John Williams' score for Star Wars: A New Hope may be the most influential of all time. It's certainly a top ten composition that's instantly recognizable all around the world. You could play that theme on any continent and get an immediate response - probably a Wookie impression or a quip from Han Solo. So how does a modern Star Wars film, one that doesn't include the involvement of Williams directly, expect to live up? A smart composer would play with the themes of Williams' score, not straying too far but not directly cribbing from the classic. The former would be a disaster - Star Wars fans expect a certain "kind" of score to one of their movies...Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead would not be a good fit - but the latter could be just as much of a problem. Kevin Kiner wisely walks the middle line, giving fans a comfortable, relatively predictable score, but one that satisfies nonetheless.

The problem for Kiner was that if his score sounded like a subpar version of Williams' masterpiece, it might effect the viewer's opinion of the film too. I'm sure no one involved wanted to look (or sound) like a "lesser version" of the original Star Wars. Kevin Kiner's score, which he composed and conducted, walks the fine line of doing its own thing while paying homage to the classic themes that inspired it. Honestly, Kiner gets the idea of creating a bridge between the "old" Star Wars and the "new" Star Wars more completely than the people who made the film itself and certainly does a better job of doing so. So much about The Clone Wars movie doesn't work, but the score is never a real problem. Sure, some of it sounds a bit too much like a TV soundtrack, but that's expected because The Clone Wars movie is basically just an extended pilot. Kiner's work features some of the joy missing from the movie itself. Fans will be more satisfied than they were in the theater.

Now available (it was released on 8/12) at all physical and digital outlets through Sony Classical, Star Wars: The Clone Wars Original Motion Picture Soundtrack features 32 tracks (with titles like "Obi-Wan to the Rescue" and "Dooku Speaks With Jabba" for over an hour of classic goodness. Of course, the film does contain some of the original theme by John Williams and he's also credited on the cover, but Kiner does most of the composing and conducting for the bulk of the score. He's been a composer for work on TV series including Stargate: SG-1, Star Trek: Enterprise, Superboy, and CSI: Miami and the soundtrack for Clone Wars does sound a bit like what you would hear on an animated series more than a theatrical piece, but so does the movie itself, so that's not that big a drawback. Kiner's work should sound excellent on the show itself. It's one of the few reasons we might tune in and we'll certainly go back and listen to the soundtrack to The Clone Wars long before we see the movie again. It won't have the impact of the original Williams' masterpiece but it doesn't tarnish its legacy either.