Danny Elfman

Terminator Salvation: Original Soundtrack

(Warner Bros.)

Record Review by Kevan Peterson

Danny Elfman has scored countless movies and television shows from The Simpsons to Tim Burton’s Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.  In fact, Elfman is a frequent Burton collaborator having scored several of his features.  With this kind of resume, it’s hard to doubt Elfman’s songwriting ability.  That being said, the Terminator Salvation soundtrack has few standout tracks, yet when taken together creates a solid serving of thematic music. 

The score works perfectly if you want to spend an afternoon feeling like you are being chased by life-threatening robots, even if you’re just sitting on your couch eating nachos at the time the soundtrack is playing.  Nothing about the Terminator series is miniscule and so, too, the soundtrack plays on a grand scale.  Keeping an industrial feel throughout many of the tracks and playing the majority of the time with a sense of urgency, the album achieves a connection with the film that many fanboys will delight in. 

It’s hard to imagine many people buying this soundtrack that are not diehard fans of the film, unless of course they are just diehard fans of Elfman’s.  That’s not to say the music isn’t worth a listen, but lets face it, if you’re the type of person who usually spends an afternoon listening to orchestra music, your wine and cheese club will probably raise their noses and not their glasses at the commercial sell-out of such hugely franchised arrangements.

The soundtrack runs through a variety of emotions, but spends much of its time alternating between what sounds like “man being chased by giant robots” to “man about to be chased by giant robots.”  A subtle but important difference and one that Danny Elfman has built a career on mastering.