I appreciate James taking the time to write his reviews. I find it interesting how often our personal tastes align but also it gives me pause to think when they don’t!
So glad to see this one get the love it deserves. I never understood the lukewarm reception this score got. When it came out I remember reading it was themeless (?!) and the orchestral writing muted (???) and Rahat's voice hard to listen to (I for one love his music, very good to search out). Its an absolutely ravishing score start to finish, the likes of which we won't soon hear again. Horner apparently liked it, too, since every one of the themes would go on to be used elsewhere (the opening one as the CBS News theme, one in Avatar as the heroic theme, and the love them in For Greater Glory as you point out).
Until someone (maybe it was you!) said it on Facebook yesterday I had never even noticed the heroic theme being similar to the one in Avatar. (But it is, of course.)
I like The Karate Kid a lot. My problem with this score is not this score, but the fact that the main theme in this score influenced the main theme in The Amazing Spider-Man later on. Horner has always reuse his main themes, but this one bothers me more than the others because Spider-Man deserves a unique main theme. This is the reason why as much as I like TASM, it will never but on the upper echelon of my all time favorites
This is one of the very few Horner scores I don't own. I haven't heard it since I saw the movie years ago but I will go check it out based on your review. Which doesn't say much but is another way of saying, thanks for this series, James. It's great to revisit these scores with a fresh perspective.
I like the album but this score would really benefit from the expanded treatment, even if only for the film version of the main titles (without the vocal) and the film version of the finale, which is much more robust than what we got on the album and might rebuke the feeling that the album finale cue was unsatisfying (which it was). As I recall this film went through a fairly tortured post-production with a lot of last-minute editing. I wonder if the album was locked before the score proper was finished.
One of the TV spots for The Devil's Own featured a Horner-esque flurry of tinkly pianos that really sold me on going to see the (shitty) movie. I was sure it was from the score. Alas, it wasn't in the movie.
