• Composed by Harry Gregson-Williams

I usually start these things with a little description of the film, but even though I’ve seen Infinite I haven’t got a clue what it’s about. Something to do with resurrection (I did get that much) and Mark Wahlberg trying to find an egg in order to save all life on earth. From the usually-reliable Antoine Fuqua, it’s a disappointment. The director doesn’t really seem to have a regular composer, but the one he turns to most frequently is Harry Gregson-Williams. I can sympathise that this would not have been an easy film to score, given it is completely incomprehensible, and so perhaps it’s no real surprise that the music seems a little perfunctory. The opening “The End of All Things” is a pretty good summation of the whole thing: there are core ideas there and the track seems to be building towards something, but it never really gets there. Just as you think it’s about to explode into life, the payoff to the suspenseful build-up doesn’t come.

A lot of suspense follows, with occasional bursts of what you might call standard modern action music. The score has real quality when Gregson-Williams gets the chance to inject some emotion – I love “Resurrection”, with its distinctive ethnic sounds and colours and its feeling of dramatic importance. Whenever the music returns to this motif it’s attractive and has a real calmness that serves as a bit of an antidote to the action material, which is the biggest disappointment: it has a disappointingly generic feel, like it could come from any number of other scores, and lacks the “high concept” feel that it could have got (I assume Fuqua was aiming for Christopher Nolan while he was making the movie). The one time it gets close to this, the vaguely Inception-like “Enemy Territory”, is the album’s strongest moment. Infinite certainly has some strong moments, but between these is pretty anonymous material, so I have to chalk it off as a disappointment.

Rating: **

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