The Wolverine Soundtrack Review

9th Aug 2013

Like various other comic book franchises – the X-Men/Wolverine series seems to not be able to find a composer that they can stick with. Or even any strong themes that span the films.

This is fine when you want to give each film their own identity, but when the quality of those identities leaps up and down like a lie detector – you begin to wonder how well planned this series has been produced. Especially in light of forward planning becoming a slow but sure trend for franchises. And this is still something that the X-Men films has lacked and is barely scraping through on. One only need look at the inconsistencies of First Class to see how questionable the Days of Furtures Past “coming together” really is.

With The Wolverine though they have claimed all along that this is stand-alone venture. That again is questionable upon the evidence of the film as there is much carried over from the aftermath of previous films, and it does indeed look to the future as well at the end.

The issue with likes of the Marco Beltrami’s scores in general is that they are all serviceable with hints of uniqueness. But that uniqueness needs to spread into a larger percentage of each work they are produced within. They may work at a much lower percentage as some of the bigger names but there is a reason why the A-graders are at such a level. Instead, perhaps a mid-budget film (that cannot stretch its pockets) may have been wiser to have someone do a global search online for an up and coming composer who could handle the project and deliver something truly magnificent that would bolster the feel of the movie as well as perhaps launch a new and exciting music career for themselves and for the public. Something that hasn’t happened for a while on the music side of film.

The Wolverine soundtrack is then by all standards fair. There is a very lovely piece of music near the end in “Where to” which should have been more prevalent in Logan’s search for himself in the film. Instead we are given some nicely tuned melancholy, some horror themed action riffs that seem more to spell out what is on screen than to actually do anything original. This is then is another compromise from a film that could have stood out from the crowd if only it had the brass to be more unique.