Buy it... if you're open-minded about the flashy direction that the franchise took with this film and you don't want to fork over the cash for a superior Batman & Robin score from Elliot Goldenthal in bootleg form.

Avoid it... if you expect Goldenthal to have taken the concept as seriously as Danny Elfman had, because Batman Forever is a carnival ride of wildly inconsistent personalities at war.

Goldenthal

Batman Forever: (Elliot Goldenthal) The tables were turned on the Batman franchise in 1995, when Tim Burton declined to direct a third film for the series for Warner Brothers and criticism still poured in about the lack of cohesion in Batman Returns. The original Batman of 1989 had been constructed with such a classic formula, pure in its brooding styles and stark coloration, that the more ambitious and broadly conceived Batman Returns ultimately became a major letdown. Warner, however, decided to proceed with the franchise not by correcting that situation, but instead hired director Joel Schumacher to solve the problem by taking the franchise further down a path to despair, a path that would meet a laughable end with Batman & Robin within a few years. Schumacher's solution was to make the films more consistent with the original comics' tones and their outrageously silly villains. Gone was the bleak darkness of Burton's creation and infused were colors, streaks of lights, and a carnival atmosphere that would spike the film's visuals to an almost intolerable level. The most considerable reason for the artistic downfall of Batman Forever was the fact that the series, in this and the fourth film, failed to continue taking itself seriously. By turning away from the gothic gloom of Burton's original adaptation and instead pandering to pop-culture references in both the scripts and greater design elements, the franchise bordered on becoming a parody of its former self at times. This error would be corrected in the resurrection of the franchise by Christopher Nolan in the 2000's, though. Composer Danny Elfman, who saw the situation with Batman Forever coming, declined to continue down this road and left for other projects. Elfman's Batman theme had quickly become one of the most easily recognizable in recent cinema (and his entire score for the first film is often deemed an early classic of the Digital Age of film music), and whether or not you appreciated his interpretations of the Batman theme and its brooding attitude in Batman Returns, his sequel score remained consistent in its basic feel even though it lacked the same power of performance. Replacing Elfman for Batman Forever was an equally stylistic, rising composer, Elliot Goldenthal.

Given that Goldenthal, like Elfman, had shown an interest in exploring bizarre mutations of orchestral instrumentation and rhythms, there was hope that there would be only a minor change in style of the franchise's music as this juncture. Goldenthal had been known for some dark and morbid works himself, and as a logical choice for the continuation of the franchise, he fit into the project with ease. Unfortunately, Goldenthal, in both his two scores for this series of films, fell into the same trap as Schumacher, striving for such outlandishly creative deviations in the musical style of his contribution that his music is outstanding in parts but intolerable in others, the entirety failing to take the concept very seriously. To his credit, Goldenthal took one action in his score for Batman Forever that was very admirable; he constructed a theme that was more complex in progression than Elfman's title identity, but he finishes it with the same heroic, two-note major key rise that Elfman had so famously used. Thus, for the average movie-goer, the themes sound similar enough in basic flow to pass as the same, even if Goldenthal's theme wanders quite a bit in the process of getting to the integral progression at the end. Seemingly intent on inserting this two-note shift consistently throughout his score, Goldenthal adapts the Elfman progression so often that it ceases being a subtle application and borders on being irritating. With that chord progression repeating in the jazzy, electronic, circus, and action motifs throughout the score, Goldenthal's use of that adaptation is tiresome by the film's conclusion. By the last twenty seconds of "Batterdammerung," it's hard not to get the point. Aside from that attempt to adapt Elfman's theme into Batman Forever, there is really little positive to say about Goldenthal's score. There are sequences of ballsy, snare-ripping and brass-blaring action material (such as "Main Titles & Fanfare," "Fledermausmarschmusik", and "Victory") that are satisfyingly muscular while maintaining some of Goldenthal's avant garde flair. The muted trumpet and piano duet for a noir effect in place of a standard love theme is also admirable. But the rest of the score is a schizophrenic carnival of noise, shifting from one bizarre collection of motifs, rhythms, and instruments to another with no regard for consistency or a powerfully consistent foundation. Negative critics of the composer's Interview with a Vampire will state that the problems were foreshadowed in that score, and correctly so.

			Learn more about supporting Filmtracks

The wildly shifting personality of Batman Forever (both on screen and album) reaches an all-time low with the insufferable female voice and theremin effects at the end of "Nygma Variations." By allowing his music to become a staggering mess of jumbled styles, Goldenthal completely deflates the Batman character, with only the fanfares at the beginning and end saving the concept from dissolving into total mediocrity. For some casual listeners, the music will be so fragmented in personality that it will seem like unorganized noise. At every turn, there's a different sound, a reinvention of the score's attitude and instrumentation. It is creative to a fault, forced to follow the wild changes of color and flash in the film instead of maintaining any badly needed sense of consistency. It is difficult to say if the failure of Goldenthal's score is entirely due to the film's crazed pacing (and thus the script) or if the blame rests to a degree on Goldenthal's shifty variations from cue to cue. Certainly, Batman Forever as a film is horrid and that is party responsible, but Goldenthal also uses several techniques that are hardly listenable. First and foremost, he again kills the brass section with his whining trills and pitch-wavering effects, a technique he employed in other scores at the time, and it nearly ruins "The Perils of Gotham," among other cues. Second, his use of electronics is overbearing and equally thrashing, lacking sophistication in nearly every application. Some of the carnival-like cues for the Riddler and Two-Face need a wired listener just to be tolerated (the painful "Gotham City Boogie" should be used to interrogate enemy combatants), and they do a great injustice to Goldenthal's slightly more consistent, if not enjoyable romantic and film noir material. No amount of editing of this score onto album could yield a sense of continuity. Overall, Goldenthal thankfully did his best to incorporate Elfman's Batman theme without simple restatement, but he also created a wild, eclectic, and insufferable mass of noise that remains unlistenable in most parts when heard apart from the film's similarly indecisive cinematography. There was, after all, a reason why Elfman's original theme was still heard in all Batman-related trailers, commercials, and theme park shows a decade after Goldenthal's theme hit the screens, surviving even into the tenure of Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard's music for the franchise's entries in the 2000's. Goldenthal would redeem himself to a degree with the superior Batman & Robin, but the damage was already done. **

Bias Check:

For Elliot Goldenthal reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.07 (in 15 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.11 (in 13,849 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.