Meet anyone who has seen all of the Star Trek movies (or at least the first six) and they probably have a pecking order as to their preference. For me, it's 4, 2, 6, 3, 1, and 5. So, it's a little uncomfortable to have here the soundtrack to my least favorite of the movies. However, as fate would have it, the two weakest films sport the scoring talents of the late Jerry Goldsmith. For many, Goldsmith created the iconic Star Trek fanfare, so popular that Star Trek: The Next Generation threw out their plans to create their own theme and just used his instead. Although I'm a sucker for Leonard Rosenman's score of the fourth movie, and a lot of folks prefer James Horner's "beefed up" return performance on the third, it's hard to say in the long run than any of these come closer to capturing the Star Trek spirit musically as Goldsmith's work.
I abandoned any plans to build a complete soundtrack collection ages ago, so I never heard any of the other soundtracks until recently. This soundtrack cuts pretty darn close to The Motion Picture (1979) as Goldsmith is probably following the "why mess with success" model. The "Klingon" theme reappears cleverly as before, which is a nice touch. It almost makes me forget how dumb much of this movie was. Also, as is fairly typical for these soundtracks, included on the disc is a pop track by Hiroshima called "The Moon Is a Window to Heaven". Not exactly my listening preferences, but oh well.
As far the other soundtracks of the "classic" movie era, the only one I've neglected to mention here is the sixth one, The Undiscovered Country. While it is one of the stronger movies of the bunch, the soundtrack is the total antithesis of the theme-heavy franchise. The composer, Cliff Eidelman, I think is/was best known for composed the music for Free Willy and is mostly ethereal and background-grade stuff. While I can whistle just about any of the other movies' themes, this one has nothing. So that answers that.
When the "Next Gen" movies came about, they initially went with Dennis McCarthy, who did most of the TV show music for The Next Generation and its spinoffs, Voyager and Deep Space Nine (for which is did the theme). However, the lure of Jerry Goldsmith (who wrote the original theme for Voyager) was too much, and all three of the other films feature his scores. Goldsmith died a couple years after the last movie, Nemesis, which is another bad movie sporting a far nicer soundtrack than it probably deserved. Of the composers of the original six movies, only considerably youngest Eidelman is still living (Rosenman died of old age in 2008 and Horner is a plane crash in 2015).
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