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The Phantom Menace vs. Attack of the Clones vs. Revenge of the Sith


John

The Phantom Menace vs. Attack of the Clones vs. Revenge of the Sith  

102 members have voted

  1. 1. Which film is better?

    • The Phantom Menace
    • Attack of the Clones
    • Revenge of the Sith
  2. 2. Which score is better?

    • The Phantom Menace
    • Attack of the Clones
    • Revenge of the Sith


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Film: Revenge of the Sith (all three are degrees of bad, but ROTS is the most entertaining)

Score: The Phantom Menace, it still feels the most complete of the three music-wise, even if AOTC & ROTS are very good. 

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TPM for both. 

 

The score is unequivocally outstanding. Top ten JW score for me. It's such a large piece of work with so much new material and yet it is still identifiable as Star Wars. JW kind of opened up what a Star Wars score could be, so much so that the other two, while still very good, feel somewhat like they're in its shadow, particularly with "Duel of the Fates".

 

It's insane to call TPM a better movie than the rest of the PT, because it is not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination. But it feels the most tactile, the most "cinematic" in the way the OT was visually and production-wise that it wins nearly by default. The digital cinematography of the latter two just looks awful, and contains some truly terrible elements that TPM does not have, namely Hayden Christensen and the "romance" between Padme and Anakin. Plus it has easily the best lightsaber fight, the only one that's really worth a damn in the PT.

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Very well put, even though I do like Revenge of the Sith more on both accounts.

 

I have no inherent problem with using digital cameras and while The Phantom Menace has more shots that are not properly framed, it also doesn't have those out of place faux-documentary touches during the virtualy-created setpieces.

 

 

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  • 5 years later...

been listening to attack of the clones, and it just finally clicked for me i guess.

 

absolutely in love with it.  i've always considered it my least favorite of 1 thru 6.

 

i think i like it the most now out of the prequels.

 

great holiday score too.

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2 hours ago, Bellosh said:

been listening to attack of the clones, and it just finally clicked for me i guess.

 

absolutely in love with it.  i've always considered it my least favorite of 1 thru 6.

 

i think i like it the most now out of the prequels.

 

great holiday score too.

What cues stuck out to you? It's always been my least favorite of the 6 as well

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4 hours ago, enderdrag64 said:

What cues stuck out to you? It's always been my least favorite of the 6 as well

 

Yoda and the Younglings

The Meadow Picnic

Return to Tatooine

Jango's Escape

 

A few moments remind me of Harry Potter music, well for obvious reasons with the timing of those releases.

 

I also find the end credits to have maybe the best version of the Imperial March.

 

Idk why in the world I've put this score off for so long. It really must be because I've literally only seen the movie once.

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Ah okay. I never really cared for too much of the action music in AOTC, the Zam music in particular I heard way too much of in LEGO Star Wars and got tired of it, and there's not much else.

 

The Spare Canister Caper is cool but short, and The Jango Fett Fight never really grabbed me.

 

Most of the other noticeable moments are quoted directly from TPM (DOTF in The Arrival at Tatooine, the droid march in Interior Topica City)

 

The only standout action cue for me is Entrance of the Monsters. 

 

I probably should like some of the Anakin/Padme music given how much I like the Tatooine material from TPM but I'd have to give it another listen, every previous time I've tried nothing has really stood out to me. 

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48 minutes ago, mrbellamy said:

 

My guy, it's your favorite Star Wars score with a bullet, you can recall many specific details and casually namedrop multiple track titles, write eloquently about the depths of its virtues, and you don't know if the love theme has a name. If what you're saying is true, this is the most impressive oversight in the history of JWFan. 

I know Across the Stars, obviously. I’m talking about the melody a few seconds into Anakin and Padme. Does it have a name? It sounds medieval-tinged to me, so I call it the courtly love theme.

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I know that the late professor Robert Bailey, in his work on The Ring, generally refused to use names for themes. Its not entirely true: I have an essay of his (The structure of the Ring and its evolution) where he does use some names, in quotation marks, but otherwise I know he always spoke in terms of "the theme we hear when X" or "the motif that relates to Y." Theme-naming is a limiting exercise, but more than anything else after a while it just becomes silly and kind of misses the point.

 

I mean, there are like three different love themes between Anakin and Padme. So, what would you call them? "Love theme 1", "love theme 2" and "love theme 3"? Or do you start making arbitrary names like "Gloomy love", "courtly love", etc...? Its just silly. Its like looking at theme-tables for the Siegmund-Sieglinde love duet: there's like five or six different love themes in there, so you have all these names "love", "bliss", "embrace", "recognition"...you could put them all in a hat, toss it in the air and use any of the names for any of the themes just the same...

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I know what you mean and as discussion gets deeper or more obscure, it starts to become more practical even in a forum chat to describe these in brief musical terms over names that can be vague or interchangeable.

 

But the biggest signifiers have their JW-christened titles and we understand which melodies we're referring to when we use them broadly, and these are when the names are obviously useful on this forum. So yes, technically "Across the Stars" is the name of the concert piece, whereas just saying "Across the Stars" to refer to its primary melody is merely nicknaming one part of it, though it would be immediately understood what I mean in most contexts. Now we're getting silly. 

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I have no problem with the Williams-penned names like "Star Wars theme", "Across the Stars", "Duel of the Fates", "Imperial March", etc... But they, too, need to be understood as poetic nicknames and shorthand, rather than as designations.

 

But, more to the point, @Schilkeman wasn't referring to Across the Stars: he was referring to one of the other love motives. Anakin and Padme have a couple of those.

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The popping of this thread reminds me that I have never been a fan of the prequel OSTs. Oh, sure, I downloaded the leaked session recordings, listened to them, but eventually deleted them. I truly hope for definitive expansions for these soundtracks.

 

The material composed for The Phantom Menace remains my favorite. Well, it's no secret. Each first movie of a new SW trilogy by John Williams inherently contains the most new themes and motives. That's just logical.

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2 minutes ago, Bespin said:

Each first movie of a new SW trilogy by John Williams inherently contains the most new themes and motives. That's just logical.

 

Pretty much, yeah.

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That becomes more and more true with each passing trilogy. ANH and ESB introduce roughly the same number of themes … TPM has a more noticable edge over AOTC … and TFA introduces waaaaaaay more themes than TLJ.

 

On the topic of AOTC, I've never been able to understand how so many JW fans are so dismissive of the score. I love it. And the OST is the only one in the prequel trilogy that doesn't jump around in the film so wildly that it becomes a distraction.

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The problem with the score of AOTC?

 

An overdose of "Across the Stars" on the OST, along with a rock electric guitar featured on another track... the use of The Darth Vader Theme in the final scene to depict the Clone Army (or call it 'The Imperial March'... It is used here, before the creation of 'The Empire,' and therefore there is not even an Emperor yet...).

 

It's bold, not subtle. Okay, the cues are longer, more 'worked'... But what actually happened there? It's a movie that goes in all directions, and so does the music it seems.

 

Like I said earlier, I criticize the OST. Now release an expansion and try to change my mind!

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17 minutes ago, Datameister said:

ANH and ESB introduce roughly the same number of themes

 

Well, Williams worked on the original Star Wars not as the opening part of a trilogy, but as a standalone film. He surely knew it could and probably would spawn a sequel, because he set up a love theme "thinking Luke and Leia would end-up together" but otherwise it was much more self-contained.\

 

With later trilogies, it was a little different.

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I have trouble loving it because it feels incomplete without a climactic set piece of the Geonosis battle .  The tracking in Act 3 of the film suggests there could and should’ve been a more satisfying conclusion to the score. 

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The amount of Across the Stars that shows up in the ost is a common criticism, and I feel is a bit over stated. Not counting the concert arrangement and the end credits, It has 7 full statements (the Force Theme has almost as many), and a handful of fragmentary statements. Surely this is on par for the Imperial March in ESB.

1 hour ago, Bespin said:

It's a movie that goes in all directions, and so does the music it seems.

I think it’s the most focused of all the Star Wars scores, in terms of thematic development and use of new material. The movie has basically two plot lines that come together at the end. There’s music for each of them. 

 

1 hour ago, Datameister said:

I've never been able to understand how so many JW fans are so dismissive of the score.

Yeah, I feel like I live in Bizarro land around here, sometimes. The reaction to any JW score as “meh” is beyond me. 

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1 minute ago, Schilkeman said:

I think it’s the most focused of all the Star Wars scores,

 

Its certainly the most unified score: just about everything in the score derives in some way from Across the Stars.

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Oh, Padme is much more than just a cougar: Its amazing how Lucas' plays Anakin's admittance of genocide to Padme as "Ahw, he's showing vulnrability! Okay, maybe we should just have a quickie!" :lol:

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We would all have preferred the love story between Padmé and Anakin to be portrayed similarly to that of Jack and Rose in Titanic, but instead, it resembled the one between Bella and Edward in Twilight.

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1 minute ago, Bespin said:

We would all have preferred the love story between Padmé and Anakin to be portrayed similarly to that of Jack and Rose in Titanic,

 

You gotta wonder if that was the sort of thing Lucas had in mind when he concieved of the love story...

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Herein lies the problem. People don’t like the movie, and I think they let it color their assessment of the music.

 

Also, 24 to 19 is hardly a cougar, but there’s a tendency to want to see Padme as the moral center of the films, but this is false. The idea of opposites attracting is a myth, and Padme is just as willing to overlook his many faults and red flags to keep him as he is to burn the galaxy to the ground to keep her.

 

The moral center of Star Wars is, as always Yoda. He also serves as George’s most direct mouthpiece in character form. I fully expect a response to the tune of the Jedi were corrupt, etc. This is also a myth. Neither the narrative, nor the music, bear that out in any convincing way, to me at least.

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7 minutes ago, Schilkeman said:

I fully expect a response to the tune of the Jedi were corrupt, etc. This is also a myth. Neither the narrative, nor the music, bear that out in any convincing way, to me at least.

 

I agree. The moral of the prequel trilogy is totally NOT that the Jedi are corrupt or flawed.

 

That's those movies' problem.

 

7 minutes ago, Schilkeman said:

People don’t like the movie, and I think they let it color their assessment of the music.

 

That has certainly not been the case in this discussion as of yet.

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I do think the prequels have - even if only as a veneer - the touch of widescreen period pictures about them, understandable given Lucas spent the years immediately preceeding those films working on historical references for Young Indy, and on what would become Red Tails. He had said in the 1980s that he envisions the prequels as "costume dramas" and "machiavelian." All in all, they're just little touches and flourishes: at their core, the films are still Lensmen adventures with periodic excursions to Barsoom, but having said that...

 

We have a couple of big ground battles, some shots straight out of the larger-scaled films in the Kurosawa canon, a podrace touched by the chariot race of Ben Hur, a Gungan sacred place right out of Kurtz' compound, a parade out of Cleopatra and The Fall of the Roman Empire, a tip of the hat to Lawrence of Arabia, a couple of conspicious homages to 2001: A Space Odyssey, an arena fight out of Gladiator, flyovers from The Lord of the Rings, signs of temp-track love for both those films and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and I think one could easily make the case that the forbidden romance is out of Doctor Zhivago and Titanic.

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TPM, while it may be contrived from ideas from other score from Williams past works, is still a fun score with a nice mixture of old and new themes. Duel of the Fates is the obvious hi-lite. 
 

The film is a mixture, visually impressive but a bit clunky, especially the Courascant scenes. The  duel is one of the best but the film suffers from silly humor permeating the script, a few pop culture moments of the late 90’s as well. 
 

ROTS is the best of the prequels, in part of the fall of the republic and birth of Vader. I do wish Lucas would have stepped aside and let someone who could handle the dramatic material,  direct. Hayden’s performance is a bit underwhelming at times, especially the moment he submits to Palpatine and his confrontation with Padme and Obi-Wan right before the duel. The duel is a bit comical and lacks the drama of Luke and Vader’s encounters in the OT. And the the thrill of TPM’s duel. 

 
The score is appropriately dark but Battle of The Heroes isn’t DOTF. And the reuse of The Duel from TESB comes across as bit uneven. But Williams hits the dramatic moments just right with the score.

 

AOTC is a mess, both score and film. The failure to let Williams score the entire film, reusing battle music from Menace and dropping most of the arena cue was a huge error. 
 

Most of the deleted scenes should have been left in the film and others removed. The whole Clone thing isn’t properly addressed and 10 years later the bad guys are still trying to get Padme. There is NO chemistry between Anakin and Padme and he come across as a creepy teenage stalker. Again, Lucas should have deferred the director’s seat. The film’s digital look sticks out like a sore thumb. But it has less Jar Jar, and that’s a plus. The audience I saw it with laughed at the Yoda / Dooku duel, which I don’t think was the intended reaction.

 

Sadly Williams score isn’t all that interesting. I blame a lot of that on Lucas. The Asteroid sequence relies more on sound than giving Williams a chance to shine and the chase thru courascant lacks any energy as a cue. The love theme wears itself out. 

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I have to say: I LOVE the score for AOTC. The movie itself is pretty bad, but the score is fantastic. Perhaps because it's the closest to Harry Potter a Star Wars score ever got, lol.

 

I'm really fond of the warm, romantic music for the Anakin and Padme scenes, plus Yoda & The Younglings. 

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I can't say a whole lot about TPM. I've never seen the film, but the OST plays reasonably nicely standalone - I'm less of a fan of it these days but there's definite inspiration behind it.

 

RotS, I actually liked the film and the score is outstanding. I can't wait for a proper MM expansion of this as there are some wonderful highlights waiting to be heard properly.

 

I left AotC for last for a reason... the film looks absolute garbage and I can probably find ten minutes of music that's sort of interesting; the real highlight finding a far more effective home in CoS. The little melody in Meadow Picnic is beautiful, original and interesting, almost making up for Across the Stars being a romatic, sweeping copy of Hook. I'm sure this score works fine in the film, but ranked against other JW scores and other composers in general, it's a pretty generic effort in my book.

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7 hours ago, GerateWohl said:

You really think, that these scenes with Padme taking Anakin home to her parents should have been left in the movie? :eh:

 

I'm not usually one to hold deleted scenes over the filmmaker's head, but in this case the deleted scenes show just how soapy and YA-like Lucas was making the whole thing, replete with a "talk with dad", gossiping with sister in the kitchen, and sitting cross-legged in Padme's childhood bedroom...they're companion pieces to stuff like the meadow scene, and utterly inexcusible.

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15 hours ago, GerateWohl said:

You really think, that these scenes with Padme taking Anakin home to her parents should have been left in the movie? :eh:


 

In the right hands they would added a bit more believable depth to the growing relationship between Anakin and Padme.

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The concept of the 'right hands' no longer exists in the creative process of any Star Wars-related project since 'The Phantom Menace' (TPM).

 

Star Wars is now a machine to print money. It's like if Star Wars turned itself to... Vader.

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41 minutes ago, Bespin said:

Star Wars is now a machine to print money. It's like if Star Wars turned itself to... Vader.

Right, because it was originally conceived as a risky low-key art project. ;)

 

Karol

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Quite. A few quotes seem relevant here:

 

Quote

I had done sociological research on what makes hit films.

 

Quote

The idea of Star Wars was simply to make a "real gee-whiz movie." [...] "I put in all the elements that said this was going to be a hit," Lucas says.  He even put a value on them. "With Star Wars I reckoned we should do $16 million domestic"—that is, the distributors' share in the United States and Canada would amount to $16 million—"and, if the film caught right, maybe $25 million. 

 

Quote

 [it would be a] wonderful, humorous and exciting adventure-fantasy, an artistic and very commercial venture. Most of what we need is here.

 

Quote

Ladd called Spielberg on the sly to ask what he thought about what he'd seen. Spielberg told the executive he thought he had a hit on his hands – one that would eventually make about $US50 or $US60 million. [...] the sales reps were ecstatic. "Extraordinary," one said succinctly, while another shouted to Ladd over the phone, "I don't believe what I've seen!"

 

Quote

The picture falls into the category of a blockbuster picture. The picture has substantial domestic and international appeal.

 

Quote

there is much talk among those in the film business who should know that “Star Wars” might well be the largest box office movie of the summer.

 

Quote

Then there was merchandising. Contrary to legend, the contract didn't give Lucasfilm exclusive rights to all movie-related products: Fox could sell those too. [...] The fact that the lawyers would keep fighting over the precise details for the next two years shows that Fox was not as asleep at the switch we've been led to believe.

 

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17 hours ago, Ollie said:

In the right hands they would added a bit more believable depth to the growing relationship between Anakin and Padme.

This was supposed to be a larger than life epic love story. And, no matter in which hands they lay, such kind of scenes never ever make a love story more epic or whatever. This was just, like Chen said, making it more stuffy, soapy, suburban. It is one of the best decisions in this movie, to leave these scenes out.

 

By the way, looking at all the AOTC bashing: If you take into account, that all these Clone Wars stories from the animated series did not exist at that time, the movie gave us the first and only look at the clone wars and seeing jedi actually at battle. And I found it great at the time to be honest. The whole arena sequence is marvellous. I left the cinema with a better feeling watching it, that after The Phantom Mennace. Might be than The Phantom Mennace has aged better than Attack of the Clones. But at that time, despite the awkward love story, as a Star Wars movie AOTC worked much better for me.

 

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My theory is the other Padme scenes were cut to better maintain the symmetry between Clones and Empire. Was there music written for them?

 

Re-listening to this score today, and I think has some of his best bits of thematic development in all the Star Wars scores. The arena battle in particular is almost symphonic in its development of the theme. It's a shame it was cut from the film. 

 

As for the other two scores, TPM is a treat from beginning to end, with stand-out cuts being both concert arrangements, Jar-Jar and the Swim, Anakin Defeats Sebulba, The Droid Invasion, and Qui-Gon's Noble End. For Sith, which I find a bit lumpy on the ost, Anakin's Betrayal and Anakin's Dark Deeds are about as emotional as Star Wars gets. A straight-up opera at that point.

 

 

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