ANTARCTICA (OST)

The music on this soundtrack is very well produced, and musically it can be compared to the Oscar-winning Chariots Of Fire soundtrack, which is a good album. But still, I must say I wasn't very impressed when I listened this album completely, knowing three - probably best - tracks in advance. I'll round my 2½ stars down even if it's clearly better than 'collectors/fans only'.

So what's wrong? Is it perhaps as the review on allmusic.com says, that the music fails to capture the iciness of Antarctica? No, actually I disagree on that. The music is atmospheric all right. I haven't seen the Japanese film, but I can imagine Vangelis' music works pretty well on it. Instead, it's the usual fault of the film music: as the main theme, wonderfully introduced in the bright opening track 'Theme From Antarctica', is being repeated in various ways throughout the album, the listener gets frustrated and bored before the end. The second track 'Antarctica Echoes' is however another highlight even if it's just a meditative, slowed down version of the opener.

The rest of the album has a couple of fine tracks that easily fill up the quality standards of Vangelis though not anyhow spectacular, but as a whole, to me this album per se is a bit boring. It's miles from the greatness of Blade Runner or 1492 - The Conquest of Paradise, both of which are among my all-time favourites of soundtrack albums. But their secret lies in the way they were further worked out to function perfectly as individual albums. And this is true about Chariots Of Fire also: if you watch these films and listen to the music on them, those brief music passages have quite a little to do with the album. Now if Vangelis had had the same goal with Antarctica, he could have ended up with another strong soundtrack album.