by Ryan Keaveney

Music Composed by James Horner
Rating: ** 1/2

If you’re talking summer movies and you just happen to be talking with a major film music geek, chances are the story behind the mega-buck tent pole picture Troy has less to do with Homer than it has to do with Horner. Anyone with access to one of the many film music bitching boards on the internet knows the story already (and no, I’m not talking Homer’s The Illiad here). Originally hired to score the reject-score-happy Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, Academy-Award winner Gabriel Yared hitched up his cords and shook off his loafers, writing his most ambitious and grandiose score to date. The proof was provided by the composer himself — Yared made the bold move of providing more than ten samples from his score on his website. But this review isn’t about Yared’s score. It’s about the score that James Horner, hired to replace Yared, wrote and recorded in a harrowing twelve days. Faced with a short deadline a composer can either buckle down and churn out filler music good enough to pass by today’s “sophisticated” audiences, or a composer can spark their creative genius and write something truly memorable… Or in the least, interesting. Possible, perhaps, in twelve days. If Horner had written only the whopping seventy-five minutes of music on this overlong soundtrack album, that would amount to a little over six minutes of music per day. This would seem like some superheroic feat where it not for the fact that this score has all the zing of dishwater.

Regardless of what you think of the composer’s music, there has always been something, however fleeting, to grip on to in previous James Horner scores. But Troy doesn’t even deliver on that basic level.

James Horner

Horner’s themes are usually his strongest assets. Sure they’re really all mutations on the same core idea, from Deep Impact to Bicentennial Man, to A Beautiful Mind to The Missing, we can chart the course of thematic ideas from one score to the next. The big difference here is that these scores actually have clear main melodic motifs, while Troy… Well, it’s a score in search of a major idea to anchor itself. There are hints of ideas, like Achilles’ theme in “Achilles Leads The Myrmidons” (5′53 — and check out those oddball synth “orch hits” at 2′27), a triumphant , Balto-like brass fanfare that seems to try to make Achilles into a hero (a hero, mind you who relished his single purpose of splitting Trojan wigs). This is the score’s most interesting element, unfortunately it seems inappropriate. Horner seems to be taking the marketing department’s view of Achilles: he’s Brad Pitt, he’s a star, he’s golden, and he’s wearing a skirt. He’s a goddamned hero!

The brass also takes the lead on the glittering return to the city of “Troy”, the only time Horner’s score reflects the majestic oasis of the locale (the rest is scored with low synths and torturous Lisa Gerrard-like female vocals, “The Temple of Poseidon”). There are two additional ideas that try to give this score some identity. A little romance is dialed in with “Briseis & Achilles”, strangely these four notes evoke David Arnold’s Stargate. Must be the sand! This fragment is expanded upon for the finale, but it seems like too little, too late… And too familiar to save this score.

Horner’s score is a hybrid of orchestra, electronics and voices. The Bulgarian Women’s Choir (often sounding like samples) and Tanja Tzarovska fulfill the usual guest star performer quotient. Though these elements all pale in comparison to the triumphant return of the elusive four-note “Evil Motif”. It’s here, littered all over this score like bird shit on a windowsill, and makes perhaps it’s most diminutive appearance of all-time in “The Wooden Horse and The Sacking of Troy” (3′48). The steam-kettle synths are here, the slow rolling snares are here, the contemplative English horn solos are here (”The Night Before”) and the required thirteen-minute plus finale cue (”Through The Fires, Achilles… And Immortality”) are here… But they don’t add up to all that damn much! This is one long haul, seventy-five minutes of underdeveloped noodling, only occasionally broken up by stock action and suspense music that is more noisy than it is thrilling (”The Greek Army and Its Defeat”, “The Trojans Attack”).

Let’s be honest, with only twelve days, James Horner couldn’t co-ordinate a bar mitzvah, let alone write two-plus hours of film music. The rub here is that Troy is actually a decent - though pompous - summertime epic. It needed film music to really kick it up a few notches. Music with texture, emotion and most of all, character. Horner is a composer with obvious gifts to write a film score with all of these elements (see the similiarly themed Braveheart for example), but without the right amount of time, Troy will remain desirable for only the most devoted Horner lover, making it a forgettable footnote in the unfortunate history of replacement film scores.

Music Composed and Conducted by James Horner; Orchestrated by James Horner Eddie Karam, Conrad Pope, Randy Kerber and Jon Kull; Recorded and Mixed by Simon Rhodes; Album Produced by Simon Rhodes and James Horner; Availability: In print; Label (Catalogue): Warner / Sunset / Reprise, (CDW 48798); Release Date: May 11, 2004

01. 3200 Years Ago (3′36)
02. Troy (5′01)
03. Achilles Leads the Myrmidons (8′30)
04. The Temple of Poseidon (3′28)
05. The Night Before (3′28)
06. The Greek Army and its Defeat (9′38)
07. Briseis and Achilles (5′19)
08. The Trojans Attack (5′01)
09. Hector’s Death (3′27)
10. The Wooden Horse and The Sacking of Troy (10′02)
11. Through the Fires, Achilles… and Immortality (13′27)
12. Remember (4′18)
Performed by Josh Groban
Music by James Horner / Lyrics by Cynthia Weil
Produced by David Foster

Total Playing Time: 75′15