Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan – Expanded Original Motion Picture Soundrack CD Review
Reviewed by Chris McEneany, 11th August 2009
One of my all-time favourite scores, folks, arrives at Warp Speed from literally out of the blue and zooms, straight away, to the pole position of this year’s already considerable releases. FSM Retrograde do it proud, as well, really cleaning up the once-archaic sound of the previous incarnations. The clash of themes is electrifying – Khan’s tribal rhythms clawing at Kirk’s proud maritime heritage, the icily beautiful shimmer of the Genesis Project meeting the warmth of its resulting creation, Spock’s glistening alien cadence confronting the fateful agony of his own demise. James Horner has graced every genre going and always stamped them with his own unique hallmark. His voice is distinctive and familiar even when he is being at his most experimental. With Star Trek: The Wrath Of Khan he took ideas with which he had invigorated earlier sci-fi and horror films and created a whirling tsunami of challenging and devoutly exciting action music, fanfares, suspense cues and iridescent cosmic voices. He had a tough act to follow. Jerry Goldsmith’s original score for the first Trek movie is a bonafide classic, but in just the same way that he would with his follow-on from Goldsmith’s Alien, with his own Aliens, Horner took the ideas and motifs and injected them with nitroglycerine and an amazingly agile verve.
The music of Star Trek peaked all too soon with the first two movies. Although both Horner and Goldsmith would return to the series, neither would ever again reach the tumultuous heights that they attained with their defiant, go-for-broke series debuts. This score is thoroughly remarkable and endlessly listenable, which makes it an all-too rare commodity these days. Horner would take his themes and ideas and run with them across the full filmic spectrum, but Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan is certainly one of his greatest achievements.
Ten out ten suddenly doesn’t seem enough.
