Film Reviews

Fantastic 4 Soundtrack Review

4th Aug 2015

We now come to the reboot (and looking very much like a re-imagining of the Fantastic Four franchise) – and it’s a double teaming of composers Marco Beltrami and Philip Glass we get for this one.

You can’t help but feel that the score is something from the Danny Elfman school of thought when you first run it. And as this is a comic book movie we are talking about that makes this comparison somewhat of a letdown for the listener as we’ve have quite enough of that sort of feel over the past two and a half decades.

The score does change its tune though as it continues with some very strong hiunts at Jerry Goldsmith’s Alien peppered into the mix.

And yet, as with many other comic book movies of late, there is no attempt (or at least a very weak attempt) to have anything for the listener to latch onto in terms of themes. Heroes it seem (or villains for that matter) don’t have anthems of their own anymore. Either every film scorer in Hollywood is still striving against them, or there isn’t the talent available anymore that knows how to build such strong scores. Have film composers gone the way of architects and artists of the past? Where we used to build and design such grand structures, but now the modern day sickness and lazy approaches to commercialism has left us bereft of ideas.

This Fantastic Four rendition then is for the large part incidental music that drives story and thrills. This way work a charm as part of the film itself – viewers will have to decide. But as music apart from the film, this has nothing much to offer the ear that is new or of much value.