You could take any action cue from Crystal Skull or The Adventures Of Tintin or The Force Awakens, throw it behind any other scene in the film, and it would kind of sound the same.
Indeed, his action music
has become a lot more frantic and less developed, which is why I hoped he'd finish off his career scoring character dramas, affording him more of an opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to a movie, but that's just not in the cards with the studio system today. I think it mostly goes hand in hand with how the films have been edited as well over time, there's less dialogue than there once was, there are more cuts, faster edits, etc.
Honestly I don't bother listening to Crystal Skull or any of his Disney Star Wars scores. There might be a few "good cues" but I prefer listening to his superior works and most of his scores dating from roughly Harry Potter on backwards.
Yeah, it's still identifiably Williams in these post-90s scores, but hearing him do the recent indy or Star Wars projects was kind of like hearing John Barry doing James Bond by the 80s, or Goldsmith's "Next Gen" Star Trek scores in the 90s and early 00s...obviously preferable to anyone else doing it, but lacking that "spark" that fuelled their first takes on the franchises, replaced by professional competence.
I get the comparison, though I'd much rather hear THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS over THE LAST JEDI myself.
John Williams' legacy will be the amount of brilliant scores he wrote across a wide variety of genres, and the quality of those scores. To be blunt I don't think he's ever scored anything as
thankless in his career as these late-era Disney revivals. These give him nothing artistic to build upon in a creative sense and just keep pressing the same buttons -- but in a modern forum with less of a place for a meaningful musical contribution.
Williams always brought a purpose to sequels he scored -- except these. It'd be one thing if he were doing it because it was Spielberg, but I'm surprised he kept coming back to score these movies even though the creative artists he was associated with -- Lucas, Spielberg, etc. -- had departed. I don't begrudge him for wanting to puff up his grandkids' college tuitions and keep working, but IMO they've done nothing at all for his body of work...possibly diminished it just a little because he really never "cashed the check" before these pictures. Even when he could've "phoned it in" with JAWS 2 or HOME ALONE 2 etc. he instead wrote brilliant all-new music for them. But there's a lot more recycling going on with, say, RISE OF THE SKYWALKER than there is the kind of bold -- and also unique -- scoring he did in the prequels, and it's not close.
And again, I am not saying it's that he's not trying and shouldn't be working, but the argument "at least he's still around to score these" -- I hear it, but honestly, these films aren't worth his time. I'd be lying if I didn't feel Ford and Williams had followed Lucas and Spielberg in just saying "no" to the whole lot and instead raised up the films they already made -- instead of "legitimizing" these limp wannabes with their respective involvements they are not deserving of.
