Soundtrack Review: The Eye (2008)
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This is a review of the motion picture score for The Eye by Marco Beltrami. Release date: Unknown.
Tomorrow is of course the Academy Award and Marco Beltrami is nominated for Best Score with 3:10 to Yuma. February 1st this year The Eye had its premiere, and it wasn’t too successful. It is a remake of a Hong Kong film called “Jian Gui”, and sits comfortably in the horror genre. As I’ve mentioned before, horror scores is probably the hardest to review, because I listen to them outside of the movie and this is what my reviews are based on. It can fit perfectly in the movie, but sound terrible outside of it. Usually there are two types of horror scores, the “crazy” one, where it sounds like random noise and the “ambient” one in which it is more creepy background noise and of course anywhere in between. I’ve reviewed one horror score so far this year, and it was The Mist by Mark Isham, so I will draw some comparisons along the way. Here is the track list for The Eye:
- The Eye Main Titles
- Bruja
- Rain
- Not My Eyes
- To See Again
- Apartment On Fire
- Taking Mrs. Hillman
- Road To Mexico
- He Is Dead
- Bedridden
- Report Card
- Who Is She?
- Mirror Mirror
- Mrs. Martinez
- Walkthrough
- Retribution
- The Drive Home
- Roadblock
- The Concert
A solid number of songs and the total playtime is 47:01 which is very respectable. So does this score fall into the “crazy” category or the “ambient” category? I would say that this is a fine mix between the two while The Mist was definitively in the “ambient” category. Marco Beltrami has done a few horror scores before like Captivity, The Omen and Cursed. Neither of those scores impressed me, but perhaps there is something new to add to the horror genre and Marco Beltrami could be the man to do it. It starts of in a typical horror fashion, a little crazy mixed with ambient scary sounds, but it dares to step outside of the horror circle quite a few times which is refreshing to say the least. There are a few nice string based themes in there and the creepy piano sends the occasional shiver down your spine.
It is a solid horror score that actually gave me goosebumps while listening to it and the movie definitively benefited from it. If only this score was used on a really good horror movie, then it all would have come together nicely. The film studio certainly did the right thing in hiring Marco Beltrami for this. You can really feel the amount of work and pride he has put into this score. Is it wasted? I don’t think so. Even though I am huge Mark Isham fan, I have to admit that this is an improvement upon The Mist which I reviewed earlier. The huge variety in this score is really surprising. I think this is Marco Beltrami at his best, and I really want to put it in my MP3 player, but I would be too scared walking to work in the morning. Listen to The Eye below:
http://soundtrackgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/eye.flv
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(8 votes, average: 9.25 out of 10)
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Comments
Yep, I have to say that apart from Surf’s Up, this is the (positive) surprise of the year so far. This score is so much better than the movie deserved.
Has the soundtrack for “The Eye” been released?
I cannot seem to find it anywhere. I am a Marco Beltrami fan.
Hmm it doesn’t seem like it will be released unfortunately. Such a shame. It is out there, but you won’t find it through official channels.
Hey. Do you by any chance have the full song “The Concert”? Could you possibly send it to me? thank you =]
I’m sure you can find it in more “unofficial” channels out there. Try Emule or Bittorrent. I’m sure it won’t be hard to find 
I don’t understand… during the last concert piece in which Alba’s character played at the end of the film, my subtitles came up with ‘Mozart’s Violin Concert No.3 in G major’ and on imdb it is listed as that piece too. This is all good, except i tried to download it and it just really isn’t Mozart’s violin concerto!! to be honest, it doesn’t even sound in the same key! why, oh why would you list it as that??
please help me out! is there a secret concerto that i haven’t heard??
Jorn Tillnes Reply:
May 3rd, 2009 at 1:17 pm
I believe it’s the cue “The Concert” by Marco Beltrami. Haven’t access to it now to verify, but I’m 78% sure it is
Ron Reply:
September 12th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
There is a scene of a contra-bass clarinet and a bass clarinet in the segment to which you are referring. So it couldn’t be Mozart or Beethoven. Plus, the style, scoring, etc. is definitely not either one of these composers.
Soundtrack Seek
The soundtrack was good eh? I’m usually down for any Alba movies but I skipped this one all together. She’s been doing alot of horror based films lately.
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