Some films have, unintentionally, deeply ironic titles and The Forgotten has surely got to be the most deeply unfortunate titles ever bestowed on a major motion picture. The audience's appetite for M Night Shyamalan style, over clever, spooky horror, with twists is perhaps a little less than Hollywood hoped for. James Horner's score gets off to a promising start with the aptly titled An Unsettling Calm which features an intermittent violin solo over a cycling piano motif and a few well placed synthetic embellishments. It rather suggests James Newton Howard's wonderful score to The Village, although Horner never allows the violin part to soar above its background, instead, fragments of melody appear in bite size chunks giving a moody restlessness.
Remember... picks up where An Unsettling Calm leaves off, but the level of movement increases, as does the volume and by the second half of the track, a full blown synthetic percussion invasion has started. The multi-layered rhythms are interesting enough, but seem to belong in another score entirely, indeed, they wouldn't be out of place in The Island. They are fine enough as this kind of thing goes, but after the effectively haunting opening, shatter the mood rather mercilessly. Unfortunately, the opening tracks constitute just about all of the material worth hearing. Much of the rest is either the same kind of thing or endless, deathly dull sustained low string notes. Some, such as Profound Emptiness... The Hangar, feature some nice textures, but aren't really interesting as music.
As with all of the A list composers, Horner rarely does anything less than a professional job and the atmosphere is effective and well maintained, but at just a gnat's crotchet under an hour, not sufficient to engage the listener to the bitter end. After the promising opening, it seems unfortunate that, unlike the aforementioned The Village, Horner's score just seems to slip into a somnambulant state where nothing much happens. Howard keeps the music fresh and the ball rolling, all while maintaining a gorgeous autumnal atmosphere, but The Forgotten just fizzles out or repeats itself. Not exactly awful, but from a composer who used to create such exciting orchestral scores, a pretty unappealing and likely to be, deservedly, forgotten.