Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2005-09-09 02:40 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2005-09-09 02:40 pm
(no subject)
I bought the Episode III soundtrack waaaaay back in late July, but I don't think I ever got around to mentioning it. So here follows a bit of a ramble on
First of all, am I the only person who was really disappointed, not so much in the quality of the music itself (no, I'll come to that later), but in the selection of tracks on the RotS soundtrack? It seems like a lot of the filler--several minutes of notes that are so low you can barely hear them, for example, during the opera scene--could've been cut to make way for some of the better music that appeared in the movie but was inexplicably not included on the soundtrack. I mean, hello--where was the cue from the march on the Jedi Temple? The extermination of the Jedi? Easily some of the most moving scenes in RotS, not least because of John Williams' contribution. I did like a few of the tracks on the soundtrack--the Immolation Scene, the Birth of the Twins/Padme's Destiny, some of the variations on the Throne Room theme that got thrown in at the end credits--but overall I think the selection was poor indeed.
As to the actual content of the soundtrack... I don't know if this is John Williams' fault or if Lucas egged him on to it, but the music for all three prequels and RotS in particular seemed remarkably bombastic and lacking in subtlety. Okay, it's Star Wars, the OT wasn't great on subtlety either, but at least the music was well tailored to the action. In EpIII you have a full-scale "omgwtfLOOKATTHEEVILNESS" cue with choirs shrieking and orchestra rumbling, for... General Grievous getting off his ship. Words cannot express how overwhelmed I am by the sheer terror of a really crappy villain walking out of an escape pod, George. Actually, that scene sums up the prequels pretty well: George beats us around the head going "Look how cool this is, guys!" instead of sitting back and letting us say "Wow, that's really cool."
Also? I might just get Force-choked for saying this, but the lightsaber fight on Mustafar was really pathetic. So the special effects are pretty. Wonderful. The OT had great special effects for its time too, but it was driven by this thing called a "plot," not by teh pretteh. The Anakin/Obi-Wan fight was just so gratuitous--they were hacking and slashing away at each other and showing off their lightsaber technique and swinging from cables and dodging lava, but were they interacting? No. Were they talking? No. Did the length of that scene in any way contribute to the movie? No. At no point during the fight did I get any sense of tragedy, any hint that the two people trying to kill each other were comrades-in-arms a few days ago, any point to the scene other than "Lookit the special effects! Lookit what good swordsmen they are! LOOKIT!" And the tripe that's labelled Battle of the Heroes on the soundtrack only contributed to the pointlessness. How hard would it have been to show them reflexively working together to fend off some danger during the fight--lava, structures collapsing, droids going haywire, there's no shortage of material here--only to realize that they were supposed to be enemies? To compose something for the scene that wasn't all battle-music and bombast? To put in something to keep the audience's attention besides gratuitous special effects?
Which leads me straight to Lucas's Law of Diminishing Lightsaber Battles: the likelihood that the novelty of seeing people fight with shiny laser swords has worn off is inversely proportional to the likelihood that there will be something more substantial during the fight to keep the audience's attention.
Think about it. How much Plot is there in the OT lightsaber duels versus the PT ones? The PT duels are very good at having something important happen at the end of them--Qui-Gon's death, for example, or everything that happens after Anakin gets sliced and diced on Mustafar. But there's nothing going on during them, just a bunch of hack-slash-parry-I-am-teh-1337-swordsman. Whereas in the OT the emphasis isn't on the general awesomeness of the fight choreography, but on what's going on, y'know, between the characters. The technique in the OT kinda sucks, actually, but I like it better that way because I'm not interested in Luke and Vader playing my-saber-is-bigger-than-yours, I'm interested in Vader goading Luke into attacking furiously and almost killing him in anger. Which is what makes the Obi-Wan/Anakin/Dooku fight at the beginning of RotS far superior, IMO, to the Anakin/Obi-Wan duel on Mustafar. We see Anakin channel his anger and only begin to drive Dooku back once Obi-Wan has been hurt. We see his baby steps towards the dark side start to get bigger when he kills Dooku. The Mustafar duel is just pathetically static until the very end, just like the Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan/Maul battle in TPM and the Yoda/Palpatine duel in RotS.
So yeah. As far as I can break it down, my biggest disappointment in the PT was the aspect of telling instead of showing. It's why, I think, Anakin/Obi-Wan is so much more popular on LJ than Anakin/Padme--A/O was shown, and A/P was not just told, but shoved down our throats. There were a lot of things I didn't like about the prequels, but that was by far the biggest one.
First of all, am I the only person who was really disappointed, not so much in the quality of the music itself (no, I'll come to that later), but in the selection of tracks on the RotS soundtrack? It seems like a lot of the filler--several minutes of notes that are so low you can barely hear them, for example, during the opera scene--could've been cut to make way for some of the better music that appeared in the movie but was inexplicably not included on the soundtrack. I mean, hello--where was the cue from the march on the Jedi Temple? The extermination of the Jedi? Easily some of the most moving scenes in RotS, not least because of John Williams' contribution. I did like a few of the tracks on the soundtrack--the Immolation Scene, the Birth of the Twins/Padme's Destiny, some of the variations on the Throne Room theme that got thrown in at the end credits--but overall I think the selection was poor indeed.
As to the actual content of the soundtrack... I don't know if this is John Williams' fault or if Lucas egged him on to it, but the music for all three prequels and RotS in particular seemed remarkably bombastic and lacking in subtlety. Okay, it's Star Wars, the OT wasn't great on subtlety either, but at least the music was well tailored to the action. In EpIII you have a full-scale "omgwtfLOOKATTHEEVILNESS" cue with choirs shrieking and orchestra rumbling, for... General Grievous getting off his ship. Words cannot express how overwhelmed I am by the sheer terror of a really crappy villain walking out of an escape pod, George. Actually, that scene sums up the prequels pretty well: George beats us around the head going "Look how cool this is, guys!" instead of sitting back and letting us say "Wow, that's really cool."
Also? I might just get Force-choked for saying this, but the lightsaber fight on Mustafar was really pathetic. So the special effects are pretty. Wonderful. The OT had great special effects for its time too, but it was driven by this thing called a "plot," not by teh pretteh. The Anakin/Obi-Wan fight was just so gratuitous--they were hacking and slashing away at each other and showing off their lightsaber technique and swinging from cables and dodging lava, but were they interacting? No. Were they talking? No. Did the length of that scene in any way contribute to the movie? No. At no point during the fight did I get any sense of tragedy, any hint that the two people trying to kill each other were comrades-in-arms a few days ago, any point to the scene other than "Lookit the special effects! Lookit what good swordsmen they are! LOOKIT!" And the tripe that's labelled Battle of the Heroes on the soundtrack only contributed to the pointlessness. How hard would it have been to show them reflexively working together to fend off some danger during the fight--lava, structures collapsing, droids going haywire, there's no shortage of material here--only to realize that they were supposed to be enemies? To compose something for the scene that wasn't all battle-music and bombast? To put in something to keep the audience's attention besides gratuitous special effects?
Which leads me straight to Lucas's Law of Diminishing Lightsaber Battles: the likelihood that the novelty of seeing people fight with shiny laser swords has worn off is inversely proportional to the likelihood that there will be something more substantial during the fight to keep the audience's attention.
Think about it. How much Plot is there in the OT lightsaber duels versus the PT ones? The PT duels are very good at having something important happen at the end of them--Qui-Gon's death, for example, or everything that happens after Anakin gets sliced and diced on Mustafar. But there's nothing going on during them, just a bunch of hack-slash-parry-I-am-teh-1337-swordsman. Whereas in the OT the emphasis isn't on the general awesomeness of the fight choreography, but on what's going on, y'know, between the characters. The technique in the OT kinda sucks, actually, but I like it better that way because I'm not interested in Luke and Vader playing my-saber-is-bigger-than-yours, I'm interested in Vader goading Luke into attacking furiously and almost killing him in anger. Which is what makes the Obi-Wan/Anakin/Dooku fight at the beginning of RotS far superior, IMO, to the Anakin/Obi-Wan duel on Mustafar. We see Anakin channel his anger and only begin to drive Dooku back once Obi-Wan has been hurt. We see his baby steps towards the dark side start to get bigger when he kills Dooku. The Mustafar duel is just pathetically static until the very end, just like the Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan/Maul battle in TPM and the Yoda/Palpatine duel in RotS.
So yeah. As far as I can break it down, my biggest disappointment in the PT was the aspect of telling instead of showing. It's why, I think, Anakin/Obi-Wan is so much more popular on LJ than Anakin/Padme--A/O was shown, and A/P was not just told, but shoved down our throats. There were a lot of things I didn't like about the prequels, but that was by far the biggest one.