About the Soundtrack: Marking his return to the mainstream, James Horner composed the score for "The Spiderwick Chronicles," a film that's expected to do moderately well at the box office.  While I admit I have personally missed Horner's presence in recent times, his work here left me wanting something else, but I'll touch more on that soon. 

 

The soundtrack was first made available on iTunes (one had to do a search to find it) and offers quite a bit of score material.  The sound quality wasn't exactly top notch as I ran into difficulty hearing the quieter passages on the album, so take note of that if you decide to venture forth with this score.

What You Need to Know: The good news with "The Spiderwick Chronicles" is that James Horner didn't copy his previous material on this album.  The bad news is that James Horner didn't copy his previous material on this album.

 

Leaving me virtually unmoved, the score for this film played like a dud to me.  I do admit that I only gave this soundtrack but one listen but sometimes that's all it takes to determine the likeability factor.  I found little appeal to the music and felt as though it drifted from one piece of underscore to the next with no significant impacts to be felt.  I certainly thought going in that there would be a semblance of fantasy driven material, given the source material, but I didn't detect any such motifs...nothing substantial, at least.  While the score does begin to find a life of its own from the 10th track onward, there's simply too much down time to really keep you in a listening mood. I'm telling you, leading up to the highlights, this felt like a chore to listen...not exactly what I'm looking for out of my soundtrack experience.

 

Horner has long been critiqued about his self plagiarism (rightfully so), but he departs from that 'technique' on this album, which makes me wonder if he ran out of material?  Probably not, but it's an honest conclusion that can be made since there doesn't seem to be any vintage melodies or action cues that he's known for.  Again, is this due to the fact that he didn't copy over his prior work and had little new material to choose from or was it a case of his heart not being into this project?  Or maybe it was a point blank misfire. In either case, I can't deny that I expected more from him with this opportunity.  I know that I was also fooled into this one by looking at the track titles, many of which seemed alluring as far as musical opportunities go.  But alas, what was heard on disc didn't match up with the titles.

 

Final Grade: Perhaps I might have a different view of this score's outcome if I were to listen to the soundtrack again but I'm not sure when that will be.  The matter at hand is that this score failed to captivate me and thus I can't give this one a recommendation.  That said, I still have optimism that Horner will bounce back soon and give us material he's known for...even if he has to mimic himself again.