A month or so before its release, King Kong looked set to be a disaster.  Massively over-budget, nervous studio executives hardly sending out the right signals by publicly criticising the running time and refusing to stump up any more cash, and finally, the straw that seemed to break the camel's back, the extraordinary firing of composer Howard Shore, whose relationship with director Peter Jackson had seemed to be so strong.  Well, so much for it being a disaster.  In the time it's taken me to type this paragraph so far, the film's probably added another $50m to its worldwide box office take.  It's probably garnered more overwhelmingly positive reviews than any other popcorn movie since Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Critics love it, fans love it, and no doubt Universal's bank manager loves it.

The completely unpredictable replacement of Shore's music meant that whoever came in to replace him faced a seemingly-impossible task.  Announced at the same time as Shore's departure was James Newton Howard's arrival (though Howard had already been working on the film for a short while by that point).  While he had written impressive scores in very short timescales before (Waterworld springs immediately to mind), King Kong really did seem to be a hiding to nothing for any composer; to write any sort of score, bearing in mind that Jackson wanted three hours of music in the film, in the time available was going to be extremely hard; to write a good one, particularly considering that in the event of it not turning out well, everyone and his dog would be publicly suggesting that Shore should have remained in place, just seemed beyond anyone's capabilities.  But Howard - assisted, through necessity, by a huge team of co-composers and orchestrators - somehow managed to pull it off.

The disc opens with a brief prologue, which sets out the somewhat simplistic, though effective, main theme.  For a while, the score goes along without a whole lot going on (the vaguely comic tones of a couple of the cues would sound perfectly at home in a Randy Newman score for Pixar) but being pleasant enough, before Howard really lets loose around a third of the way into the very long album; and from then on, there's no let up.  "Last Blank Space on the Map" is a brooding, ominous piece which suddenly explodes with orchestra and choir both being employed in supersize portions; this leads into one of the strongest cues, "It's Deserted", which over its long running time includes some sweeping awe and wonder and some great action music.  There's a wonderful clarity to the brass writing (and recording, with credit to engineers Joel Iwataki and Alan Meyerson).

A couple more top-notch action cues follow this ("Something Monstrous... Neither Beast Nor Man" and "Head Towards the Animals", the latter featuring more great trumpet writing) before a complete change of pace with "Beautiful", which certainly lives up to its name, with a wistful flute solo introducing a lovely piece.  After this comes the disc's standout piece, the magnificent action cue "Tooth and Claw".  The hallmark of any great piece of modern-day film music action music is whether or not it is as well-constructed and exciting as the landmark pieces by Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams.  This is.  It's a real thrill-ride all the way through.  After that comes some more slightly softer writing in the moving "Central Park" before the five-part "Beauty Killed the Beast" which closes off the album.  Towards the end, Howard employs a solo choirboy in quite attractive fashion, though the score does slightly end with a whimper.

All of this sounds wonderful, and indeed it is a hugely-enjoyable album.  Far be it from me, however, to refrain from a few complaints.  For one thing - on a technical level, the score is flawless; on an emotional level, it becomes less flawless, because Howard is left - inevitably, of course - simply pushing the right buttons rather than being able to add genuine emotion to the scenes; and so on an intellectual level, there's nothing really at all, which is probably the one big thing that separates it from the score Howard Shore wrote.  Whether all of that actually matters or not is something I'm sure people could spend many hours debating, and it's very hard to say.  Given the time pressure, what Howard has come up with is mightily impressive, but there's always just that nagging little suspicion that - while King Kong is right at the top of modern action music scores by people who aren't John Williams - there is nothing actually distinctive about it, not one single thing which means it couldn't be cut and pasted into Waterworld or Vertical Limit or Outbreak or anything else - and that, with a bit more time, Howard could have produced something that really was distinctive.  Still, that can't detract too much from the fact that it's a top-notch album, a really enjoyable one, and one of the few modern scores which justifies the 75-minute running time.