2019-10-06

The Wrath of Abrams

Ranker.com has a list of the greatest film scores of all time.

The highest Star Trek score is, probably unsurprisingly, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. What is surprising is that it's at a criminal #47 overall [please, no "47s" lame quips.. -ed], below Dances With Wolves and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Surely Jerry Goldsmith's sublime and powerful album deserves a Top 25 spot along with other 40something scores like Goldfinger and The Wizard of Oz.

But then things get sad, and they get sad fast. What's the second ranked Trek score? My money of course is on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the wonderful before-he-was-famous James Horner score. Dark horse candidates would include The Search for Spock, First Contact, The Undiscovered Country, even The Final Frontier (no, really, the movie is horrendous but the score is lousy).

So, second place Star Trek score, ranked at #111 is... Star Trek (2009). Wait, what? No, seriously: are you kidding me?

Movie scores have been on steady decline since Howard Shore and John Williams did such great work on the Star Wars prequel and Lord of the Rings trilogies. By 2009 they were essentially Rick Berman's famous "window dressing". There's nothing remotely memorable about the score. For that matter, no movies made after 2009 should even be on the list. But there's the 2009 waste of space Abrams-verse film polluting spaces that better scores could take up.

The next Star Trek film is First Contact at #177, Wrath of Khan at #188, Final Frontier (see?) at #343, The Undiscovered Country at #346, The Search For Spock at #374, The Voyage Home (the worst of the original 6 Trek scores) at #375, Star Trek: Nemesis at #397, Star Trek: Into Darkness (the one that opens with Faggot Spock flaming) at #425, and finally the IV-level forgettable Star Trek: Insurrection at #459. Almost every entry is ridiculous.

Other surprising omissions on the list are The Hunt for Red October (surely a top 50, Crimson Tide sits at #253), Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Event Horizon, and National Treasure (both surely in the top 588!).