• Composed by Michael Giacchino
• Milan / 75m

Bad Times at the El Royale (English translation: Bad Times at the The Royale) is not only an anagram of “almost reheatable deity”, it’s also a film about seven strangers hiding dark secrets who come together at a seedy hotel in the late 1960s.
Director Drew Goddard hired the busy Michael Giacchino to provide the score – a nice (and increasingly rare) opportunity for him to work on something other than a big franchise picture or a Pixar smash-hit.  His score is pretty down and dirty – by far the highlight is the wonderfully-titled “Suite at the El Royale” which opens the album.  It’s a lengthy track and covers a lot of ground – the glassy opening section is hypnotic, then we go into a dynamic action theme (a bit reminiscent of some of the composer’s Apes music) before a surprising section of religioso choral music.  It’s really good – a solid summary of the score’s main ideas and a satisfying addition to the Giacchino playlist.

I wonder in fact if it’s such a solid summary that virtually all of the remaining 67 minutes of album is rendered somewhat superfluous to requirements: virtually everything else of note on the album is a variant of something heard in that opening piece but rarely rendered in such a satisfying form (and there are some rather dull suspense cues making up the balance of the run time).  It is interesting to hear the composer do something this gritty – he uses a dark orchestration style favouring the lower ranges almost exclusively with the flavour coming from some interesting textures (and if The Hateful Eight wasn’t a pretty significant part of the temp track, I’d be surprised), but I have to say my favourite parts of the score are the more ethereal, softer sections – a piece like “My Memory, My Memory” is in itself golden – it’s just that there are so many similar ones, the impact becomes rather diluted by the time the ridiculously overlong album reaches its conclusion with the sprawling but excellent ten-minute “Absolution Presents Itself” (if you’re still listening by that point then you’re in for a treat).  People delete my website from their favourites in droves whenever I say something like this: really, a half-hour album (with the terrific opening and closing cues and a handful from in between) would have been absolute dynamite; at an hour and a quarter, I’m afraid it sticks around long beyond the checkout time.  If all this seems a bit negative then it’s worth emphasising that the opening and closing tracks really are terrific and run 18 minutes between them – and there’s enough in between them to make this easy to recommend to Giacchino enthusiasts – it’s just not quite what it could be.

Rating: ***

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