The Last Airbender (Music from the Motion Picture)

Contemporary horror-fantasy director M. Night Shyamalan’s big-budget adaptation of the popular Nickelodeon animated series generated some of the most pointed criticism of his career. But the film’s bold, heroic orchestral score by seven-time Shyamalan musical collaborator James Newton Howard stands up quite well on its own. Largely eschewing the impressionistic chimera of The Sixth Sense and his Academy Award-nominated score for The Village, the composer takes a more forceful, thematic approach that effectively forges the European orchestral classicism of John Williams with the contemporary synth-fusion bombast of Hans Zimmer. Yet despite some obvious genuflection to action film conventions, Newton Howard still manages to suffuse the soundtrack with his own distinctive textural intrigues and masterful sense of ethereal introspection.