Music Composed by John Williams
Rating: ****

And here we are. Not only the very last Star Wars score you’re ever going to hear from Williams, but arguably the last big “event” score you’re going to hear in a very long time. Will it live up to your grandiose expectations? Will you be able admit it to yourself if it doesn’t? Or have you been so disillusioned by the prequel trilogy as a whole that you just don’t care at this point? I’ve had mixed reactions to Williams’ work on this new generation’s series of epic costume cartoons, and you should probably bear that in mind before you listen to anything I say about this concluding piece of the saga. My feelings for The Phantom Menace were lukewarm at first – the album was poorly sequenced, and left the music feeling bland and disjointed, so I dismissed it as Williams on autopilot. In the intervening years, I’ve warmed to the score, and have come to admire the way Williams warmly and gracefully supported the film’s shifting emotional currents while still be from a Star Wars score. And at times, the approach really makes Revenge of the Sith soar.

John Williams

The epic quality is best reflected in the new theme, first heard in the possible concert arrangement, “Battle of the Heroes.” A choral tour-de-force, the theme is similar to “Duel of the Fates,” but simpler in its construction, with fewer layers and even more emotional urgency in their stead. True, the climax of the piece sounds a helluvalot like the climax of “Neodamerung” from Don Davis’ Matrix Revolutions, but perhaps this was just Williams’ way of acknowledging that his protégé wrote a better piece of Sanskrit music than “Duel of the Fates.” The theme strikes its hardest blow in the mesmerizing “Anakin versus Obi-Wan,” quite possibly the finest cue of the prequel trilogy. Williams deftly interweaves the racing apocalyptic urgency of the new theme around his “Clash of the Sabers” material from The Empire Strikes Back, and the effect is stunning. Hearing a composer revisit and reconstruct one of his finest cues from his glory years is exciting enough (I know I’m not the only one nerdy enough to get excited over the fact that Williams actually lets Vader’s theme finish its final phrase in the cue this time around). But it’s the juxtaposition of this familiar material with the world-shattering new thematic material that makes this piece resonate so powerfully. When the cue climaxes into a choral-driven rendition of The Force theme, Williams has us so firmly in his grip that you might even buy into all that fate-of-the-galaxy-is-at-stake cheese for a moment. One can only pray that Lucas has the good sense to keep this cue intact without burying it under sound effects and bad editing (I’d be lying if I said I was optimistic for this).

Certainly, this is not a score lacking in bold dramatic music. What the score unfortunately does lack is more personal human intimacy. Anakin’s defection to the dark side is frequently conceived in epic world-changing terms, but the problem with using music as a mallet to hammer over the audience is that while a mallet can pound hard on the surface, it has a harder time seeping beneath the surface. Oh, there are exceptions, especially when Williams is working with “Across the Stars” from Attack of the Clones. The painfully delicate reading of the love theme in “Anakin’s Nightmare” is far more tragic and affecting here then it ever was as an overblown sledgehammer in its parent score. Indeed, the way Williams gradually kills the theme off throughout the course of the album is one of the score’s most poignant and chilling attributes — by the time we get to “Enter Lord Vader,” the fragment of the theme is little more than a shadow of its former self.

And there are other shorter quieter tangents, like the low bass drone of “Palpatine’s Teachings” (an odd piece which gives “Yoda’s Theme” a twisted Elliot Goldenthal treatment) or the eerie lullaby of “The Twins are Born.” By and large, however, the score uses drama as a blunt instrument. Which would still be fine perhaps if the score were structured more coherently, but as good as the best moments are, the work as a whole feels strangely disjointed. “Anakin’s Betrayal,” “Anakin’s Dark Deeds” and “The Immolation Scene” are all powerful individual set pieces, but the highlights don’t gel as together as well as one might hope from such a momentous work. The new theme is a wonder, but it only appears twice, and the first time might even just be a concert arrangement. Signature Star Wars themes like “The Force Theme” and “Vader’s Theme” are there, but usually only briefly and rarely in the spotlight. We’re then left numerous enormous pieces that are melodic and dramatic without having any solid thematic relationship to the rest of the score (or the series).

Of course, there’s reason for this. In order to provide a liaison between Episode 3 and Episode 4, Williams evidently felt it necessary to dismantle rather than develop the themes that wouldn’t be appearing in the following trilogy. Hence, “Vader’s Theme” is given nowhere near as prominent a role as one might have expected, “Across the Stars” is slowly dismantled, and both “Anakin’s Theme” and “Duel of the Fates” are absent entirely. In fact, to further the connection to the next film, Williams introduces hints of “Luke’s Theme” and “Leia’s Theme” near the end, and even occasionally harkens back to the style of orchestration he tended to use in 1977 (especially prevalent in the tight militarist brass of the opening cue, featuring a knockout march rendition of “The Force Theme” that could have easily been part of the 1977 film). The score isn’t really designed to stand by itself, but to serve as a bridge between two trilogies, which is certainly an interesting way of approaching the film and something I had not anticipated at all.

But the problem I have with this technique is that in focusing primarily on the score’s role as a transitional phase into the next trilogy, he neglects giving the prequel trilogy the dramatic resolution it deserved. If Revenge of the Sith was going to have a real cathartic resonance with us, then we needed to hear “Anakin’s Theme” truly develop into “Vader’s Theme,” we needed to hear the momentous “Duel of the Fates” develop into something more than a theme for a throwaway villain, and we needed to hear the “Emperor’s Theme” grow fuller and more powerful. This is how the characters and the story themselves progress, whether the themes appear in the following film or not. The only reason these themes don’t appear in the next film is that Williams simply hadn’t written the themes yet when he scored Star Wars: A New Hope in 1977. I appreciate the efforts made to bind the films together, but surely the emotional considerations of the story at hand are more important than trying to create an artificial sense of continuity (which will never happen anyway, because John Williams is such a different composer now than he was 28 years ago, no matter how hard he tries to go back). There are a few exceptions — the aforementioned destruction of “Across the Stars” and a powerful recapitulation of the funeral music from The Phantom Menace near the end provide a few meaningful and cathartic connections to the preceding films — but it’s just not enough to give the story the emotionally satisfying closure it deserves.

And to be honest, sometimes choices made in the name of continuity just seem like laziness. The last track is entitled “A New Hope” because that’s exactly what it is — a series of awkwardly edited cues tracked directly in from Star Wars: A New Hope. The gentle renditions of “Leia’s Theme” and “Luke’ Theme” at the beginning are promising, but afterwards Williams just tracks in “Binary Sunset” and launches into the end credits with barely a transition. Bad enough that previously composed music constitutes the finale, but Williams chooses to conclude the end credits with his triumphant concert adaptation of A New Hope’s “Throne Room” finale. Yes, we all know that eventually everything is going to turn out fine, but can’t we just sit and let the tragic ramifications of the story we just saw settle for a bit before we bring out the victory marches? Having an enormous victory celebration 20 years before the battle is actually won just feels extremely off-putting to me.

Another odd detriment to the score is the large number of overt rips from other contemporary film composers. Williams has been known to “allude” to other composers’ work in the past, but he used to only use classical and Golden Age composers. In Revenge of the Sith, Williams seems to be following a temp track comprised of film scores from the 10 years, and the results are often so close to plagiarism that James Horner himself would get queasy. “Anakin’s Betrayal” contains a pretty obvious quote from Zimmer’s theme from The Thin Red Line and “Anakin’s Dark Deeds” opens with a carbon-copy of Shore’s choral “Seduction of the Ring” theme from Lord of the Rings (even the orchestration is identical). But “Padme’s Ruminations” is where the score reaches its lowest point, as Williams decides to jump on the pseudo-Middle-Eastern-wailing-vocals bandwagon that gave the scores for Gladiator and The Passion of the Christ so much crossover appeal for the masses. Once upon a time Middle Eastern vocals were a fresh and innovative way of approaching film music, but at this point they really have turned into an almost-laughable cliché, a cliché that I’d really expect Williams to be above using. It doesn’t help that he implements the cliché in an almost-identical manner that Debney did in Passion — he even uses the same 4-note motif from the “Peter Denies Jesus” cue. These moments of borderline plagiarism are admittedly brief, but they’re obvious enough to distract anyone who’s remotely familiar with the scores getting pilfered, and seem quite beneath a composer who so many people working in the film music community look up to.

At this point, I’ve probably spent enough time harping on the score to make you wonder why I still gave it a largely positive 4 star review. But there’s a deceptive sense of finality in writing a review and assigning a rating — it implies my mind is made up on the score, when in fact, I’m sure I will still be processing Revenge of the Sith for months to come. Right now, as many issues as I have with the choices Williams made in constructing the score, I can’t deny that the music, taken on its own terms, is largely excellent, exciting, bold, and moving. And perhaps upon seeing the film and hearing the score in a more complete form, I’ll find that my complaints were entirely unfounded (that is if Lucas doesn’t butcher the music in editing again). Yet I still can’t shake the feeling that as great as the score gets, it’s somehow less powerful and affecting than it should have been. I mentioned earlier that my favorite score from the series has always been the enormously underrated Return of the Jedi. I understand everyone’s complaints about the score to an extent, they aren’t enough to overshadow the delicate, raw, and vulnerable emotion contained in that score, all the more vivid because it was so understated. Listening to Revenge of the Sith, I can’t help but set up Return of the Jedi as a basis for comparison. As good as Sith gets, as dark as it gets, it never comes close to matching that sense of bleak despair and anguish reverberating from those final confrontation sequences in Jedi. Listen again to that devastating moment where Luke rips loose on Vader and attacks to the anguished moaning of Williams’ male choir and Barberesque strings, and you’ll understand what I mean. To date, that moment is the single “action” scene in the Star Wars series that hasn’t been scored with action music — Williams jumped deep beneath the soul of that moment and gave us something that was subtle, beautiful, and completely devastating. As hard as Williams tries, he never reaches that same depth of despair and loss in Revenge of the Sith, rather odd when you consider how much darker the Sith story theoretically is than that of Return of the Jedi. Revenge of the Sith is still an excellent score and essential listening for anyone with so much as a passing interest in film music — I’m just not sure the score is everything that the final piece of the most famous body of work in film music history deserves to be. (Originally posted May 3, 2005).

Music Composed and Conducted by John Williams; Performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and London Voices; Recorded and Mixed by Shawn Murphy; Produced by John Williams; Availability: In print; Label (Catalogue): Sony Classical, (SK 94221); Release Date: May 3, 2005

01. Star Wars and The Revenge Of The Sith (7′31)
02. Anakin’s Dream (4′46)
03. Battle Of The Heroes (3′42)
04. Anakin’s Betrayal (4′04)
05. General Grievous (4′07)
06. Palpatine’s Teachings (5′25)
07. Grievous and the Droids (3′28)
08. Padme’s Ruminations (3′17)
09. Anakin vs. Obi-Wan (3′57)
10. Anakin’s Dark Deeds (4′05)
11. Enter Lord Vader (4′14)
12. The Immolation Scene (2′42)
13. Grievous Speaks to Lord Sidious (2′49)
14. The Birth Of The Twins and
Padme’s Destiny (3′37)
15. A New Hope and End Credits (13′06)

Total Playing Time: 70′09