Cocoon: The Return

It’s fun, silly, and unusual. What more can you want (except for thematic consistency and quality)

I don’t know how to feel about this soundtrack. There are elements of 1920s-style jazz, basketball music, and even what sounds like a reference to the Harlem Globetrotters. And it’s got a traditional orchestral sound too, for the most part. It’s lively and generic at the same time. It’s got quality and boredom. It’s an enigma…

I’ve never seen either the original nor this sequel I decided to randomly listen to. I didn’t know what to expect, but I somehow expected more. The soundtrack is unique in that I feel like it lacks depth, yet very clearly there is a lot of depth and detail behind it. Perhaps what I am associating with “depth” is more accurately just a more cohesive sound.

Yet, it’s not bad! It’s just not great. There are some highlights. I really like the piece “Basketball Swing.” Coming out of nowhere, it introduces some excellent vintage Roaring Twenties flair. You really get into this piece and enjoy what it has to offer, but then it kind of swings at you, and not in a good way. The end of “Basketball Swing” kind of makes it go from great to just good, as it peters off into an almost Philip Glass-style sound with ultra minimalism. Not only is it a complete change in shift, but it doesn’t really work.

There is a full ensemble orchestra here, as you would expect from a Horner score (I say that, and yet Titanic exists in a very electronic form). But the orchestra more often than not breaks into the realm of weird and uncanny. Soft, pleasant strings merge into unusual orchestrations almost at will. The jazz itself is lovely, and honestly that’s the main highlight. Horner proves that he can write swinging and hip-rocking music with the best of them.

But this is very much 1980s-style James Horner. What I mean by that is that he has pieces that are incredibly long, and that hurts the review. You see, if we review tracks in a vacuum, we can think of them as pieces we’d want to listen to on a long car ride. There really isn’t a lot of valuable substance in between the beneficial stuff. If I declare the themes and melodies to be enjoyable, the bits and pieces in between really aren’t of note.

Just like this review, this soundtrack doesn’t really have a lot of substance.