John Williams is busy at the moment. Busy, busy, busy. There's the recent Star Wars, the upcoming Harry Potter, Spielberg's Catch Me if You Can. And Minority Report, director Steven Spielberg's latest - and really good - flick, starring Tom Cruise as Precrime detective John Anderton, who... ah, you all know the plot anyway. Spielberg writes in the liner notes that "if most of John's scores for my films have been in color, I think of this score as his first in black and white", refering to the dark, film noir quality of the score and also comparing it to scores by Bernard Herrmann. And sure, parts of Minority Report seem to have been inspired by Herrmann's style, but above all this is a typical John Williams suspense score. And it rocks. If I had to choose between Williams' two 2002 summer scores, Attack of the Clones and Minority Report, I would go with the latter.
So the score, like the film it is written for, is dark, dramatic and packed with suspense. It is at times quite dissonant and atonal (don't confuse atonal with noisy), although more thematic and melodic parts can be found, such as the slow theme heard in the opening and closing tracks of the disc, and the beautiful but restrained, piano dominated "Sean's Theme", used to represent John Anderton's son. Williams uses a single female solo voice for the scenes involving the charachter Anne Lively. Unlike the sweet voice of Barbara Bonney used in Artifial Intelligence, this one (belonging to Deborah Dietrich) us very disturbing and sometimes even frightening, especially in the textural, atmospheric - and excellent - "Visions of Anne Lively."
The higlight of the entire CD however, is without doubt the great "Anderton's Great Escape". Clocking in at almost seven minutes, this is a really amazing action cue, similar in style to some of the material written for Attack of the Clones and The Phantom Menace. It's fast, complex and dramatic. And really entertaining, despite it being a very serious action piece. Almost as memorable is the dark "Spyders", with its repeated brass motif (representing the spider like Spyder-robots) and low string ostinatos and percussion, very similar in sound to the percussive solo performances in Attack of the Clones. More lighthearted, but equally memorable, is the upbeat march heard in "Eye-Dentiscan". It's typical tongue-in-cheek John Williams music, reminiscent of his many villain marches.
There are parts on the soundtrack that isn't that interesting and memorable. Cues like "Dr. Eddie and Miss Van Eych" (used in the scene where Cruise's character visits Peter Stormare as a more or less insane eye surgeon (singing and cursing in Swedish) are a little too textural, without much interesting going on. But these moments are luckily few and far apart. Minority Report is a very solid effort by John Williams.