I ordered my tickets online for the Seattle Cinerama, which boasts the biggest and best screen in town. (Short of that snazzy IMAX stuff...) I've still got the ticket stubs from the other two prequels in my wallet, both of which I saw on opening weekend in the best theater around. To be honest I don't care for the Star Wars prequels all that much, and I'm not expecting too much from the final installment. But, breaking with my usual stance of elitism and snobbery, I feel all warm and fuzzy inside to have had a front seat on the whirlwind of popular culture. I'll keep this ticket, too.
Let's talk about the soundtrack for a moment. I found the PM score to be lacking, but eventually parts of it grew on me. The AotC score was even harder to swallow, but again time helped me acquire the taste, and a few of the pieces started sounding decent. This time, though...ugh! John Williams has definitely lost his vision for this franchise. It's going to take a lot of time for me to have anything kind to say about the RotS score.
Williams has a distinct style. He favors discontinuous music that reflects the action on the screen rather than maintaining an internal continuity as other big name composers like James Horner prefer to do. You might say Williams accents a mood, while the Horner types tell a story. This style leaves him prone to thematic irrelevance, and I found that the RotS soundtrack lacks any meaningful thematic cues.
(Thematic cues are the underlying pieces of music, around which a full piece of music can be written, that recur in a movie to achieve a unification of substance onscreen; the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, for instance, has a famous and now widely-recognized principal epic cue. Braveheart consisted of almost nothing but its central cue. (It is one of Horner's worst failings, I might add.))
In RotS, there are only a small handful of significant new cues, each uninspired and technically primitive--albeit embellished with Williams' usual rich technique. Even many of the old cues, most notably the "New Hope" cues and the Imperial March sequence, were in my opinion misrepresented and poorly applied. Of course, the Williams' brilliance is that his music can sound terrible on its own and yet succeed beyond any expectations when taken in the context of the film itself. So, because I haven't seen the film yet, I can't make a final judgment. (I also note that there will be bits and pieces of music in the film that are not included on the soundtrack release.)
Nevertheless, in absolute terms I sure hope that Revenge of the Sith is better constructed than its un-independent musical score.
And may the Force be with you...
