Cheap Planet of the Apes (Music) (Danny Elfman, Paul Oakenfold, Pete Anthony) Price

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Customer Reviews of Planet of the Apes

Tame "Apes"
Danny Elfman's score, for director Tim Burton's 2001 remake of Planet Of The Apes, may not be as bad as the film itself. But it does have its share of problems. Let's face facts, some films and film scores can stand the test of time and don't need to be reimagined or remade, period...Elfman had to follow some very big footsteps with this score. Original "Apes" composer Jerry Goldsmith's music for the 1968 original, uses innovative (for that time) instruments, to give it an "otherwordly" sound. Elfman starts off on the right foot, by paying homage to Goldsmith, with a solid "Main Title". After you get past that though, most of it sounds pretty generic for an Elfman score. I think the main problem here, is that fact that he wasn't really trying (and rightly so) to compete with what's come before, but rather, he was competing with himself. I think the score tries to hard. Many of the tracks didn't did seem all that well thought out. It seemed as though, he said as long as I use bars of the main theme every now and then, things will work. You can't have only one theme and jumble everything else...I have to say though, that I liked Paul Oakenfold's remix of the main title, for "Rule The Planet". I usually like stuff composed by Mr. Elfman, but in this case, he didn't leave me with a lot to like from this score. The CD has 15 tracks, and a running time of 58 minutes, 27 seconds

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A Really bombastic Score....
There were so many things wrong with Tim Burton's take on Planet of the Apes. Weak screenplay, bad casting, very little substance to it. The same was with the score. Danny Elfman tried to put the brass and the woodstring themes into something that tried to echo Jerry Goldsmith's brillent score for the 1968 film, regretfully the finished music sounds so uneven with themes and melodies that do not convey the sense of wonder and fear that the Goldsmith score has. In the end, you sort of wish that both the remake and the music score had never been done at all.

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"Not worth the plastic it's recorded on"
Unlike the actual film, Danny Elfman's composition for the new Planet of the Apes is repetitive, unimaginative and most of all mind-numbingly dull. Elfman, best known for his dark, gloomy and brooding contributions to such Tim Burton flicks as Sleepy Hollow and Edward Scissorhands, seems to have his hands full trying to recapture the melodramatic spectacle of Jerry Goldsmith's classic 1968 soundtrack, so much so that his "tribute" to him in the "Main Title Deconstruction" seems nothing more than a blatant rip-off of Goldsmith's mysterious masterpiece. At the same time, Elfman also tries to recreate the gripping tension of his Batman pieces and seems to invoke a composition that is brutal as it is unrelenting, but turns out to be, on the other hand, nothing more than melody-challenged. While not a total disaster (the opening main titles is an instant pleaser), the album does suffer from boredom, and deafening boredom at that. We've come to expect more from such a highly rated composer. That said, probably the most enjoyable track on the CD isn't by Elfman, but by DJ king and sometime film composer Paul Oakenfeld (soundtrack composer for the Travolta vehicle Swordfish), who wraps up the soundtrack with a mix of music and dialogue from the film that seems to recall sounds executed by the Chemical Brothers on the Fight Club score. Despite Oakenfeld's excellent salvage, the Planet of the Apes soundtrack isn't even worth the plastic it was recorded on.