I agree that R1’s soundtrack beats TFA’s. Only good theme was Rey’s theme in TFA, whatever marches were way too prequelish for me and not even close to the OT. And even Williams admits its similarity to PT, IIRC in some interview.
I mean, R1’s soundtrack doesn’t stand that much out either but it’s much more consistent. It would have been way better if the guy had more than 4 weeks to score it. But at least it doesn’t sound prequelish.
And I don’t necessarily mean OTish = good, PTish = bad, but they are very different and these try to tie in with the OT, not the PT. PT has a few good themes too, but they don’t have the same feeling. Nevertheless, IMHO Williams just isn’t as good as he once was, and I don’t mean anything bad with it, that’s just the way it is. R1 with 1980’s Williams score would have kicked ass.
I don’t think TFA sounds very much like the prequels at all. It sounds different from the OT, sure (and I think it should). But it doesn’t sound anymore like the PT than it does the OT.
shameless plug alert
hey, domcobb, I suspect you’d get a kick out of THE SUKAIWAKA FORTRESS. I was initially going to deploy only one TFA tune (rey’s theme), but found many of the TFA tracks had solid hooks and ended up using quite a few.
Dude I know, been meaning to watch that.
part of the reason the TFA soundtrack might not be memorable at first is the way the songs were edited in the movie. on a rewatch of TFA, I noticed that many of the OST tunes were sliced & diced before they could really get going and show their quality.
This is par for the course, though TFA fares far better than most, especially the PT movies. I’d say, despite the editing of other cues, the Scherzo for X-Wing is really the only one we miss out on in the film.