Poll: Your favourite/best SW score(s)

[mxsch 115]

Here is something about them all from me:

 

SW: First and classic, nuff said.

ESB: Considered to be the best on Filmtracks, for example. I really like it, but it too much relies on Yoda's and Vader's themes, imo.

ROTJ: Most complex work of all 9 for me. So many themes here, all finale stuff is just superb. Only minus is Ewok stuff.

 

TPM: Most Star-Warsy from prequels and obviously the best from them, but not for me. Ending battle and all after it there is on god-tier too.

AOTC: Not my cup of tea. Aside action tracks, I'm not a big fan of all this quiet romance stuff, except some tracks, like Meadow Scene.

 ROTS: My favourite or second after ROTJ, very emotional, hits on the same level as ROTJ in terms of drama, or even more. No Ewok stuff, woo-hoo! Not very developed in terms of themes, and that is the main compalint on Filmtracks. It's actually very funny to read reviews from release time about this score. If this is still all true, ROTS is underrated as hell. Final stuff kicks ass again. Best opening stuff by far too.

 

TFA: Strongest from the sequels, excellent new themes, best End Titles for me.

TLJ: Relies heavy on old themes, and overall feels.... I don't know. This thing with repeating opening battle music in Battle of Crait is really bothering me. So. overall, meh. I like second motif of Rebellion Reborn very much, btw.

TROS: Still listening to it, but now it is the weakest for me.TLJ is close second. Minus perfomance, of course. All official releases gave us too little of final recorded amount of music. Score is butchered to hell in the movie, even prequels weren't like this. Plus very questionable use of themes, like repurposing music from ESB scene where Yoda lifts X-Wing e.t.c.

[Bellosh 3,369]

Empire.

[Arpy 4,145]

@mxsch The ESB Yoda Uses the Force reuse in TRoS seemed like a perfect moment to do so. How is it questionable when it's intentionally referencing the same actions from ESB? It makes that scene much stronger.

[mxsch 115]

8 minutes ago, Arpy said:

@mxsch The ESB Yoda Uses the Force reuse in TRoS seemed like a perfect moment to do so. How is it questionable when it's intentionally referencing the same actions from ESB? It makes that scene much stronger.

And what about reusing Yoda theme in Reunion? I'm sorry, I've just forgot that I've wanted to mention this one.

[bruce marshall 1,314]

If JEDI wins I'm outta here#!

😆

[Smaug The Iron 510]

26 minutes ago, mxsch said:

TLJ: Relies heavy on old themes,

Whats wrong about that? Do you want him to write new themes for characters who already has one? I think TLJ is the best sequel score because it has so much thematic material in it. 

 

30 minutes ago, mxsch said:

This thing with repeating opening battle music in Battle of Crait is really bothering me

It is a Battle motif so it is suppose to be in both Battle scenes. 

[mxsch 115]

7 minutes ago, Smaug the iron said:

Whats wrong about that? Do you want him to write new themes for characters who already has one? I think TLJ is the best sequel score because it has so much thematic material in it. 

 

It is a Battle motif so it is suppose to be in both Battle scenes. 

Battle motif, cool, almost whole cue is a motif. TLJ suffers from duration and amount of underscore.

25 minutes ago, Arpy said:

@mxsch The ESB Yoda Uses the Force reuse in TRoS seemed like a perfect moment to do so. How is it questionable when it's intentionally referencing the same actions from ESB? It makes that scene much stronger.

And what I've wanted to write about TROS, Yoda's theme now not only Yoda's theme, Luke and Leia's theme now not their theme only too.

[Arpy 4,145]

The sheer complexity and the way Williams maneuvers through the themes in ESB made it so that none of the themes felt overused (Yoda and Vader are prominent characters in the film).

6 minutes ago, mxsch said:

Battle motif, cool, almost whole cue is a motif.

I don't get it, you have the tenacity to rate the other scores and have listened to them to know how Williams uses themes and motifs etc., and then you can't work out why or how a motif can be used in a cue like The Battle of Crait? 

[mxsch 115]

1 minute ago, Arpy said:

The sheer complexity and the way Williams maneuvers through the themes in ESB made it so that none of the themes felt overused (Yoda and Vader are prominent characters in the film).

I don't get it, you have the tenacity to rate the other scores and have listened to them to know how Williams uses themes and motifs etc., and then you can't work out why or how a motif can be used in a cue like The Battle of Crait? 

Oh, never mind. I've got it from the beginning. Just my stupid nitpicking.

 

[Arpy 4,145]

8 minutes ago, mxsch said:

 

And what I've wanted to write about TROS, Yoda's theme now not only Yoda's theme, Luke and Leia's theme now not their theme only too.

??

 

[mxsch 115]

16 minutes ago, Arpy said:

??

 

Williams applied it to the whole Reunion thing, when Luke and Leia played when Lando met his daughter.

Just check this out.

This guy actually have some mistakes, like he thinking that Imperial March is only Vader's theme, but overall, he is on point.

 

[Arpy 4,145]

Can't stand that video, obnoxious bullshit galore that fails to take into account the difference between composer and editor. 

[Naïve Old Fart 9,489]

15 hours ago, mxsch said:

 

 

Shut up, you silly man.

 

(not you, @mxsch, the eejit narrating the video).

[Falstaft 2,132]

I really dislike that the discourse around TROS's score has been so negatively focused on the reuse of Yoda & The Force, as if 35 seconds of returning music was more salient than the 2 1/2+ hours of new material.

 

I also regret that I contributed to this discourse by criticizing the scene in a podcast earlier this year. Though my point was not so much the music, which is obvious and fitting enough, but the unearned nostalgia of the scene proper. Oh well.

 

Any way, my opinion on the ST scores continues to evolve, but I'm pretty comfortable saying I think TROS is my favorite of the bunch now. TLJ has the most satisfying dramatic highlights but weakest new themes. TFA the best themes and finale, but its underscore is the least interesting to me. TROS, messy and frustrating as it is, is overall the most impressive. I love it.

[TheUlyssesian 2,473]

8 hours ago, mxsch said:

Williams applied it to the whole Reunion thing, when Luke and Leia played when Lando met his daughter.

 

I have also said that the Luke and Leia theme represents incest in the Star Wars universe. So it was perfect for Leia and Like and perfect for Lando chatting up his daughter.

[Ludwig 1,120]

49 minutes ago, Falstaft said:

Any way, my opinion on the ST scores continues to evolve, but I'm pretty comfortable saying I think TROS is my favorite of the bunch now. TLJ has the most satisfying dramatic highlights but weakest new themes. TFA the best themes and finale, but its underscore is the least interesting to me. TROS, messy and frustrating as it is, is overall the most impressive. I love it.

 

A great assessment of the ST! I would agree with it as well. I think the most damaging aspect of the film to the score is how much the film must have changed in the month before release. It really seems that Williams wrote a score for a very different movie, so it seems that Williams' conception of the score remained scattered and fractured at best in the end. Things like the reordering of scenes, cutting of scenes, substantial edits to scenes, etc. make it very hard to hear Williams' intended arc for the score.

 

And yet... the new themes, especially the three for the good guys (Friendship, Victory, Heroics) are all quite strong, the underscore for action scenes is top-notch (we even get an old-style thematic action cue in the Speeder Chase), and somehow, instead of feeling like the thematically-attractive-but-less-interesting-underscore-type score for TFA or the emotionally-exciting-but-low-density-of-new-themes-type score for TLJ, the score for TROS manages to be both attractive in its themes and exciting in its underscore and still hang together in the film. The prominence and frequency of the Friendship theme throughout certainly helps, as does seemingly not overdoing it on temp track references / old themes.

 

Even so, an expanded score I think would be the most revealing of any in the ST because of how much the film seemed to have changed. The Anthem of Evil, for example, I would guess had a larger and/or more important role in the original film than it ended up having - was the choral bit ever part of the film, for example? And as @Falstaft pointed out when the film was released, the Speeder Chase motif is a kind of variant of the Heroics theme, and Ben Solo's theme (aka the Kylo Ren redeemed theme) was foreshadowed near the start of the film. So it seems that Williams had a more overarching conception of the score and how the themes would appear throughout, creating a more unified score than what we heard in the final film.

 

But I love the score, too, even with its current frustrations, and likewise consider it the best of the ST for all the above reasons.

[Joni Wiljami 1,206]

TLJ

[ricsim88 244]

How can it not be ESB.....

[Tom 4,631]

9 minutes ago, ricsim88 said:

How can it not be ESB.....

because the same question is asked every six months and people grow tired of picking of the obviously correct choice.  

[SilverTrumpet 638]

15 hours ago, Ludwig said:

 

The Anthem of Evil, for example, I would guess had a larger and/or more important role in the original film than it ended up having -

 

Tons of great points in this post, but this is something I feel is overlooked. One of the best parts of an otherwise disappointing credits suite is that big, almost march version of the Anthem of Evil. I don't remember many other uses like that in the film at all. That, plus probably most of the deeper Sith stuff got lost in having to make two movies and a finale to 9 parts in one film.

 

4 hours ago, Tom said:

because the same question is asked every six months and people grow tired of picking of the obviously correct choice.  

 

That's why I chose Revenge of the Sith this time. 

[Ludwig 1,120]

On 8/1/2020 at 2:01 AM, SilverTrumpet said:

Tons of great points in this post, but this is something I feel is overlooked. One of the best parts of an otherwise disappointing credits suite is that big, almost march version of the Anthem of Evil. I don't remember many other uses like that in the film at all. That, plus probably most of the deeper Sith stuff got lost in having to make two movies and a finale to 9 parts in one film.

 

Anthem of Evil is also unique in that, of all the leitmotifs in the saga (those shown on @Falstaft's list), it just blows me away that it's the only one not to have a full statement somewhere in the film proper (i.e., other than the end credits). It's second half never gets played in the film itself.

 

And I'm talking about the A section of themes, the part that makes the theme the theme. Even themes in other films that don't appear very much like Luke and Leia, or Poe have a complete statement. Rose's theme as well, which is heard a lot, appears only single time in complete form during The Fathiers. 

 

I'm just saying that in his Star Wars scores, it seems important for Williams to have a complete form of each new leitmotif somewhere in the film, then to use the end credits as a summary of those complete statements, not as a place to reveal a full theme. So Anthem of Evil almost certainly had more to do in the film.

[blondheim 1,157]

Since we don't have complete scores, I am merely scoring the original albums here.

 

Attack of the Clones, The Last Jedi and Star Wars are the three best albums. Perhaps not in that order, although perhaps. Just because it is newer, I listen to The Last Jedi a lot.

 

Score in context makes it much tougher.

[Arpy 4,145]

Interesting @blondheim, not many members here seem to appreciate Attack of the Clones.

It's a score I find myself returning to more and more - I like the balance between the action and the quieter moments and the development of the love theme.

[mxsch 115]

1 hour ago, Arpy said:

Interesting @blondheim, not many members here seem to appreciate Attack of the Clones.

It's a score I find myself returning to more and more - I like the balance between the action and the quieter moments and the development of the love theme.

I'm really changed my mind about AOTC to much bigger appreciation.

[JoeinAR 1,949]

Star Wars has no dead spots. ESD has a few. Star Wars is like Mary Poppins....practically perfect.