Buy it... if you enjoy Jerry Goldsmith's suspense and action material heard in The Swarm and are often intrigued by his experimentation with sound effects.

Avoid it... if only the best-developed Goldsmith suspense motifs satisfy your tastes in the composer's more bombastic orchestral works.

Goldsmith

Leviathan: (Jerry Goldsmith) In retrospect, 1989 was the crowning year of underwater suspense and horror. Among others, DeepStar Six, Leviathan, and The Abyss all were released that year, perhaps due to some level of advancement in underwater filming technologies. Undoubtedly, The Abyss was only the cinematic success of the three films, although Jerry Goldsmith's score for Leviathan gives Alan Silvestri's choral work for The Abyss a run for its money. The premise of Leviathan starts with promise, but disintegrates into a combination of Alien and The Thing that dozens of other films have attempted before. An underwater mining crew (consisting of a decent B-film cast for the time) searching for precious metals 16,000 feet down is testy as it nears the end of its 90-day shift. The crew discovers the mysterious wreck of a scuttled Russian ship named Leviathan in the great depths. They plunder various goodies from the ship unaware that among their discoveries is a mutant gene experiment that was likely the demise of Leviathan. The film stumbles badly at this point, as a few of the crew are transformed into monsters wearing rubber suits and do all the obligatory maiming and senseless killing that films like Leviathan require. At some point, you stop caring if anyone survives --the film has a good sense of humor in these regards-- and luckily the $24 million sunk into the production elements of the film were spent to good use in sets, special effects, and the hiring of Jerry Goldsmith. The composer's involvement with Leviathan is no surprise, given that he and director George P. Cosmatos had collaborated with great success on Rambo. Goldsmith had also proven himself worthy in the monster and sci-fi genres in the late 1970's and 1980's, with everything from Alien to The Swarm under his belt. The task for the composer was not much different from that of Alien, come to think of it, but Goldsmith couldn't resist the temptation of the underwater setting as an influence in his music.

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On the surface, Leviathan is very average Jerry Goldsmith work. But a handful of additions to the score help it stand one leg above the substantial mass of other similar works from the composer. The opening titles are one example of where Leviathan excels, with Goldsmith establishing an elegant and slowly building theme for strings over broad brass as counterpoint and an array of whale sound effects. What follows in the rest of the score is a classic study in Goldsmith suspense, although two tracks distinguish themselves as enjoyable listening exceptions. A piano-led love theme of sorts makes a short appearance in "One of Us" and a victorious end titles cue gallops with almost the Western spirit and thematic bounce of Bruce Broughton's Silverado. While out of place, that variation of theme in "A Lot Better," along with the intrigue of the opening cue, is worth the price of the album. But rather than providing bland suspense music for the majority of the middle sections (which Goldsmith has done in projects such as The River Wild and a few others), he offers substantial power and rhythmic development to many of the action pieces. The orchestral presence is powerful and brooding, with one brass motif after another striking you while staccato strings chop above them. The true point of interest in Leviathan remains the host of sound effects that Goldsmith employs. The 1980's were his time of electronic experimentation, and in an environment as other-worldly as the bottom of the ocean, and with the need to frighten the viewer, Goldsmith's foreign atmosphere in Leviathan stretches from the benign whale calls to the harshest slashing and backwards-mixed effects (heard in the outstanding "Can We Fix It" cue) used in, unrelatedly, the film Dark City. The substance of the horror underscore is not quite the quality of The Swarm, but it puts the similarly conceived ideas in Deep Rising to shame. In the film, Goldsmith's score is featured with great force, prominently mixed into the DVD's primary two-channel Dolby Digital soundtrack. While many casual listeners may write off Leviathan as a merely average Goldsmith action piece, it surprises you with its persistence and quality bookending cues. Collectors of the composer will likely enjoy parts of the album, which is a rather amusing example of Varèse Sarabande's extremely poor and difficult-to-read packaging on some of the label's early CD releases. ****

Bias Check:

For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.22 (in 111 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.36 (in 120,040 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.