8 Movies Where the Music Is the Best Part

0:00Have you ever sat through a deeply flawed movie or even just a profoundly mediocre one and you just find yourself completely utterly captivated by the music? Oh yeah, I mean you know the exact feeling. Right, you are sitting there in the dark, maybe shifting in your seat a bit because well the dialogue happening on the screen is just incredibly wooden. Yeah, and the plot has holes so massive you could literally drive a truck through them. Exactly. The pacing feels like you are waiting through wet cement. Like the entire cinematic illusion is just failing right in front of you. But then a scene shifts. Right. The lighting changes and this immense perfectly calibrated wave of sound just washes over you. Suddenly the hairs on your arms are standing up. Your heart rate actually sinks with the bass drum. It's wild. For three solid minutes you completely forget that you are watching a narrative disaster. Because the soundtrack is manipulating your emotional state so effectively that the visual flaws just you know they evaporate. It creates this fascinating cognitive dissonance.

1:02How so? Well your prefrontal cortex like the logical part of your brain is analyzing the script and screaming that the narrative structure makes absolutely no sense. Right, you know it's bad. Yeah, but your auditory processing centers are bypassing that logic entirely. They route a direct signal right to your microphone. Oh wow, so it's literally a physical override. Exactly. Your ears are demanding that you feel awe or heartbreak or adrenaline regardless of how poorly the actors are delivering their lines. So the visual data and the auditory data are basically at war with one another. They are. And usually the auditory data wins. And that is exactly what we are unpacking in this deep dive today. That's a great topic. We are exploring the specific bizarre phenomenon where the music arguably outshines the plot, the acting and just the overall film itself. Right. We are pulling from a fascinating list compiled by Jeremy Irkhardt over at Collider. He isolated eight distinct movies where this exact auditory hijacking takes place.

2:04It's a really well curated list. Yeah, but we aren't just going to run down a list, you know. The mission here for our deep dive is to reverse engineer the why. We really need to dig into the mechanics of it. Exactly. Like why does a transcendent piece of music effectively blind us to a paper thin plot? Or why do masterful composers hand over their absolute best career defining work to directors who deliver frankly, underwhelming final cuts? Right. We are looking at the entire spectrum here from bad movies completely salvaged by a rhythm section. To otherwise decent movies where the music just scales a peak that the visual storytelling can't even dream of reaching. So let's unpack this. Let's do it. So if we are reverse engineering this, where do we start? Well, I think we have to start at the extreme end of the spectrum. We need to look at the films where the line between movie soundtrack and standalone legendary album doesn't just blur. It completely disintegrates. Oh, I see where you're going with this. Yeah, these are the instances where the film operates as little more than a delivery mechanism

3:06for a musical titan at the absolute height of their power. Which means we have to talk about purple rain. We have to. 1984. You look at the cultural footprint of the Adam Purple Rain. And it is arguably one of the greatest most cohesive records in the history of modern music. Without a doubt, it is Prince firing on every conceivable cylinder. Every single track adds up to this remarkably consistent, flawless hole. But the album is technically a soundtrack to a movie of the same name. Right. Which people tend to forget. And the movie purple rain, well, to borrow the blunt phrasing from our source material, it isn't so great. No, it really isn't. The film is intensely almost aggressively anchored in its 1980s aesthetic. Aggressively 80s is the perfect way to describe it. It possesses a certain charm simply as a cultural artifact of that decade, sure. But the core structural flaw lies in the fundamental difference between musical performance and dramatic portrayal. What do you mean by that exactly? Well, when Prince is on a stage within the film playing his guitar,

4:09he possesses a gravitational pull that is just impossible to look away from. Oh, absolutely. He's electric. He is a force of nature. But a narrative feature film cannot sustain itself on concert footage alone. Right. Eventually the music has to stop and people actually have to talk to each other to move the plot from point A to point B. Exactly. And when the narrative demands traditional dramatic acting to carry the emotional weight of the story, the film falters significantly. Because Prince's acting capabilities simply do not align with his songwriting or his vocal abilities. Not at all. The disparity between his staggering musical genius and his relatively stiff, dramatic execution creates this massive chasm in quality. And it's all within the exact same piece of media. Right. You are oscillating between witnessing a god-tier musician and frankly a struggling amateur actor seen by scene. It is such an extreme contrast. And I think it has actually altered our collective memory over time. Yeah, do you mean? Well, many people today, especially those who weren't around in 1984,

5:14don't even realize that this legendary album is a soundtrack. That's a great point. They just think of it as a Prince album. The record has entirely swallowed the movie in the cultural zeitgeist. When you say the words purple rain, people visualize the purple album cover. They hear that opening guitar riff. Right. They think of the sheer swagger of the music. They do not think of the script. They don't think of the dialogue. The music has retroactively erased the movie's mediocrity. It acts as an auditory shield. An auditory shield? I love that phrase. We forgive or completely forget the cinematic shortcomings. Because the auditory reward provided by tracks like When Doves Cry or Let's Go Crazy is so astronomically high. The film essentially just rides the coattails of the album's historical significance. Precisely. Okay, so let's apply that exact same logic to a much more recent example. But staying in that same lane of musical giants carrying a film. Hey, what are you thinking? 2018, Bohemian Rhapsody. Ah, yes. A massive global box office phenomenon.

6:16Huge. Ramy Malik playing Freddie Mercury. It dominated the cultural conversation. And it even swept through the 2019 awards season. People absolutely flocked to the theaters for that one. They did, but as time has passed and you know, you strip away the immediate hype, the actual structural reality of the film is highly debated. Yeah, the consensus, particularly noted in our source material, is that it suffers from a profoundly unambitious structure. It's very safe, isn't it? Unbelievably safe. For a band is revolutionary, theatrical, and convention breaking as queen, the film adaptation of their story is remarkably by the numbers. It's a standard biopic. Right. Furthermore, there is an inherent narrative awkwardness caused by the firm's attempt to distribute focus. Like trying to give everyone equal screen time. Exactly. It occasionally forces attention onto the other band members, Roger Taylor, Brian May, and John Deacon, in a way that really disrupts the pacing. It feels a bit like a contractual obligation, maybe. It definitely raises the question of whether the narrative

7:16would have been significantly stronger had it committed entirely to being a character study of Freddie Mercury alone. Rather than trying to satisfy all the surviving members of the band. Right. And as we get further away from 2018, that safe, unimaginative script becomes more glaring. But there is a crucial detail in the discussions surrounding this film that I want to zero in on. We have a comment from a reader in our source material, a person named Benny. What did Benny say? Benny specifically points to the climax of the film. He notes, I feel like the live-ade scene in Bohemian Rhapsody has a lot to answer for. Oh, that observation is the absolute key to understanding the firm's deceptive success. It really is, right? That 20-minute recreation of the 1985 live-ade performance is a masterclass in sensory manipulation. Sensory manipulation. Okay, break that down for me. Well, think about why this film generated over $900 million of the box office, despite a pedestrian script. It definitely wasn't the dialogue. Exactly. It was the theatrical exhibition of Queen's catalog.

8:17It is the difference between watching a movie on your laptop and experiencing it in a room engineered for massive sound. Oh, I see. Imagine sitting in a pack cinema in 2018. You were already intimately familiar with the globally beloved music of Queen. Everyone knows those songs. Right. But now you are hearing those original stems and masters pump through a state-of-the-art Dolby Atmos cinema sound system. And visually, the camera is sweeping over this massive digital recreation of Wembley Stadium. Exactly. The music of Queen is inherently triumphant. It was designed for massive arenas. So when we are the champions or radio gaga hits through those subwoofers, the physical vibration in the theater triggers a physiological response. The movie just weaponizes the greatest hits. It completely does. You aren't sitting there critiquing the clunky dialogue of the second act anymore. You have been transported to a rock concert. The bass is rattling your ribcage and your brain is just dumping dopamine.

9:18The music effectively massed the flaws of the script. Because for the last 20 minutes of the runtime, the script just ceased to matter. The music carried the whole cinematic package across the finish line. But we really have to analyze what is actually happening in the viewer's mind during that sequence. What's going on psychologically? It creates an artificial sense of narrative triumph. Because the music is soaring and victorious, the audience maps that feeling of victory onto the film's story. Oh wow. So they confuse the music's climax with a narrative climax. Precisely. The audience feels a profound emotional payoff. Even though the screenplay itself didn't actually earn that emotional peak through rigorous character development or complex plotting. The music did all the heavy lifting. Every ounce of it. Okay, I see where you are going with the idea of the music masking the script. But I want to push back on this a little bit. Sure. Go ahead. Are we letting these specific types of movies off the hook too easily? What do you mean? Is it possible that we as the audience are simply conflating our pre-existing love for the band

10:22with our evaluation of the film itself? That's an interesting distinction. Let me put it this way. It feels like buying a very mediocre run-of-the-mill, unreliable car. Purely because the previous owner installed a billion-dollar custom stereo system in it. Okay, I like this analogy. You sit in the driveway, you crank the volume, the sound is incredible, and you step out and say, wow, what an amazing car. But the car is amazing. The car is terrible, the stereo is amazing. Yeah. So are we just letting our deep nostalgic fandom for Prince or Queen blind us to fundamentally bad filmmaking? The stereo and the car is a clever visual, but I think it oversimplifies the psychological interaction between sight and sound. How so? While a car stereo doesn't change how the engine operates, right? But in film, the score actually alters how your brain processes the visual image on the screen. It changes the image itself. Essentially, yes. Yeah. The coolish of effect in film editing proves that putting different images next to each other

11:24changes their meaning. The exact same principle applies to music. Oh, so the context shifts entirely. Exactly. When you take a mediocre scene and overlay it with a piece of music that you already have a deep personal nostalgic connection to like Queen, you aren't just ignoring the bad filmmaking. What are you doing, then? Your brain is actively projecting your own emotional baggage onto the flat characters. Wow. The film isn't just writing the coattails of the music. It is actively exploiting your neural pathways associated with those songs to fabricate a cinematic experience that doesn't actually exist in the script. Okay, that is wild. So the music isn't just a distraction. It is actively rewriting the visual data in real time. That's exactly it. Well, that actually bridges us perfectly to the next psychological layer of this. We've established how a single iconic artist can hijack a movie's legacy. But what happens when we zoom out from a single band and look at how a specific era of sound anchors a film? Ah, moving from individual artists to entire genres or time periods.

12:28Yeah, I want to look at how a soundtrack anchors a movie's legacy across decades, specifically when we examine legacy sequels. This brings us to the concept of auditory nostalgia. It's about how deeply music embeds a film within its specific time period, acting as a historical anchor. And there is absolutely no better case study for this than Top Gun. Oh, absolutely. The 1986 original versus the 2022 legacy sequel, Top Gun, Maverick. Now, our source material makes a remarkably clear, almost brutal distinction right out of the gate regarding the narrative quality of these two films. The assessment is uncompromising. Yeah, it really doesn't hold back. It states that aside from the music, virtually nothing in the original 1986 Top Gun can touch the sequel. Which is saying a lot. It is. Maverick is described as feeling like a group of filmmakers sat down and asked, what if we made Top Gun again, but actually made it a good movie this time? Which is a hilarious way to frame it, honestly. But it speaks to the reality of the 1986 film. It really was just a hyper stylized, military recruitment video,

13:31wrapped in a paper thin romance, and you know, beach volleyball. Exactly. Maverick, on the other hand, is widely considered a masterclass in blockbuster storytelling. The character arcs have weight. The emotional resonance with the passage of time is profound. And the narrative structure is ironclad. It's just a great movie. Yet despite Maverick being the objectively superior piece of cinema, there is one category one vital metric where the 1986 original absolutely dominates with zero contest. The soundtrack. The soundtrack. It's not even close. The music of 1986 Top Gun is indestructible. The source points out how deeply ingrained those songs are in the public consciousness. You literally can't separate the movie from the music. It is almost impossible to forget the tracks used persistently throughout the original film. Conversely, it challenges the reader to recall any of the original scoring from Top Gun. Maverick. Try to hum a brand new musical theme introduced in Maverick, you can't. I definitely can't. But you think of the 1986 original, and instantly,

14:33Kenny Login's Danger Zone is playing in your head. Berlin's Take My Breath Away is playing. Yes. These are not merely songs placed in a movie. They are the structural DNA of the film. And we have to look at how the vastly superior sequel handled this discrepancy. How did they manage it? The article notes that while Danger Zone is featured prominently in Maverick, its impact relies entirely on the fact that it is a direct reuse from the original film. Oh right. They didn't write a new anthem. Exactly. It is deployed in almost the exact same context, two jets, launching off an aircraft carrier. They just copy-pasted the feeling. The filmmakers of the sequel knew that their original music could not compete with the iconic zeitgeist defining tracks of the first film, so they had to borrow the auditory groundwork laid 36 years prior. This creates a fascinating paradox, doesn't it? It really does. The objectively better movie has to borrow the soundtrack of its narratively inferior predecessor, just to evoke the correct emotional response from the audience. It proves that the 1986 film, despite its narrative flaws,

15:36achieved a level of sonic perfection that just could not be replicated. It's lightning in a bottle. Now we see a very similar dynamic, perhaps in even more extreme variation of it, in another legacy sequel discussed in our sources. Which one? Tron, legacy from 2010. Oh, this is the ultimate test case. Right. So the original Tron released in the 1980s. Ground-breaking visual effects for the time, sure. But as the article freely admits, the original Tron is a very difficult movie to get genuinely excited about from a storytelling perspective. It's visually interesting, but narratively lacking. Exactly. Then, decades later, we get Tron, legacy in 2010. Disney throws a massive budget at it trying to revive the IP. And what was the general consensus on the narrative there? The consensus was that it was simply more Tron. Just more the same. Yeah, the source text notes that these movies have always looked and sounded incredibly cool, but that is where the praise historically stops. The aesthetic is everything. Right. The story in Tron. Legacy's widely regarded as lacking depth,

16:38relying heavily on corporate espionage tropes wrapped in neon. And the public sentiment toward the franchise's overarching lore hasn't exactly warmed over time, either. No, the article points out the collective shrug, the overwhelming Y, they greeted the announcement of the upcoming 2025 follow-up, Tron Aries. People are simply not emotionally invested in the intricate political machinations of the grid. They really aren't. Yet Tron, legacy has a remarkably fierce dedicated cult following. People will defend this movie to the death. They absolutely will. By, there is one reason and only one reason highlighted in our material. Draft punk. Draft punk. The electronic score composed by Draft Punk is the undisputed, unassailable saving grace of that film. It's iconic at this point. The article issues a challenge. Try to find a single defender of Tron, legacy who does not immediately cite the Draft Punk score as the primary reason the film is worth watching. It is nearly impossible.

17:38Draft punk didn't just score the movie. They essentially are the movie. Completely. But I want to dig into the why here. Why is the specific score so revered that it excuses $170 million empty narrative? To understand that, we really have to look at the broader historical context of the artist's involved. Okay, let's look at Draft Punk's projectory. The article points out that while the score might not function exactly like one of the duo's traditional studio albums, because it has to serve the pacing of the film, it delivers as a phenomenal piece of electronic composition. It stands on its own. More importantly, if foreshadowed, the sonic direction Draft Punk would eventually take on their 2013 masterpiece, Random Access Memories, which heartbreakingly turned out to be their final album before they disband it. Exactly. Therefore, Tron, legacy transcends its status as a mediocre sci-fi sequel and becomes a crucial, historically significant document for music fans. Oh, that's a great way to look at it. It's a stepping stone. It represents a vital transitional period in Draft Punk's evolution as artists.

18:42You're listening to them bridge the gap between their purely electronic sample heavy roots and the sweeping, orchestra, and log instrumentation that would define their final work. This is where we have to talk about the difference between the 80s pop anthems of Top Gun and the modern electronic scoring of Tron, legacy. What's the main difference you see? Well, the 80s soundtracks were unabashedly designed as earworms. They were pop structures designed for radio play. Right, they wanted you singing along in the car. Modern film scoring, however, has largely drifted toward ambient soundscapes. It's designed to service the tension of a scene without drawing attention to itself. You don't leave the theater humming in ambient drone. Exactly. But Draft Punk bridged that gap. They took the ambient requirements of a modern film score and infused it with a distinct, memorable, melodic structures of an electronic studio album. That distinction is paramount. In Tron, legacy, the music is not a passive element meant to quietly support dialogue. It's very loud.

19:43It is an active, aggressive participant in the world building. The grid itself feels as though it is constructed out of the synthesizers Draft Punk used. But if we follow this logic to its absolute conclusion, we hit a very strange realization. What's that? If a movie like Tron, legacy is universally defended only for its music, and its story is actively dismissed. At what point does it cease to be a movie in the traditional sense? You mean does it become something else entirely? Yeah. If the narrative is hollow, the characters are flat. But the music is a transcendent, historically significant masterpiece. Aren't we basically just talking about a $170 million feature length music video for Draft Punk? You are suggesting a total inversion of the medium, which is a fascinating proposition. It makes sense though, doesn't it? It does. In a standard film, the audio is subordinate to the visual narrative. The music tells you how to feel about what the characters are doing. Right. But in a music video, the hierarchy is flipped.

20:44The viewer accepts that the visuals exist merely to enhance or provide an aesthetic backdrop for the song. The song is the main event. Exactly. The song is the primary text. Yes. When you sit down to watch Tron, legacy today, you aren't tracking the character motivations. Not at all. You are turning up your surround sound. You are watching the beautifully designed neon light cycle streak across a black grid, and you are just grooving to the arpeggiators. It's a vibe. It's a total vibe. It's an aesthetic experience. Not a narrative one. We are judging it as a highly successful music video, rather than a failing narrative film. If the audience inherently understands that the value lies in the audio, they adjust their expectations of the visual. This is not expecting a good story. They forgive the lack of narrative cohesion, because they are engaged in an entirely different mode of consumption. They aren't watching a story. They are listening to an album with incredibly expensive accompanying visuals. And speaking of incredible vibes,

21:44compensating for utterly chaotic storytelling, this brings us perfectly to the decade that practically industrialized this phenomenon. We are going back to the 80s. We have to. If we want to understand how music acts as a structural crutch, we have to dive deep into the 1980s and these bizarre high-concept genre mashups. The 1980s film industry was a uniquely experimental landscape, particularly regarding the integration of pop music and cinema. We've touched on how the 80s burst, incredible, straightforward pop soundtracks with films like The Original Top Gun and Purple Rain. Right, the mega hits. But I want to look closer at the really weird, highly specific energy of that decade. It was a strange time for movies. It really was. The 80s seemed uniquely capable of green lighting and producing utterly bizarre, deeply experimental movies that realistically only survived because the pervasive, synth-evi music held all the disparate pieces together. The music was the only consistent element in a lot of these projects.

22:44The source material highlights a film that serves as a perfect microcosm of this era. Electric Dreams from 1984. 1984 again. What an absolutely wild year for cinema and music. Right, okay. The premise of Electric Dreams is something you could only get away with in that specific cultural moment. It's very of its time. The story focuses on a man who buys a new, highly advanced, personal computer. He then decides to use this machine to generate romantic advice on how to successfully approach a woman he has fallen for. It is a classic romcom setup, basically. But then the high concept, sci-fi complication is introduced. And it is a weird one. The computer, having gained a form of sentience, also falls in love with the exact same woman. It is an incredibly strange, highly specific love triangle. A man, a woman, and a desktop PC. Honestly, it's hilarious to think about now. Now, the article notes that it is actually quite a fun movie. And it draws an interesting parallel suggesting it acts almost as a predecessor to the 2013 Spike John's film, HER.

23:46The thematic similarities are certainly there. Human connection mediated through artificial intelligence. That's fairly. However, the source includes a massive caveat for anyone attempting to watch Electric Dreams today. What's a catch? To derive any enjoyment from it, you must completely suspend or entirely discard all modern notions of artificial intelligence. Which is incredibly difficult to do right now. AI is everywhere. It requires a profound contextual shift. As the article points out, the concept of AI was a novelty back in the 1980s. It was almost cute. Exactly. It was a fun, somewhat quirky sci-fi trope. It was not the complex nuance and frequently anxiety-inducing reality that we grapple with in the modern world. So the innocent lens is gone. If you attempt to watch a movie about a jealous desktop computer through the lens of modern machine learning and algorithmic dread, the whimsical narrative will shatter instantly. The logic of the film just cannot hold up to modern scrutiny. But the article provides the ultimate lifeline. The music. The music. If you can't get past the outdated, somewhat absurd story,

24:48you still have the quintessential 80s music to rely on. The film features an incredibly strong score in soundtrack. The music isn't just background filler here either. The source notes it is an incredibly important part of the overall movie experience. It takes this weird, structurally shaky AI love triangle and elevates it into something emotionally resonant and memorable. The synthesizer acts as a unifying aesthetic. It creates a highly specific dreamy atmosphere that makes the absurdity of the plot palatable. You accept the fantastical elements because the music places you in a fantastical headspace. Precisely. And if we want to talk about absurdity being held together by music, we have to escalate to the next film on the list, which also happens to be from 1984. I'm a guess, Streets of Fire. Streets of Fire. Streets of Fire is a cinematic anomaly. The article affectionately labels it and unashamedly over the top cult classic. It really is. But the truly staggering aspect of this film is its sheer ambition regarding genre.

25:50Just listen to the genre description provided by the source. The long list. This single movie attempts to dipix toes into action, romance, thriller, musical, crime, adventure, and e-drama. All simultaneously. Seven distinct genres fighting for screen time. It is a dizzying, maximalist approach to filmmaking. It wants to be every type of movie at once. But it doesn't really succeed at any one of them, does it? Well, the irony, as noted in the article, is that it utilizes all seven of these genres to tell an almost comically simple story. What's the plot? A hilariously stoic hero and a group of friends attempt to rescue the kidnapped love of his life from a gang of violent thugs. A gang of thugs led by an impossibly young, deliciously evil, Willem DeFoe wearing leather overalls, which is a detail it cannot be overstated. But very striking visual. But here is the critical failure of the film. Because the director is trying to service seven different genres to execute a plot as simple as save the princess from the castle, the narrative cohesion

26:51completely collapses. It's just too much going on. The article frankly admits that the plot is a mess. The characters are paper thin, existing more as archetypes than actual human deans. So you have a paper thin simplistic plot buckling under the weight of seven competing genres, a structure like that should completely alienate an audience. So what prevents streets of fire from being a totally unwatchable disaster? The music. The music is the structural integrity of the film. It's the clue. The source states explicitly that without the music holding this movie together, there is almost nothing there, perhaps just a decent looking colorful image occasionally. But the film is bookended by two massive, soaring, operatic rock songs written by Jim Steinman. Plus, there are various other driving tracks heavily featured throughout the runtime. The music elevates a fundamentally broken movie considerably proving to be vastly stronger in quality than the script, the acting, or the direction. This specific dynamic, Jim Steinman's music saving

27:54a chaotic script is worthy of deeper analysis. Oh, let's get into it. Why his music specifically? Steinman's compositions are famous for their Vagnerian, bombastic rock opera structure. They are huge songs, meatloaf style. Exactly. They're inherently dramatic. They possess the narrative arc and emotional weight that the film script lacks. So the song provides the story arc? Yes. When the plot is swerving wildly from a gritty crime thriller to a neon lit musical, the audience should feel whiplash. But they don't. They don't, because the driving relentless beat of Steinman's music provides a consistent, unifying emotional baseline. The music acts as a relentless enger, pulling the audience through the narrative wreckage. That's a perfect way to put it. This brings me to a major question regarding the psychology of the audience during the specific decade. OK, I'm intrigued. Were audiences in the 1980s simply more forgiving of chaotic, nonsensical storytelling provided there was a killer synthesizer track

28:55or a massive rock anthem playing in the theater? Are you asking if they just didn't care about the plot? Kind of. Does a driving 44 beat literally, biologically distract the human brain from a bad plot? From a neuroscientific perspective, that is actually a highly plausible hypothesis. Wait, really? It's biology. We touched on this earlier, but we need to dive into the concept of rhythmic entrainment. rhythmic entrainment? OK. When you hear a strong, consistent musical beat, like the driving synth pop of the 80s, your brain's motor cortex and auditory systems begin to sink with that rhythm. It is a biological imperative, right? It's why we tap our feet. It's an involuntary physical response, yes. So our brains are busy keeping the beat? Precisely. And while your brain is dedicating processing power to sinking with the rhythm and processing the emotional dopamine release triggered by the melody. It has less cognitive bandwidth available to critically analyze the logical progression of the narrative. Exactly. Music bypasses the logical processing centers and targets the emotional centers directly.

29:56Oh, so if a movie's plot is failing to engage your logic. If it is messy, contradictory, or nonsensical, but the music is successfully triggering a massive emotional and physiological response. The overall experience registers in your brain as positive. Yes. You leave the theater feeling energized, even if upon reflection an hour later, you realize the story made absolutely zero sense. The rhythm effectively masked the narrative gaps. It's incredible the brain works. It is essentially a magician's slight of hand, but executed with audio. Don't look over here. Look over here. Right. Don't look at the massive glaring plot hole over here in the second act. Just listen to this incredibly epic, wailing guitar solo. And it works. It worked in the theaters in 1984. And it still works when we revisit those films on streaming today. It is a testament to the sheer power of auditory stimulus over visual logic. It really is. But we have been focusing heavily on a very specific type of music so far. Yeah, lots of pop and synth. We've been talking about rock, pop, and electronic music

30:57rescuing these films. Princess Swagger, Queen Stadium Anthems, Draft Punk's electronic world building, and 80s synth pop. These genres all rely heavily on rhythm and beat to drive momentum. Right. I want to shift our focus completely for our final segment. OK, where are we heading? What happens when the music isn't driven by a drum kit or a synthesizer? What happens when it is a classical, traditional sweeping orchestral score? Entering the realm of the traditional score. Exactly. What happens when a master composer, a titan of the industry, hands in an absolute master piece of a score for a movie that simply does not have the narrative weight to earn it? Let's look at the master composers and the flawed epics. This introduces a completely different flavor of our core phenomenon, I think. It does. When a traditional symphonic orchestral score vastly outshines the film it is attached to, the contrast feels infinitely more stark. Why is the contrast sharper here than with a pop sound track, do you think? Because of intent. Then think about it.

31:57A pop song placed in a movie often exists partially to sell records or to capitalize on a band's existing popularity. Right. Cross promotion. But a traditional orchestral score is bespoke. It's commissioned and composed specifically to serve, reflect, and elevate the narrative of that exact film. The music's sole purpose is to intertwine with the story. So when the music achieves brilliance, but the story fails, the disconnect is jarring. It highlights a failure of collaboration. That makes total sense. Let's examine a massive franchise to illustrate this. Let's look at 2002. Star Wars. Star Wars. Episode 2, Attack of the Clones. A film with a highly complex, fiercely debated legacy to put it as mildly as possible. Right. Our star's material does not mince words regarding the quality of this film. It is uncompromising. It describes the narrative as suffering from a real dreariness. dreariness is a harsh word for a Star Wars movie. It calls the film messy and largely underwhelming, pointing out that from a structural standpoint,

32:59the movie basically only exists to move the character of Anakin Skywalker into darker emotional territory. Just so that the actual tragedy of the prequel trilogy can happen in the next film, Revenge of the Sith. Attack of the Clones is essentially a necessary but clunky bridge. It is worth noting, however, that the article provides a somewhat cynical, modern context. Oh, about the current state of the franchise. Yeah, it throws a bit of shade, stating that despite its massive flaws, Attack of the Clones is still a more cohesive film than recent entries like The Rise of Skywalker. Or that one Mandalorian spin-off movie that the culture has seemingly already forgotten about. Right. It grids on a curve, sure. But we can all agree the core narrative and the dialogue are remarkably clunky. George Lucas's script struggles heavily. But amidst that narrative mess, you have the composer. John Williams. John Williams. The article states that Williams does his thing in a reliably great way, but it goes a step further, suggesting that the film itself doesn't actually

33:59deserve music of this caliber. The prime undeniable example cited in the text to support this claim is the film's love theme. Titled Across the Stars. Yes, Across the Stars. If you strip away the lightsabers in the Clones, the emotional core of this film is supposed to be the forbidden love story between Anakin and Padme. Their romance is central to the tragedy of the entire saga. But their on-screen romance in this specific film is famously agonizingly awkward. The dialogue regarding sand is universally mocked. I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating. We all know it. Yet the source points out that John Williams' composition across the stars is sweeping, deeply romantic, and easily more effective at conveying love than the actual romance it is supposed to be accentuating on screen. This is where we see a profound, almost tragic disconnect between the audio and visual storytelling. How did he get it so right when the script got it so wrong? Well, John Williams approached this assignment and composed a piece of music that utilizes complex light motifs.

35:03The underlying structure of the piece, with its minor keys and sweeping strings, tells a complex story of passionate, consuming, but ultimately doomed and tragic romance. So he wrote the music for the story they wanted to tell, not the one they actually filmed. Williams understood the thematic assignment perfectly. Yeah. He wrote the music for the Greek tragedy that Star Wars is supposed to be. But the visual execution, the script, the wooden dialogue, the stilted direction of the actor standing in front of green screens, could not match the epic scale of what Williams was doing with the orchestra. Exactly. When you close your eyes and just listen to the across the stars, your heart swells. It's a gorgeous piece of music. You feel the crushing weight of a love that is destined to destroy a galaxy. The music communicates the stakes perfectly. But when you open your eyes and look at the screen, you are watching two actors struggle to generate any believable chemistry while reciting incredibly clunky exposition. It's sharring. In a strange unintended way, the sheer brilliance

36:05of Williams' score actually highlights and exacerbates the film's flaws. Because it sets an emotional standard, the movie can't reach. The music is actively showing the audience the profound sweeping emotion we should be feeling. And because we hear what we should feel, the total absence of that emotion in the visual performance becomes glaringly obvious. The music makes the movie look worse by comparison. It kind of does. It's like the music is overperforming. The score is acting. It's hard out while the script is flatlining. That's exactly what is happening. And we see an even more dramatic, critically acclaimed example of a master composer overperforming in the final film on our list. The mission from 1986. The mission. Now, to be fair to the filmmakers here, out of all the movies we are discussing today, the source notes that the mission actually has the most interesting story and the strongest non-music elements. It is an incredibly ambitious piece of cinema. It's set in the 18th century in South America, focusing deeply on a remote Jesuit mission

37:06and the indigenous people who live and work there. You have heavyweight actors involved, too. Right. Robert Caniro plays a mercenary and slaver who is seeking spiritual redemption. He gets wrapped up in a massive, violent political conflict involving the mission, the church, and colonial powers. On paper, it sounds like an absolute masterpiece. It really does. The article notes it strives for a deeply moving narrative and complex themes. It also highlights that the cinematography is phenomenal. In fact, it explicitly calls the visual cinematography the second best reason to watch the film. But despite the incredible acting talent and the stunning visuals, it suffers from severe structural and pacing issues. It drags. The force points out that the film is incredibly slow going at times, really testing the audience's patience. Furthermore, Caniro's personal quest for quiet spiritual redemption clashes awkwardly with the massive chaotic, violent conflict that dominates the story in the second half. So it's a highly ambitious film

38:07that ultimately struggles to manage its own pacing and tonal shifts. The narrative buckles under its own weight. But the absolute number one reason to watch it, the element that makes it immortal, the music, the score by Ennio Morricot. The article states that whenever Morricot's music is playing, the film doesn't just improve, it soars. And it doesn't merely say it's a good score. The writer specifically notes that this is some of Morricot's absolute best music. Adding the crucial caveat, which is saying a lot. Which is saying a massive amount. To declare a specific score as being among the best work of Ennio Morricot is, frankly, unfathomable praise. We are talking about one of the most prolific, innovative, and celebrated composers in the history of cinema. He redefined the sound of the Western. And here, in the mission, utilizing indigenous instrumentation mixed with soaring coral arrangements and that famous obo theme, he delivers a definitive magnum opus. He delivers this masterpiece for a film that fundamentally struggled to maintain its own pacing.

39:09So how do we reconcile this? It's tough. When you look at John Williams working on Attack the Clones in Ennio Morricot and working on the mission, I try to picture what is actually happening. What do you picture? To me, it feels like showing up to a very casual, kind of disorganized neighborhood potluck. OK, a potluck. People have brought, you know, store bought potato salad and lukewarm hot dogs. And suddenly, John Williams and Ennio Mark and walk in carrying exquisite five-course Michelin star meals. They brought the good stuff. They have crafted the most incredible culinary experience imaginable. But because of where they are, they are forced to serve these Michelin star meals on flimsy, soggy paper plates. I see what you're saying. The meal itself is incredible. It is life-changing. But the venue, the container holding the meal, is just all wrong. I see the point of your analogy, but let's take it a step deeper into the reality of film production. OK, correct me. The art form of film scoring, particularly for these masters, is often independent of the film's final messy edit.

40:11So they aren't watching the bad pacing while they write. Sometimes they do. But when Williams and Morcon sit down to compose, they aren't necessarily scoring the clunky dialogue or the pacing issues. They are inspired by the concepts of these films. Oh, the ideal version of the film. Exactly. Williams is scoring the pure archetypal concept of a tragic galactic romance. Morcon is scoring the profound agonizing concept of 18th century spiritual redemption in the face of colonial violence. So they composed absolute masterpieces for the perfect versions of those movies that existed in their minds. Yes. The fact that the final products delivered on screen by the directors were flawed epics. Doesn't diminish the purity or the genius of the music they created. It simply means that the music they composed vastly outgrew the cinematic container it was poured into. The container simply could not hold the genius. The music was too big for the movie. Wow. OK, that makes so much sense. We have covered a massive amount of ground today.

41:12We really have. So let's zoom out and summarize this incredible journey we've been on regarding the collision of audio and visual art. It's been a fascinating breakdown. We started at the absolute extreme with the powerhouses, prints, and queen. We saw how legendary artists can essentially brute force a movie into being a cultural touchstone through sheer sonic willpower. Effectively erasing a weak script or a paint by numbers biopic structure from our collective memory. The music doesn't just save the movie. The music becomes the only thing we remember. From there, we expanded our view to explore how specific eras and sounds create a powerful auditorium nostalgia. Right, with Top Gun and Tron. Legacy. We saw that sometimes a soundtrack is the sole element that justifies a film's cultural footprint. The music acts as a bridge where modern, narratively superior legacy sequels are forced to rely on the indestructible auditory groundwork laid by their flawed predecessors decades earlier. Then we plunged into the deeply weird, highly experimental waters of the 1980s.

42:15We looked at wildly ambitious chaotic mashups like streets of fire and electric dreams. We discovered that incredible driving synth heavy soundtracks acted as a literal psychological tool, providing a consistent emotional rhythm that tricked the audience's brain, holding completely bizarre, nonsensical storytelling together like audio glue. And finally, we examined the highest tier of traditional scoring with master composers like John Williams and Anya Morrican. We saw how they delivered transcendence, sweeping orchestral pieces that were so emotionally perfect. They inadvertently highlighted the narrative and pacing flaws of the films they were meant to support. They composed for the perfect version of the film, exposing the reality of the flawed epic on screen. It is a profound testament to the sheer, undeniable power of music. It really is. It has the ability to save a bad movie from obscurity. It can elevate a mediocre movie into a cult classic, and it can completely outlive a flawed epic, standing alone as a masterpiece long after the film is forgotten.

43:16Well said. But before we wrap up today, I know you always have something to leave us pondering a way to apply this to our own lives. I do. This entire deep dive has been an exploration of context, specifically how the music interacts with and alters the visual film. Right. So I want to leave you the listener with a final thought experiment to mull over on your own time. I'm ready. What is it? I want you to think about your absolute favorite movie soundtrack of all time. The single score that moves you the most, the one you listen to on its own. OK, I have mine in mind. Now, I want you to imagine if you took that exact same music, every single perfect note of it, and you stripped it completely out of its original home. OK. Instead, you pasted it over a genuinely terrible, poorly acted, nonsensically plotted, unwatchable movie. Oh. If you were forced to experience that art in that new context, would the sheer undeniable brilliance of your favorite music save that terrible movie for you? Or. Or would being forced to associate that beautiful music

44:18with such a bad visual experience, ruin the soundtrack for you forever. Oh, that is tough. It forces us to ask a difficult question about how we consume media. How much does the visual context dictate our enjoyment of the audio art? Oof. That is a genuinely tough one. Would a terrible, unwatchable movie actually ruin my favorite score? Or would the score elevate the trash? It's something to think about. I'm going to be debating that in my head all week. And that is all the time we have for today's deep dive. Thanks for having me. We hope you'll take a look. And more importantly, a really close listen to your own movie library with a completely new set of eyes and ears. Definitely pay attention to the score next time. The next time you find yourself stuck on an airplane or a couch watching an absolute cinematic stinker, don't just turn it off. Close your eyes. Focus on the score. You might just discover your new favorite album hiding inside a terrible script. Thanks for diving deep with us.