but the biggest problem is that the album appears to indicate little structure to the music; each cue merely appears and then the next starts. The melodic material isn't strong enough to bind it together and the result is a score which is simply a little flat and unexciting. Difficult to recommend either way really. I suspect that fans of this kind of thing will enjoy it, but when compared to the orchestral colour and imagination that someone like Miklos Rozsa or Bernard Herrmann would have brought to a film like this fifty years ago, McKenzie's effort really doesn't hold up all that well. Nice, yet unremarkable.