I’m sorry to keep banging on this drum Hal, but the Duel of the Fates cue during the Death Star II fight still feels very tacked on and out of place to me. It doesn’t really seem to add anything to the scene, in fact the sedate nature of the cue kind of detracts from the tension overall, and from the following music that’s in the theatrical version.
Just like in ESB during Vader and Luke’s fight, much of which had score that went unused, it makes the appearance of the music when Kylo emerges from the waves all the more impactful and ratchets up the tension in the fight. A possible compromise could be to fade out the music after the crescendo where Rey does her backflip, so that the Final Saber Duel cue can have its entrance, but even then that crescendo in the DotF cue doesn’t match that moment particularly well.
I’m not sure what other people’s thoughts on this are but I’d be keen to hear them, apologies if I have missed a bunch of discussion on the topic already.
+1 (I know this has been discussed at length before, but I agree with most of the above)
I think the current work print is a massive improvement, but musically that section is just low energy, and the prominence of DotF in the current mix almost makes it sound like an afterthought or error.
bbghost, I think the main constraints were not wanting to lose the existing sound effects and environmental mix, and the overall length of the existing footage. I really, really want DotF to FIT properly in this scene, but other than Hal (or somebody else, he’s busy) mocking up some cuts of other options featuring the Episode I or III score, it seems to me the best option may be to remove it and go with something closer to theatrical version.
It’s definitely not bad in any sense, but that mix mellowness, especially in what I can detect as the mix’s center channel, just isn’t completely hitting it for me. (Again, I really really want it to work.)