Wide Awake

With the runaway success of The Sixth Sense, writer/director M. Night Shayamalan has become quite the commodity in the film business these days. Before tackling the realm of the undead, though, Shayamalan touched upon the often more mystical world of childhood in Wide Awake. A comparison of the two films will show the director's interest in both children and Catholicism, but there is little more that links the two.

For the score, Night turned to a friend from NYU with whom he'd worked on several student films, Edmund Choi. Like the film itself, Choi's score tends to border on overly sentimental, but still manage to be enjoyable. While the writing in the film tended to stray from the usual dumbed-down idea of how children think and speak, Choi tends to go pretty much by the book with what one might expect for a "wonderment of a child" score. While it's nice, much of it feels quite familiar—I won't say generic, but familiar. The greatest exception to this is track 7 ("Gloria"), which, in its brevity, manages to be the most moving and wonderful music on the disc. The American Boy Choir is put to good use when they are employed, if at times sounding a bit like Williams' Empire of the Sun; as I was once told, "If you're going to borrow, borrow from the best."

All in all, an enjoyable listen, if a bit bigger than the film sometimes called for. We can forgive Edmund Choi such minor trespasses—this was his first feature film, and if it's any indication of what might be to come, he's got quite a future.