Edmund Choi / Various Artists

Performed by the
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
& The Australian Boys Choir
featuring Tina Arena.

Distributed by
Sony

The Dish

I have to admit that I have a vested interested in The Dish. I now work for the CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility, the people who operate the Parkes Radio Telescope. That was not the case when I first saw the movie or bought the soundtrack. A month or so after enjoying the picture, I bought the Edmund Choi's soundtrack to inspire me as I applied for a dream position at the CSIRO.

Inspire me it did! When I watched the movie at the cinema I felt Edmund Choi had borrowed a bit too freely from James Horner's excellent Apollo 13 score. A closer listen to the CD revealed elements that were reminscent of Horner, but many other parts of the score stood on their own.

The first 12 tracks are "period" songs by a variety of artists. Track 13 is an opera piece. I always skips to Track 14, where Edmun Choi's orchestra score begins, and that is the subject of this review.

The Dish's score has a dreamy quality that still manages to convey a sense of the importance of operations performed by the telescope staff in support of the Apollo 11 moonlanding. The music builds up, primarily with the use of strings, through the first 10 orchestral tracks culminating with the voices of Australian Boys Choir and Tina Arena as Apollo touches down. The sense of relief is audible in "The Pictures Came from Parkes", followed by memories as Cliff revisits the site. The finale music ends with a beautiful, delicate harp motif and fades aways with trumpet and strings.

The music triggers wonderful memories of dreaming astronomy and studying science at university. If there is any real fault with this score, it is that it is over all too fast. And that is not a criticism at all.