Terminator Salvation

Danny Elfman is an extroardinary composer in most respects. His great line of work includes; A Nightmare Before Christmas, Mars Attacks, Batman, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and more. In the past few years, however, most of Elfman's scores have lost the unique identity that he once had and are becoming more generic sounding. The best case here is Terminator Salvation.

For starters, anyone expecting to hear Brad Fidel's themes fully fleshed out will be sorely disappointed. For some odd reason the brief uses of the famous Terminator motif used in the film are not found anyone in the score where they naturally would be. Also interesting is the opening track, 'Opening'. Compared to the film version it is actually fairly different. As for the score itself, there is not much to go into. Elfman's theme for the film is nice and it works as a nod to some of the lighter music in the Terminator franchise. The opening track also features a nice orchestral blending with light guitars. TO complete it is a small percussive/electronic nod to the T-1000's theme from Terminator 2. The action pieces in the score (All is Lost, The Harvester Returns, Reveal/The Escape, Hydrobot Attack, and Final Confrontation) are mostly fueled b percussion and electronic rthyms which, aside from a few moments of nice orchestral attacking, are mostly bland. One interesting feature used in the score is the use of a spanish guitar sound, heard in Fireside and Farewell. This is a nice change of pace from the typical action music and add to a small emotional side of the score. For the most part the rest of the music is either bland or fairly good. Unfortunately Elfman never makes use of his main theme which leaves the album a little off-put.

Generally, Danny Elfman is an extroardinary composer who can really make good use of his score material. In Terminator Salvation's case, he made a score generally forgettable not only by his own standards, but by film music standards. To be fair, the music does have it's moments with very small nods to the previous scores but is not very strong on it's own. Not to mention an additional song on the album which serves no purpose. Whatever your preference is, check out Marco Beltrami's music before checking out Elfman's.

7/10