Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsthe score of the film, rather flat and nondirectional
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 January 2007
While the philosopher's stone score is amazingly original and frankly a work of pure musical genius, the score to the prisoner of azkaban lacks any real direction and serves as a pure bare bones narrative to the visuals and additional audio. The minimum any score should provide is a narration of the emotions of the characters, and generally reveal the structure of the film in order to pace the audience, and that's all you get here.
The best scores ever written, which includes several by the genius mr williams, have to have a strong direction, unifying universal themes, and powerful rhythm forcing the audience to cry, laugh and jump at all the right moments, unfortunately the score neither achieves or approaches any of these.
Generally deflated when compared to the philosopher's stone and the chamber of secrets.
While several tracks on this disk are interesting, even enjoyable, overall the score is poor in comparison to some of his more famous works.
The prisoner of azkaban film is slower paced than the first two and suffers from a general lack of direction and meaning itself, resulting in quite a significant pacing problem, i'm sure this greatly affected mr williams when he was writing, as there was very little inspiration to be gained from the edit.
So i give the score to the prisoner of azkaban a 3. Average, some good tracks, but otherwise generally indifferent. Majority woodwind score, so lacking necessary force of emotion.
Do yourselves a favour and buy the philosopher's stone!
