A Critic Criticizes An Album of Musical Notes
With some, if not most soundtracks, unless you can specifically place music to a scene, it's sometimes hard to tell which piece of music goes in relation to the film. Titles often tend to be vague, especially if the composer is somewhat artsy, or creative. This can especially be annoying when the tracks are jumbled up, so you can't even tell by chronological order in the film. Thor on the other hand is quite the opposite. Heck, one film site I read listed the track listing as spoilers, as it almost reads as a plot outline in some cases. The Destroyer clearly comes into play at some point during this movie, probably towards the end. But is it killed? Well, the track makes this answer abundantly clear with the track "Thor Kills The Destroyer." Oh, so much for suspension there... Aside from simple and uncreative naming, how's the music?
This Thor is an epic film, the music is appropriately so. Unsurprisingly, considering Patrick Doyle's history with composing scores for fantasy films, these epic grand sweeps that fit into the Asgard world work great. The epic moments aren't exactly original, and have the DNA of several of classic works, but it's effective.
The only problem is everything that isn't epic. The score tends to drag. A lot. At over an hour, it feels like every piece of score in the film is on this soundtrack, which wouldn't be so bad having a fairly complete piece if the piece itself was worthy of such a complete treatment. Instead, I feel that the score could have used some trimming, to give us more of the highlights. It can't all be bombastic, but at least take out the quieter moments that I almost mistook for dead air at times.
Overall, the Thor soundtrack is more mediocre than I feel it should be. There's room for the composer to take off onto long journeys of epic sweeps, but instead is restrained by a giant hammer of dragging moments. Whether this is the fault of the movie, studio, composer, etc, the point is that this soundtrack is OK, but by no means something you have to rush out and listen to.
Real Score: 2.5/5 Stars
