Chen G.

The family drama stuff gets a bit cheesy sometimes, but nobody blocks an action scene (and on a shoestring budget, too!) like Gibson.

Like I said, it’s a kind of throwback to the 1960s epics. But it works for the way the movie is structured: the movie needs that breather there - it helps the stop-start pacing.

Right after Kerak, before Saladin reconvenes at his camp.

There are two versions of the director's cut: one that runs straight through, and a roadshow edit that has an overture, intermission and entr'acte. It may seem like an affectation, but the way the film is paced, it really needs that breather of the intermission. Get that one.

I believe its when Balian knights the Bishop's page.

The Roadshow Edition! The film really needs that intermission.

I dunno that it drags, but the style of blocking is certainly antiquated: the entire thing plays like a stageplay with a camera in the isles.

And yet there’s way more at stake because the father figure is there…

Dunno that "ground" is how I'd put it. The Last Crusade takes the outrageousness of the serial plotting and setpieces of Indiana Jones and treats them...as comedy, really; which is probably why I like it the most. They're all knowingly over-the-top, but The Last Crusade is the most succesfull at actually deriving laughs from it.

This is basically my point. I seriously doubt Treverrow's ability to bake this into the story with any success. But then, I guess I'm an outlier in that I never saw Jurassic Park as being particularly amneable to becoming a film series, and so any and all sequels to it carry little interest to me to begin with.

People's desire to meet the elderly versions of their beloved characters continues to elude me...

Meh. I didn't have any issue with the photorealism of the CGI Dinosaurs in the previous entries, and no amount of animatronics in the world are going to help a bad story.

Unfortunately, the test of the score is and must be the actual underscore in the film, and that film is... yeah...

The thing I like in The Rise of Skywalker is more the treatment of material from previous entries: although I hate it as a story development, the way Williams turns the theme associated with Kylo into a heroic theme is rathe extraordinary, and what happens to the theme associated with Rey in the final scene is astounding.

https://deadline.com/2022/04/fantastic-beasts-the-secrets-of-dumbledore-china-international-box-office-preview-1234995958/

Yes, Ironfoot is a great piece, of course!

No. It’s a setup. George Lucas only sold Star Wars to secure capitol for the purposes of cloning Sir Alec Guinness to appear in the sequel-sequel trilogy. Obviously the cloned Guinness will be revealed in the series!

Convenient...

This.

I guess that sort of material has an unfair advantage in that it comes on the heels of the musical buildup of not just one score but at least 2.5. I like the material associated with Thorin's death: part of the magic of the leitmotif technique is that the motives are constantly being recontextualized by sheer virtue of being heard next to other motives. So that we hear the theme associated with Thorin and then the theme associated with "Death and Parting" and then the material affiliated with Tauriel and Kili, not only connects al three but also shows us that both the latter and the former had been carrying the seeds of their own demise all along. Just because we don't come out of the movie singing it doesn't mean that emotionally it didn't do its thing!

Yeah, we don't really get to hear that theme, as such, before the duel begins...

Well, its a surprise because, technically, its not material we've heard before; whereas the material associated with Smaug we've heard a lot: we haven't heard it treated like that, but its still material we've heard.

Closer to what the OP is going for is probably the introduction of the material associated with Dain or, perhaps more significantly, the figure associated with the body-count at the end of the story.

Maybe the choral work in Lohengrin?

Meh. Carima Burana is a flashier piece, but its got nothing on the prelude of Tristan. Interestingly, Boorman claimed he got the idea for the music when he attended the Jahrhundertring, which I'm willing to buy except that I'm skeptical as to how he would have gotten tickets: Bayreuth sells out years in advance, and this was the goddamn centenary Ring!