By Mark Mancina

Netflix, out now

Rising from the depths…

This score to the Netflix movie from the makers of Big Hero 6 and Moana is brought to us by an alumnus of Hans Zimmer’s Media Ventures band, who has composed additional music for many Zimmer films, as well as composing plenty of film and TV scores on his own, such as Training Day and the two Planes movies for Pixar, and is probably best known for the Bad Boys movies theme. However, he also co-composed the score for Moana, and the two films share a certain amount of a tropical oceans journey story element and mood.

This score is for the most part taken from the first half of the movie, and is generally quite jaunty. There’s a certain element of a use of ticking clocks in action cues such as “Wear It Down” which might seem a little too mechanistic a sound for a score steeped in an ahistorical fantasy world of sailing ships and monsters, but actually is quite a clever thing when you think about the historical need for accurate clocks to measure longitude, and the contest to design them in the 18th Century. Likewise we also have the use of muted and distant ship’s bells, deeper strings and woodwind track elements slightly modulated to emulate a hint of whale song, and use of the kinds of instruments you’d find in Bardcore or a fisherman’s pub.

That comes over as part of the overall aural world-building, in fact, fitting in well with the Georgian-era style dance jigs used in the score, playing off the movie’s visuals of 18th Century style ships, uniforms, and Royal fashions. This isn’t surprising, as we tend to think of nautical films as being in that kind of setting – the era of Blackbeard through to Trafalgar (though Moby-Dick would be as appropriate, if set a little later). We also tend to think of pirates, and you might expect a Pirates Of The Caribbean type of sound, but the score largely eschews that in favour of a more wondrous and wistful feel – which if you had to compare to a pirate movie, is probably closer to something like Muppet Treasure Island, albeit gentler, just as pleasant, but with fewer memorable themes. It’s not really a pirate musical score, though, but more an adventure of wonders and very mild scares, with an undercurrent of moral threat.

There’s one song, Captain Crow’s theme, which is a nice bit of fun, with a quick tempo.

It’s all good fun, and perfectly fits the film, as well as being a decent score album that hits the right spots well enough. Its downside is, really, that it’s just a little ordinary. Everything it does it does well, but there isn’t really anything new in it, nor especially memorable.

Verdict: It’s perfectly decent and harmless, and thoroughly likeable, but not an essential must-buy.7/10

David A McIntee