Review: Michael Giacchino's Star Trek Score

When I first heard in 2006 that J.J. Abrams was going to have Michael Giacchino do the score for his Star Trek film, I'll admit I was more than a little underwhelmed. Don't get me wrong, I knew Giacchino was very talented and I enjoyed his scores for the television series Lost and the film The Incredibles a great deal.

"But c'mon," I thought. "Giacchino isn't Jerry Goldsmith."

I have a passion for film soundtracks. They make up a good 25% of my entire CD collection. And the musical legacy of Star Trek over the years is easily some of my favorite music. I even listen to the isolated music tracks of TOS DVDs just to hear the work of composers such as Alexander Courage, Sol Kaplan and Fred Steiner. I have all the CDs -- and even some vinyls! -- for the Trek films over the years, except for Leonard Rosenman's score for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the only thing I didn't like about that movie). James Horner's work for Star Trek II and III are so powerful, though in retrospect they sounded like nearly everything else he was doing at the time. I have Dennis McCarthy's soundtrack for Generations, but I probably only remember the first and last two minutes of it.

Fortunately, the master of Trek soundtracks -- Jerry Goldsmith -- would return for First Contact. Despite all the fine compositions for Star Trek films both good and bad, I'll always consider his score for Star Trek: The Motion Picture the masterpiece. His main theme was triumphant, "Ilia's Theme" is so beautiful, and I still get a little chill up my spine when I listen to "Klingon Battle". When I hear it, I'm 14 again seeing Klingon battlecruisers in 70mm Panavision for the first time. And, in a reversal of my feelings for Trek IV, Goldsmith's music is pretty much the only thing I love about Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. I would go so far as to say that Jerry Goldsmith's Trek music was the music for the Star Trek series. Yes, TOS had Courage's immortal theme, but Goldsmith's music was bigger than that.

So, for me, Giacchino would have some pretty big shoes to fill and I didn't think he could pull it off. How wrong I was.

My perception of what Michael Giacchino could do completely changed when I saw Cloverfield in early 2008. That films single piece of music, "Roar! (Cloverfield Overture)", was the perfect distillation of master composers such as Akira Ifukube, Masaru Sato and Yuji Koseki and the outstanding work they had done over the decades for kaiju eiga (another of my passions) such as Godzilla, Mothra and other Toho classics. Would he take a similar approach to Star Trek?

The answer is an unqualified "Yes".

Michael Giacchino's score for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek is not only a worthy successor to the work of Goldsmith but also captures the essence of the contributions of Horner, Courage, Kaplan and Fried, with a little Bernard Herrmann (The Twilight Zone, The Day the Earth Stood Still) thrown in for good measure. But, like "Roar!”, Giacchino makes it wholly his own and in the process continues the memorable legacy of Star Trek music.

I've not yet seen the film, so I can't yet say how well the score for Star Trek supports the movie itself. Like much of Goldsmith's work, Giacchino builds his score around a single recurring musical theme. It's not quite the leitmotif approach of composers such as John Williams in his Star Wars soundtracks, full of individual themes for characters and settings. Based on what I know of the story itself, the score focuses on Kirk and (I suspect) builds in variations along with the character throughout the course of the film. There seem to be identifiable melodies for the Enterprise, the villain Nero, and his vessel the Narada, but in most cases are used to intertwine with and modify the main Trek theme. Through the course of the score, Kirk's theme builds from soft and tentative ("Star Trek"), to contemplative ("Hella Bar Talk"), to brash ("Enterprising Young Men"), to mature and triumphant ("That New Car Smell"). It is, at times, as strong a theme as Goldsmith's "Leaving Drydock" in TMP.

Two of the finest moments in the soundtrack don't involve Kirk's theme at all. "Labor of Love" is an aching, building, beautiful melody that at times seems mournful and turning unexpectedly blissful. I suspect it accompanies the birth of Kirk in the midst of the tragedy of the USS Kelvin, and may have the audience holding back tears in the first 10 minutes of the movie. It has the same effect on me that Giacchino's "Life and Death" theme from Lost does. Another, "Nero Sighted", weaves moments of brass and moments of isolated percussion in such a way that it evokes Horner's track "Surprise Attack" from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It's one track that I'm sure will please fans of Horner's classic space combat music.

Another standout track is "Nice to Meld You". I won't identify what I suspect accompanies this track in the film, but it's dark, dramatic and ebbs in and out in such a way that I felt transported back to moments in The Original Series meshed with Herrmann's The Day the Earth Stood Still. I can't wait to have visuals to match with the music (one week!).

If anything feels out of place in this score, I'm afraid that it's Giacchino's take Alexander Courage's original Star Trek theme in "End Credits". It feels forced and unauthentic, like something off of the "Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra" album I've avoided for 25 years. I can appreciate its inclusion as a tribute, but I'm just not certain that a purely symphonic approach to something so well-known and originally accompanied by a soprano voice and electronics could do anything but jar this listener. Perhaps that's why it's been avoided by other composers up to this point. More effective is the use of the opening fanfare in "To Boldly Go", and a familiar melody in another track that will come as a pleasant surprise when you hear it.

I'm also disappointed that the CD contains only 45 minutes of music from the film. I realize that not every part of a score is suitable for release on a soundtrack CD, but 45 minutes out of a possible 70 minute CD for a 126 minute movie leaves me wondering how much has been left out.
But for me, the most important question was whether or not Giacchino's score would be worthy of its predecessors. Would I get another Star Trek IV (not Trek-like)? Would I get another Generations (unmemorable)? Was it beyond hope to get a score better than Star Trek: The Motion Picture (the best)?

While Giacchino's Star Trek doesn't quite reach the heights of Goldsmith's masterpiece. I'm not sure how much it will appeal to those whose tastes run darker, and more towards the work of Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. But it is at least as superb as James Horner's Trek scores and most of Goldsmith's later work. It sounds both fresh and classic and -- most important -- it sounds like Star Trek. The legacy continues. I suspect that once we hear the music in the context of the film itself, it will be perfect and we'll hope that Giacchino will be back for the next Star Trek in 2011.