Reviews - Soundtrack
Label: La-La Land Records
Street Date: October
6th, 2009*
* - Exclusively through La-La Land Records. Also
available in digital formats via Amazon and iTunes.
1) Green Lantern: First Flight Main Title (2:05)
2) The
Ring Chooses Hal (4:42)
3) Hal Meets the Lanterns / The
Flight to Oa (3:45)
4) Labella's Club (3:30)
5) Going
After Cuch (3:03)
6) The Way I Heard It (2:22)
7) Bugs in
the Baggage (4:16)
8) Teleport Pursuit (2:29)
9) Brutal
Attack / The Fate of Kanjar Ro (3:53)
10) Relinquishing the
Ring (1:19)
11) Back from the Dead / Boodikka Turns (5:54)
12) The Weaponers / Sinestro Transforms (4:29)
13) The New
Power Arrives (2:37)
14) The Corps Fights Sinestro (2:47)
15) The Corps Falls (1:39)
16) Revival of the Green Lantern
(2:30)
17) Asteroid Battle (2:50)
18) Ring Against Ring
(3:05)
19) The Green Lantern Pledge (1:02)
20) Green
Lantern: Closing Credits (3:05)
Synopsis: When Hal Jordan first becomes a Green Lantern, he is
put under the supervision of senior Lantern, Sinestro, only to
discover that his so-called mentor is part of a secret
conspiracy that threatens the entire Green Lantern Corps.
Composer Robert J. Kral catches all the space-faring action with
his riveting score.
Review (Zach Demeter)
While available on iTunes, Amazon and other various retailers
for some time now, the Green Lantern: First Flight soundtrack will
land on CD via La-La-Land Records on October 6th, 2009. This is
great news for those of us who are obsessed with maintaining the
highest level of quality when listening to orchestrated
scores…and also good news because it gives fans a tangible
product to hold onto. A minor perk for some, but for me holding
the CD and cranking it up in full CD quality trumps MP3 any day.
Of course I should probably confess that I don’t
actually listen to the physical disc itself. I copy it to my PC
via way of the FLAC format, which maintains CD level audio
quality throughout. Then I pump it through my home theater setup
and let it thump around the room. I’ve listened to film scores
in compressed MP3 format before and I have to say that the FLAC
format (or CD format if you still have a player hooked up) makes
a major difference to the listening experience. But that’s just
a general observation and really has jack-all to do with this
particular soundtrack release.
Robert J. Kral returns
for this third DC Universe go-around with Green Lantern:
First Flight. Watching the film for the first time, one of
the things you take notice of is the opening titles theme, which
mixes the super heroic underscoring that Kral pushed into other
outings like Superman: Doomsday and Batman: Gotham
Knight and mixes in sci-fi elements that may remind some of
early Star Trek. It’s certainly a unique composure and
one that stands out while watching the film. Normally you want
the score to blend with the action on screen, but even when you
took notice of it during the film, it never detracted and, in
fact, was often the highlight of a scene at times.
Sadly
where First Flight was weak as a film so too is it weak
as a score. See, while watching First Flight you get
caught up in the whole sci-fi cop drama aspect of it, but in
reality the film is such an uneven split (something like 60/40,
I’d wager) of Sinestro and Hal Jordan that it’s hard to really
grasp what the film is about. It’s entertaining to watch, sure,
but while doing so you often wonder just where the films headed.
There are some genuinely surprising twists in the story (if
you’re not soaked up in Lantern lore, anyway), but it
ultimately just hangs a little flat in the end. Entertaining to
watch, but it’s kind of like a microwave dinner—looks great on
the box and may even smell delicious while it twists on the
turntable, but by the time you take it out to eat it you’ll find
that once you finish it you just really aren’t all that
satisfied with it.
So with the film already suffering
from a slightly uneven story, the score by Kral must follow
suit. Listening to it isolated here actually left me rather
underwhelmed. Usually I can pick out a few great tracks to
listen to again and again, but here it all just really flowed
together as one. Which is nice that it was uniform throughout
and had a nice upswing in the finale department…but there really
wasn’t much that stood out to me.
This isn’t a knock on
Kral’s work, mind you; he scored something that fit the
material, it just doesn’t make much of an impact when there
isn’t any animation to back it up. I will say that the
“Labella’s Club” music started off as something out of Batman
Beyond and eventually turned into something akin to
something that would accompany a very bad nightmare, but that
track aside nothing really jumped out at me (and that track
didn’t really do it in a good way—I nearly skipped the last 20
seconds of it because it started to sound like nails on a chalk
board).
So the score itself is definitely something that
fits the film but as a stand-alone? Eh. I just couldn’t get into
it. Not to say I won’t ever listen to it again as I’ll gladly
add it to my bi-monthly binges of animated DC scores, but
there’s just really nothing that feels…well, special. As far as
scores go I’ve definitely been more impressed, but having said
that it’s still a solid effort by Kral and worth picking up if
you’re a fan of animated DC scores in general.
Recommended.
The CD
The CD itself
arrives in packaging that mimics the DVD releases. The cover art
is that of the single disc DVD while the disc art is of the
two-disc/Blu-ray releases. There’s also a booklet that contains
a smattering of images from the film as well as a summary of the
film and a two-page intro the soundtrack by composer Robert J.
Kral. The production quality of these soundtracks have been
kicked up a notch as well; in the past I’ve complained that they
sometimes look homemade, but this whole set looks wholly
professional.
Overall a nice package and with over an
hour’s worth of music (61:10 to be exact), you can’t really go
wrong for the price that this costs on iTunes/Amazon ($9.99). I
can’t seem to find the soundtrack on La-La-Land Records website
yet, but you do get a nice little forward by Kral and the
opportunity to rip it in something higher than the 256kbps that
Amazon/iTunes offers.
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