Various Artists - Terminator Salvation: The Soundtrack (Album)
Without commenting too strongly on the film, it can be said that a feeling of confusion would be the first thing elicited by discovering the soundtrack to the motion picture ‘TerminatorSalvation’. This CD release contains essentially, the score of the film, with the addition of Alice in Chains’ classic Rooster. But it is not simply the outlandish presumption that only one solitary song would suffice for any soundtrack (after all, it was the only song that featured in the film apart from Guns ‘n’ Roses’ You Could Be Mine which was already used on the T2 Soundtrack), but it is the lacklustre effect that the score has on any viewer of the film.
Yet another dull and unaffecting score by Danny Elfman begs the question, “Why on earth does that man still have a career when he has no grasp of how to evoke emotion or capture the essence of anything provided by his films?”. Of course, he will always be renowned for his work with Tim Burton, but if you remove the rosy tint and bias that inevitably effuses from the Burton world, all that remains is a generically pseudo-eerie atmospheric menagerie.
This score could have been the dull background music evincing anonymous action scenes in absolutely any standard Hollywood film, if not for the occasional obligatory recurrences of the signature Terminator theme composed by Brad Fiedel.Elfman certainly doesn’t seem to proactively slouch as he attempts to energise the cemented motifs, familiar to even the casually informed.
Yet, he does this with such very characteristically Elfman techniques that he bludgeons the traditionally ominous tones with their hybrid metallic & orchestral sound. Without any powerful movements of its own, merely additional and uncomfortably frenetic sounds, this simply dilutes the awe intended from the clanging steel which so powerfully accentuates that familiar theme. In his scoring, only musically weaker ghosts emerge of the Terminator mythos.
One of the only tracks to differentiate itself is the Fireside track, a gentle acoustic aroma highlighting the romantic catalyst of the film. For the rest (ignoring the superfluous Alice in Chains track) we are essentially given the same uninspiring old hat background work as heard on other Elfman projects, Wanted, Hulk, The Kingdom, Planet of the Apes and the Spiderman films.
