X-Men: The Last Stand (soundtrack)

The film's director Brett Ratner invited John Powell to write the music for being a fan of Powell's work in The Bourne Identity. Powell included references to the score from the previous two films - "it all had to be in the same family, and the same language" - and used lyrics from Benjamin Britten's Requiem Mass for the choir parts.^[2]

Powell deviated from the first two in that he created less a set of individual cues and more of a cohesive sound throughout. Most of the 27 tracks are short, with the exception of a few extended battle sequence cues. The second track "Bathroom Titles" is an explosion of violent percussion in the form of Danny Elfman's Planet of the Apes soundtrack. Actually, Powell's style is a noticeable mixture of Elfman and John Williams (especially their Spider-Man and Superman soundtracks, respectively).

Powell had 141 musicians of the Hollywood Studio Symphony at his disposal, and he did not waste them. Despite drawing similarities to other composers (like Danny Elfman and John Williams), soundtrack reviewer and talk show host Clark Douglas stated that Powell diverted from "recent action scores which force the orchestra to play second string to the synthetic elements (such as Klaus Badelt's "Poseidon")... [and instead] fully utilizes the elements at his disposal." Douglas went on to say that the orchestra is best used during the "final third" of the score.

• On the CD version of the album, the track "Phoenix Rises" is incorrectly labeled on the back and inside the booklet as having a length of 6:29 when, in fact, it is only 4:21.

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Allmusic	[3]
ScoreNotes	[4]
Tracksounds	[5]
Scorereviews.com	[6]
Filmtracks	[7]
Soundtrack.Net	[8]

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Sean Wilson of Den of Geek said Powell's soundtrack is less thoughtful than Michael Kamen’s X-Men score but more memorable and richly realized than John Ottman’s. They found it a shame that Powell’s old-school score was used in one of the franchise’s weaker films, noting that it combines action and emotion with multiple themes. Wilson also noted that this soundtrack solidifies Powell as one of modern film's great score composers and wishes the more recent X-Men movies had his input.^[9]