ST X: Finale - Allegro non assai (Star Trek: Nemesis - Jerry Goldsmith - Soundtrack)

Member Name: berlioz II

Product:	Star Trek: Nemesis - Jerry Goldsmith - Soundtrack
Date:	18/12/07 (101 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Darkly rich music from beginning to end

Disadvantages: Only problem is the score has very little to say

By 2003 Star Trek had run a bit ground as a popular series of films and movies. The last film Insurrection in 1998 was not really that great a success as First Contact had proven to be, the stallwarth old series of Deep Space Nine had finally come to a conclusion in 1999, the vaining series Voyager was canned in 2001 much due to low viewer ratings, and the new series Enterprise that first aired in 2001 was considered a failure from the get go and, though it managed to scrape together four seasons of episodes, the show was cancelled in 2005. This slump was further emphasised when the tenth film in the franchise came about in 2002 that barely scraped enough money worldwide to cover the $60 million production costs, and frankly I can see why. Star Trek: Nemesis is among one of the most terrible Star Trek films ever, just slightly above Star Trek V, and even though it looks quite good effects wise (though at times being painfully evident with its CGI usage), the film simply suffers from an incoherent plot and characters whose motivations remain shrouded in mystery and generally not making any sense at all. The film mostly deals with a man named Shinzon, who apparently is cloned from Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and is now hell-bent on having some kind of retribution on the Federation and the Romulans and needs Picard specifically there to fix his ailing genetical makeup. What follows is a fairly dark and action packed film that unfortunately doesn't go any deeper. Quite specifically, I never got to know what was Shinzon really up to since the film's plot seemed to go from "do something nasty to the two governments" to "then have a big space battle". Part of the problem maybe that about 50 minutes of scenes were edited out of the film due to time constraints, most of which might have actually explained a whole lot about the film. Even listening to the director's commentary shed no light to the actual meaning of the film and it almost seems that the final battle scene was ultimately the only real reason for the existence of the movie, a pretty empty reason at that. Even the fixed emotionalism of the end was unconvincing, which for a film touted to be the final Next Generation film ever is a huge disappointment.

Again working with the music was composer Jerry Goldsmith, whose musical voice had shaped the new Next Generation movies soundscape from the get go. At the time Nemesis came out in late 2002, nobody really suspected that this would in fact be the third last score Goldsmith would ever write, being followed only by his rejected score for Timeline and the unfinished Looney Tunes: Back in Action, before Goldsmith died of cancer in July of 2004. Whether his illness had any effect on him during the scoring process of Nemesis can be questioned, but the fact remains that Star Trek: Nemesis, despite being ostensibly the best of Goldsmith's Next Generation Trek scores, it still suffers from an anonymity problem that his other two scores suffered from. For Nemesis, Goldsmith wrote probably his most darkly tinged Trek score that even left First Contact in the shadow by not really featuring a lot of lighter material (First Contact at least had the First Contact theme to use). The score for Nemesis doesn't actually really introduce a whole lot of new thematic material, or at least nowhere near the scale of either First Contact or Insurrection. The large new addition here centers around a five-note theme for Shinzon, a darkly melancholy, though somewhat simplistic, cascading note progression that is always quite understated and is on par with the secondary villain material of the previous two scores. A secondary phrase appended to the theme is laced with more tragedy and emotion (best heard in the concert arrangement in between the end credits), but on the whole this new theme is not a memorable one, nor does it really feel like a major theme at all, rather than coming across as a fairly standard suspense motif. Other thematic ideas center on likewise subtle usage of older themes such as the main Star Trek theme and the four-note Friendship theme that make periodic reappearances, though not to any large extent. Otherwise there is fairly little thematic interconnectivity with the past scores.

And indeed it is this reticence that ultimately lets the score down. With the first eight tracks being basically subtle and understated suspense, which is then replaced by some quite standard beating action music with a lot of electronic ticking and clicking, the score suffers from a bad case of anonymity. The long-sustained suspense of the first half of the album is likely something that will bore you half-way through, with the only real piece of remarkability being the occasional interludes of either familiar thematic material or the steady appearance of the Shinzon theme, but makes little concessions to actually be anything more than supporting noise under dialogue and dark sets. The action music likewise suffers from the same problems as for the largest part the suspense is merely traded with some louder orchestral bursts of noise from the percussion and brass, while the usage of thematic material remains the same with the Shinzon theme forever remaining as subdued as before and the older themes punctuate the matrix here and there, but never past the point of simple reference. This is doubly the shame particularly as you have something as great to compare the darkness and suspense to as Cliff Eidelman's similar music to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, but in the case of Eidelman, he always based much of his underscore on his actual thematic material, not on simple filler as Goldsmith has a tendency to do in this score (and as it is amply showcased that Goldsmith indeed could write some very effective action and suspense music). The best music on the album again finds its way towards the end with the cue "Final Flight" with its more epic performance of the Shinzon theme thus far heard, and providing the most satisfying piece on the album besides the opening "Remus". Other than that, Nemesis continues on the line of functional but bland of the previous two scores. As such, whether you are going to enjoy this score hinges on how much you enjoy dark suspense that does little to provide anything really solid for you to hold on to. The Shinzon theme in its simplicity is fine enough, although this simplicity also works against it. Star Trek: Nemesis is simply a score that could have been so much more, but is not nearly enough, and for one of the last great Goldsmith efforts is quite a significant disappointment.


1. Remus (1:57)
2. The Box (2:21)
3. My Right Arm (1:04)
4. Odds and Ends (4:39)
5. Repairs (6:27)
6. The Knife (3:10)
7. Ideals (2:16)
8. The Mirror (5:23)
9. The Scorpion (2:24)
10. Lateral Run (3:55)
11. Engage (2:13)
12. Final Flight (3:49)
13. A New Friend (2:38)
14. A New Ending (6:08)

Music Composed and Conducted by Jerry Goldsmith
Orchestrated by Mark McKenzie & Conrad Pope
Music Recorded and Mixed by Bruce Botnick
Recorded at Paramount Pictures Scoring Stage M
Music Editors: Kenny Hall & Bob Bayless
Varèse Sarabande, 2002 (302 066 412-2)

© berlioz, 2007

Summary: Warp Factor 10, Put on the brakes!!! We are starting to disperse timeeeeee!!!