The Best Movie Scores

A lot of my non-review blogs are usually ideas from my wife. She’s been a blogger longer than I have and is much better at it so she comes up with ideas that don’t revolve around me having to rely on reviews. One of her ideas, and the one I’m embracing today, is sharing some of my favorite songs from movies. I do plan on talking about both musical scores and more popular music put on soundtracks. 

Before we continue, I just want to share with you my distinction between musical scores and soundtrack songs. For my personal definition, a musical score is any classical song written for the movie to be used as an accompaniment to any scene. A very popular example is the Imperial March from Star Wars. That’s the song usually attributed to Darth Vader. A song for the soundtrack will be any song you’d also hear on the radio (non-classical station of course). As an example both Logan Lucky and Kingsman: The Golden Circle used Country Road by John Denver.Country Road. That, of course, was a song before the movies ever came out.

So without further ado, let me share with you three of my favorite scores from movies. 

Star Trek: First Contact - Main Theme composed by Michael Giacchino

 Not just any of the Star Trek themes. While I do love them all and will eventually talk about them in other posts, for this first one I want to focus The Next Generation film from 1996. There are a couple reasons for this. The first is that I believe that the main theme from First Contact merges very well with the theme from the show. If you listen to the beginning of the song it starts the same way the TV show intro does and then triumphantly changes into the new theme expressing how the show lead to the movies. The other reason I picked this song to talk about first is that First Contact is my favorite Star Trek film. The 2009 reboot and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home are close seconds and thirds, but First Contact did a better job of capturing the magic and spirit of the show.

Flight from the Man of Steel soundtrack by Hanz Zimmer.

Hanz Zimmer is the best thing to happen to movie scores since John Williams. If you look through a list of movies he’s scored you’re bound to find one of your favorites. The best thing about Flight is that it’s exciting without feeling like cheesy trailer music. It does start out slow but it’s triumphant, it’s moving, it makes me feel brave. It’s the perfect embodiment of Superman. Man of Steel wasn’t well received as a movie and I get that. I happen to love it because it does a wonderful job of capturing the spirit and the magic, of the boy from Krypton who was raised to be the best humanity has to offer. Damn, that’s a good line. Don’t be surprised if I write a blog defending Man of Steel and I use that same line.The song is 4 minutes and 13 seconds and it starts out slow and easy like Clark's youth then at the 1:28 mark it starts to pick up

Princess Mononoke - Journey To The West by Joe Hisaishi

Another movie from the 90s and one of my favorites of all time. Whenever I think of moving classical scores I think of Joe Hisaishi’s work on Princess Mononoke. Even though I love the film, I think the epic score helped solidify its place on the top of my list. There are three times this moving song is featured in the film, but it’s use as an accompaniment for a travel montage for Ashitaka and Yakul (his steed) as he leaves his village and I think it's the best use of the song. The theme captures the wonder of the film and the heart behind the story.

There you have it. The first three songs in what I hope will be an ongoing series. Do you have any favorites? Share them and I'll bring them up in the next installment.