Cerebral Cortex

Woke up on a Saturday and had new John Williams music to a new Indiana Jones film waiting for me. Can't think of many better ways to start a three-day weekend. Life is good. @Ludwig @Falstaft It's insane that a piece like this can drop and not even half a day can go by before we already have transcriptions hot off the press. Thank you for all you two continue to give to this community, this just being one of many examples. We are grateful.

Drew Struzan responded to Mangold's tweet.

Exactly. Why use The Planets as a template if this is the road they were gonna go down?

Williams is a notorious procrastinator and is waiting until the last minute to get stuff done on the film.

I think he meant it as in there are scenes in it that are "bad" and "ass."

These are fantastic. Excellent job and thanks for sharing with the community.

The chickenpox vaccine didn't start becoming a thing in the U.S. until 1995. Maybe Indy is looking for the cure to that.

We should have been posting these in the John Williams A.I. thread as a joke.

A few people on Twitter said it actually looked even better in person.

Oh no! Not wanting to be outdone by NASA, it appears that Bezos got to Williams. Maybe Shatner inspired him?

What? She looks the same she always does? Unless you're referring to how the faces of people change over time because time moves in a linear fashion? Regardless, it seems weird to zero in on that unfounded accusation of vanity when there were far more egregious offenders on display at that event. Williams spent nearly the entire time wearing perhaps the worst disguised toupee I've ever seen and not a single person in attendance had the guts to call him out on it, presumably because they didn't want to embarrass him at a huge event held in his honor.

Been trying to familiarize myself more with the works of Lalo Schifrin here lately. Certainly some parallels to Williams. Started out with a background rooted in being a jazz pianist, worked in TV before mostly switching to larger films, born in 1932. His last big scoring effort, however, was in 2007 with the third Rush Hour movie. And it's easy for me to forget how easily that could have been the case with Williams. Music is so ingrained into his DNA that, indeed, I think it unlikely that he would ever truly step away from the music creation process. Say he'd stepped away from film scores back in 2007. For one thing, he's already cemented himself as one of the greats, with that title being secured even going back a considerable number of years prior. But also think of how much career-defining music he has put out since then. I think of his work on Lincoln, another entire film trilogy of Star Wars films, all of his concert pieces, etc. It all feels a little surreal. Other users, including myself, have waxed poetic on this strain of conversation before, so I realize I'm not making light of anything new. I think more than anything I'm trying to speak to myself trying to rationalize how bizarre it is that we're here on this forum still discussing, debating, and analyzing the continued film scoring efforts of John Williams, and that many think that some of these such efforts are among the best he's ever contributed to the musical form. He wrote Rey's theme at 83. Imagine living a life such that you are able to say that, perhaps, your best work was in your 80s. That's insane. Goldsmith. Bernstein. Hermann. Steiner. Mancini. Morricone. Titans of the industry that we look to as being emblematic of the old guard. Williams met, worked with, or was active alongside all of them at some point in their lives. He's that singular bridge tethering us in the here and now to old Hollywood. And somehow here we are getting ready to see him record a score to another one of the biggest movies ever made. To have a man be so prolific for so long at such a level of quality is a gift. To have a place like these forums for the 3+ generations of fans that have grown up and been inspired by his work is another. We could be in a timeline where Williams closed up shop in 2007 and we're all here in a dark cave driving ourselves mad with what could have been. But we're not. He's scoring another fucking Indiana Jones movie. And I still can't believe it.

I agree. The music blew me away, and it's mixed really well in the episode. It's so hard coming from a show like Picard or Kenobi to this. Puts 99% of other scoring efforts meant for TV to shame.

The answer is simply that Williams isn't really all that interesting.

Looking at this piece alongside all of his other Disney era contributions, I can very easily see where this might fall on the lesser end of that spectrum for many. Some users have made the point that this specific period in Obi-Wan’s life, and by extension this time in the Star Wars universe, doesn’t really quite lend itself to that classic Star Wars sound. The opportunities for those celebratory brass fanfares to shine through are decidedly a little more barren this time around. I posit that Williams could have written something that would have been more of a crowd pleaser but I think doing so would have betrayed what the theme needed to be for the story as he understood it. It ultimately comes down to, in my eyes, effectiveness versus accessibility. This theme I think is very effective at conjuring up, with startling accuracy and nuance, the multiple feelings as they would describe the character as the show finds him now. What cost that comes with I think is accessibility. A bittersweet theme without resolution meant to define one of the most iconic heroes ever created is a hard pill to swallow. The feelings it creates aren’t that accessible. It’s not something I think most people would want to let wash over them, and I totally get that. But it’s how well that emotional depth, for me, is realized that makes me want to keep coming back to it. Heroics, mysticism, tragedy, tinges of sadness, and a little bit of hope. It’s all in there. You get all those feelings in 4 minutes. None of them ever really dominate, they all kinda coexist in there. And you know what all those kinda sound like to me? That sounds like Star Wars, baby.

Really enjoy the piece a lot, and I also think it's gonna continue to be a grower. I feel like it doubles well as a theme for the Jedi in general, and pairs nicely with the Force theme as far as musical pieces that draw upon the more mythical quality of this universe; the distinction being that while the Force theme creates those feelings from an almost divine perspective, the Kenobi theme approaches it more agnostically. In another universe, I feel like Williams could have used this as a theme for Camelot in a film revolving around the Arthur legend. The piece definitely evokes that feeling of looking upon "something obsolete that was once great (and could be again)," and it genuinely blows my mind how someone can be so gifted in something like musical composition such that they're able to conjure up such a niche and specific feeling so concisely.

#OneLastMine Seeing this and knowing that we're getting one last Ford/Williams combo is so surreal. It finally is starting to feel real. Let the hype begin.

This has been on YouTube since February and I can't stop laughing at this Internet oddity.

We know Williams read the script early on so he may have developed some themes early into the film's production, but I'm glad that he's able to attack the bulk of this score now with the film in post and all the filming completed while cuts of sequences are slowly being delivered to him. Sounds like he won't be rushed a ton and will have more adequate time to send-off Indy in a more cohesive way than he did the Star Wars ST. Should bode really well for the final product.

Holy smokes, this show really took a visual leap forwards!

I thought that too at first but apparently...