Movie Mania! Starship Troopers soundtrack

 

As I write this, I'm still behind lining up movie reviews, so I'm doing a little bit of catchup with another soundtrack post. This time around, I have my newest acquisition, the Starship Troopers soundtrack, which I ordered as a follow-up to my review of the direct-to-video threequel. It's of further note as the second soundtrack from Basil Poledouris, last sighted with the Conan the Destroyer soundtrack. Here's a pic of the disc and the insert booklet.

Poledouris is by my own estimation number three of the top film composers of the 1970s through the '90s, with John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith being deadlocked for 1. (James Horner sometimes did as well or better, as evidenced by the Krull soundtrack, but he was prolific enough to get by on the law of averages.) In addition to the soundtracks already under consideration, he scored the likes of Red Dawn, RoboCop, Hunt For Red October, and Breakdown. He kept up his output longer than most, only really tapering off a few years before his death in 2006. His most famous works, at least after the Conan movies, were for Paul Verhoeven, which in fact only accounted for 3 movies: RoboCop, Starship Troopers and the obscure historical adventure Flesh And Blood. 

The present CD was clearly created to promote the movie, which in hindsight was iffy. From my own research, it is not available in digital format, though there are a fair number of recordings of the "Klendathu Drop" track. The booklet includes some pretty good publicity stills. Here's a few pics of the album back and the booklet interior.

For the album itself, the one big problem is that it's quite short at only 36 minutes, which is still longer than Deep Rising and not nearly as padded out as the Zombie soundtrack. It starts with a short track of the Fednet march that opens the movie, then jumps right to "Klendathu Drop", which is really in the middle of the film. It's a bit awkward, and feels like an admission what people would buy the album for. All in all, it's as good as it should be, yet doesn't feel quite up to the composer's usual standards. My strongest reaction is that it feels like a symptom of the problems already in the movie, above all the strange and pervasive lack of emotional depth. Just compare the "Brain Bug" track and sequence with perhaps Poldouris' finest single work, "Looking For Me" from Robocop. The latter makes you picture the characters, almost down to their body language if you're familiar enough with both the music and the film. The former just conjures up a weird giant bug, because the people were never that interesting to begin with.

In case that's too much of a downer, here's the link for my own personal playlist of Poledouris' work. It's been a while since I've listened to it, and I'm once again amazed that I haven't lost a few tracks to deletions and take-downs. No more introductions, just listen to it! Or don't, it's your call. And that's all for now, more to come!