If this seems a little weird being here, keep in mind some of the stuff in my collection goes back quite a ways, back to days when I dreamed of owning every single Star Trek movie soundtrack (I stopped at 2). I don't really do soundtracks anymore because they are all either glorified mixtapes (beware the phrase "inspired by") or largely dull incidental music. Pretty much all the soundtracks featured here were straight out of freebie bins.
The themes to all the Star Trek movies (well, the first five) were pretty darn catchy. Each composer usually started with the old TV theme and then dove into their own signature theme: the Goldsmith (the first and fifth films, and the Next Generation TV show), the Horner (the second and third), and here, in its only appearance, one of my favorites, the Rosenman. I don't know why but everything from the sixth film onward is utterly forgettable (even the return of Jerry Goldsmith didn't really solve anything).
Why Star Trek IV has a different theme than all of the other films probably has something to do with the fact that it is, in fact, a very different movie from its cohort. Even though it picks up where Star Trek III left (which in turn picked up the Wrath of Khan story line), it's the only one of the movies where the Enterprise is nowhere to be seen, at least not until the last minute of the movie. There is also no use of weapons in the film. In fact, the most violent scene is when Spock neck-pinches the punk on the bus playing his music too loud. It's also a lot funnier than any of the previous movies and putting the crew of the Enterprise into 1980's San Francisco is an irresistible opportunity for plenty of social commentary. I'm sure transparent aluminum is still tied up in the patent process and should soon be available along with hoverboards.
Of course if you think about the plot to hard you pretty quickly realize just how ridiculous it is, and I'm not talking about putting the Monterey Bay Aquarium next to the Golden Gate on the wrong side of the bridge with the power of film editing. I mean, they are pretty flip about deciding to go back in time and make it look pretty darn easy, making you wonder what took that guy from the JJ Abrams Star Trek so long to think of going back in time and changing history. So I try not to think of it too hard, because I can think of a better way to scare whale-haters than to say some deep space screeching probe is going to destroy the planet unless they get some damn whales on the scene STAT.
Since I'm not here to blog movies, a word on the soundtrack, which was nominated for an Oscar. As indicated, Leonard Rosenman brought his own theme to the table and it's very catchy and appropriately Star Trek. As a soundtrack most the music is incidental stuff with very appropriate titles ("Gillian seeks Kirk" "Hospital Chase", etc.). Just to mess with us, he turns things over to smooth jazz group the Yellowjackets for a couple tracks (not all at once, but taking turns), just in case you needed a reminder that this is the film where they go to the 1980's.
For some reason Rosenman wasn't invited back. He shouldn't feel too bad, since only James Horner and Jerry Goldsmith did repeats (not counting the last two movies with Michael Giacchino). Goldsmith did an outstanding soundtrack for a terrible movie in Star Trek V and then it sort of devolved into random composers and/or Jerry Goldsmith. Sadly, most of Rosenman's soundtracks (which stretch back to the 1950's) are for movies I've either never seen or really don't want to see. However, he had a stroke of luck in the mid-1970's scoring Barry Lyndon and Bound for Glory. Post Star Trek, Robocop 2 was about as high profile a movie as he got and he retired in 2001. He died in 2008.
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