Music Album Review: 'Apollo 13: Music From the Motion Picture'

Before James Horner died at the age of 61 on June 22, 2015 in a single-fatality plane crash in California's Los Padres National Forest, he had composed over 100 film scores, including the Academy Award-winning music for director James Cameron's Titanic (1997), which included that year's Oscar-winning Best Original Song, "My Heart Will Go On." Throughout his 27-year-long career as a composer and orchestrator, Horner earned eight more Best Original Score Oscar nominations, won two Golden Globes, three Satellite Awards from the International Press Agency, and three Saturn Awards from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films.

Among the eight Oscar-nominated scores in Horner's filmography is the one for director Ron Howard's 1995 film Apollo 13, a dramatization about the April 1970 lunar mission which nearly ended in tragedy as a result of a catastrophic explosion of an oxygen tank aboard the spacecraft's Command/Service Module (CSM).

On June 27, 1995, three days before the film's theatrical debut, MCA Records released Apollo 13: Music From the Motion Picture, a 25-track  (the album's back cover list says 15, but in reality it's 25) mix of seven tracks of orchestral music composed and conducted by Horner, eight songs by either artists who were popular in the 1960s and early 1970s or a contemporary band (Miami-based country group The Mavericks) and snippets of dramatic dialogue performed by actors Kevin Bacon, Brett Cullen, Tom Hanks,  Ed Harris, and Gary Sinise. The album also features two soloists: trumpeter Tim Morrison and Scottish vocalist Annie Lennox (of Eurythmics fame).

The 25 tracks are:

1. Main Title (featuring Tim Morrison, trumpet)
2. One Small Step (Walter Cronkite and Neil Armstrong)
3. Night Train (James Brown)
4. Groovin' (The Young Rascals)
5. Somebody To Love (Jefferson Airplane)
6. I Can See For Miles (The Who)
7. Purple Haze (Jimi Hendrix)
8. Launch Control
9. All Systems Go/The Launch (music plus dialogue by Brett Cullen, Ed Harris, et.al.)
10. Welcome to Apollo 13 (Tom Hanks)
11. Spirit in the Sky (Norman Greenbaum)
12. House Cleaning (Dialogue spoken by Kevin Bacon, Tom Hanks, and Gary Sinise)
13. "Houston, We Have a Problem." (Dialogue spoken by Tom Hanks and Brett Cullen)
14. Master Alarm
15. "What's Going On?" (Dialogue spoken by Tom Hanks and Gary Sinise)
16. Into the LEM
17. Out of Time (Dialogue spoken by Tom Hanks, Ed Harris, and Kevin Bacon)
18. Shut Her Down (Dialogue spoken by Kevin Bacon and Brett Cullen
19. Dark Side of the Moon
20. "Failure is Not an Option" (Dialogue spoken by Ed Harris) 
21. Honky Tonkin' (Hank Williams)
22. Blue Moon (The Mavericks)
23. Waiting for Disaster/"A Privilege" (Dialogue by Ed Harris, Tom Hanks, and Gary Sinise)
24. Re-Entry & Splashdown
25. End Titles (featuring Annie Lennox)

The original 1995 album was executive produced by Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Todd Halliwell, and Kathy Nelson.  Composer James Horner produced the tracks that featured the original score, and the executive in charge of music for Universal Pictures was Harry Garfield. 

Note:  In 2018, Intrada Records released a 2-CD, 135-minute album that features two different versions of James Horner's orchestral score without the dialogue tracks or pop songs that are in the MCA Records album. CD 1 (Orchestral Film Score) includes 16 orchestral tracks by Horner, some (but not all) of which are heard in the '95 album, but other tracks were previously unreleased. CD 1 also presents nine brief Electronic Cues after the End Titles (track 16). CD 2 is the composer's Soundtrack Assembly, which reflects Horner's planned original soundtrack album. As Michael Matessino of Intrada explains:

CD 2 marks the first commercially available presentation of Horner’s originally planned 59-minute album. Created with engineer Shawn Murphy for release on MCA Records, this assembly features some performances and cues that vary slightly from the film versions (notably, “Master Alarm,” which is completely different). The album never materialized commercially, however, as the filmmakers opted for a CD that incorporated dialogue and sound effects highlights as well as pop songs from the period that could be heard in the film itself, alongside a reduced presentation of Horner’s Academy Award-nominated score.  

 My Take

Although this 1995 album is, in film score critic Mike Matessino's words, "a souvenir album" that presents a mix of Horner's orchestral score, a potpourri of pop songs, sound effects, and snippets of dialogue from Ron Howard's Academy Award-nominated movie, it is my second-favorite of the four soundtracks that feature the late composer's music. (My favorite? Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.)

In many ways, Horner's score is similar to the other three scores that I have in my modest music library – Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Clear and Present Danger (1994), and Titanic (1997). The orchestrations in Apollo 13, like those three scores, feature brass-and-snare drum fanfares and nautical-sounding themes; stylistically, Clear and Present Danger is Apollo 13's closest musical sibling since they both have main titles that sound militaristic and evoke going-to-sea feelings – even though Phillip Noyce's adaptation of Tom Clancy's novel is steadfastly Earthbound and Howard's adaptation of astronaut Jim Lovell and science writer Jeffrey Kluger's Lost Moon (which was reissued in the 21st Century as Apollo 13) clearly is not. (Fun fact: if you watch the original trailer for Apollo 13, it features music from Clear and Present Danger.)

Even though I agree with the oft-repeated opinion that Horner tended to be derivative as a composer and that he often "borrowed" themes and musical ideas not just from his own scores but also from classical composers (the scores for Star Trek II and III cribbed from Prokofiev's music for Alexander Nevsky and Romeo and Juliet, and Horner's "action ostinato' from Aliens comes from his earlier score for the horror flick Wolfen), I love the music from Apollo 13. 

Perhaps this is because I have a strong emotional connection to the film's and its topic, the manned lunar missions of NASA's Apollo Program.

You see, I was a child of the Apollo age. I was too young in 1967 to be aware of the Apollo One tragedy (which is alluded to in the film and the score). but I remember Apollo 8 (the first manned orbital mission to the Moon) and (of course) the first manned landing (Apollo 11) of July 20, 1969 (I was six then). As a Moon-crazy kid, I shared Jim Lovell's dream of someday walking on Earth's nearest celestial neighbor.

As a fan of orchestral film scores, I have always had mixed feelings about the 1995 album. I like it, don't get me wrong, but I think that it is a bit too gimmicky for my taste. I don't object, say, to the inclusion of seven period and one non-period popular music songs (including the inexplicable cover of Blue Moon by the 1990s retro country band "The Mavericks").

But considering that by 1995 most of Hollywood's major films got a home video release on VHS and (to a lesser extent, Laserdisc) six or so months after their theatrical runs, was it necessary for the producers to get gimmicky, add dialogue tracks, and overrule Horner's desire to release an album that featured his work?

Again, I quote from Matessino's notes on the new Intrada 2-CD album:

This official release was effectively a “souvenir” album, which included such luminous voices and performers as Walter Cronkite, Neil Armstrong, James Brown, Jefferson Airplane, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Hank Williams and The Mavericks, as well as those of the film’s stars: Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise and Brett Cullen. 

Now, I don't hate this stylistic decision by the album's producers; they thought it was a cool thing to do, and if you love rock, R&B, and country songs from the late 1960s and early 1970s, the album will be a highly enjoyable experience.

However, I think that if MCA Records, which was the music division of what was then Universal Pictures' corporate parent company MCA, had not opted to make the Apollo 13 soundtrack album an inexpensive one-disc album, this could have been released as a 2-CD set from the git-go. That way the producers would be happy, the pop artists or their estates would have still gotten their royalty payments, listeners would have been happy, and James Horner would have been happy.

Sources:

James Horner article on Wikipedia

Intrada Records: Apollo 13 2-CD Special Collectors Edition