Today brings Colin Trevorrow's long-awaited film Jurassic World. Pushed as the proper follow-up to Steven Spielberg's 1993 Jurassic Park rather than just another sequel, there is a lot riding on this reboot. Merchandise and future sequels aside, many count the original score as one of John Williams's finest and Millennials hold it dear to their childhood memories. Whether or not Michael Giacchino, who composed the new score, can live up to it is a big question.
Much use has been made of Williams's primary theme from Jurassic Park to promote Jurassic World. It is the franchise's signature and has been incorporated into many of the trailers. There's a reality to this project that while it is trying to reestablish the brand and start anew, the original film casts a huge shadow on its reception. With that in mind, let's look back at how the music has come to be and where it is going with Giacchino's newest interpretation.
Jurassic Park (1993)
With Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Michael Crichton's bestselling 1990 novel, John Williams had his work cut out for him. Utilizing the iconic strings and brass that we have all come to love, he also underscored the action-packed narrative with a rich bass line, choir, synthesizer, and percussion on the more ominous tracks.
Filling the majority of a film's running time with music is no easy task, and yet feels necessary to travel the narrative hills and valleys of what is at its core a pulp adventure tale. The fact that it resonated beyond just the dinosaurs, but as a visual and aural feast with a well-developed narrative is testament to the commitment shown by cast and crew to tell more than an adventure tale. Rather, they share a story built upon the dreams of human beings.
It's difficult to say what exactly makes Williams' score so iconic. Built on core themes that are reinterpreted throughout the film, it's classically-inspired movie music squarely in the vein of Williams's earlier work on Star Wars, E.T., and other fantasy classics. Before modern times sped everything up and whetted viewers' appetites for sonic experimentation, film composers evoked characters and themes in a manner that would have been familiar to Richard Wagner.
A key aspect of the score is Williams's use of bells and bell-like instrumentation. They present the childlike awe so necessary to the story and help to provide relief from the more traumatic cues.
With a sound design built on deep resonance, the score had to match it with a similar weight. As cinema has turned more digital the need to capture sound at the source has become less and less necessary. You can hear this develop over the course of the Jurassic Park franchise.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
Both Spielberg and Williams returned for The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Since the sequel was less about theme park ride awe and more about immersive jungle adventure, Williams didn't revisit the primary themes from Jurassic Park. Rather, he developed new material that focused on the danger of the narrative and drew out percussion such as "congas, bongos, 'jungle drums,' gourds, log drums, and tabla," according to Wikipedia, which also notes that Williams pulled another nifty trick out of his composer's bag.
Another common stylistic element in this score is aleatoric writing. To create a sense of chaos and terror, Williams provides a series of pitches to a group of instruments and instructs them to play them quickly ad lib for a given number of measures. Although this technique has been used in many scores by Williams and other composers, employs this effect with unusual frequency, particularly for scenes involving the compsognathus.
Unlike most composers following up initial efforts, Williams recognized that this was not so much a sequel as a separate narrative with minimal connective fibers to the first film.
It's a dynamic score as a result, and is part of the reason why this film was better than most want to remember. It's not a story about children looking in wonder at creation, but rather about adults dealing with severe trauma. The main music theme from the original Jurassic Park is, significantly, brought back at the end of the narrative to highlight the narrative's continuity and to remind us how valuable a child's awe can be to inspire the world.
Jurassic Park III (2001)
Jurassic Park 3 is much more an embrace of the b-movie adventure tale than the other films. What the first Jurassic Park avoided by having strong characters and a richly organic sound, the third installment steers right into, becoming one action sequence after another.
Spielberg handed over the director's chair to Joe Johnston (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Jumanji), and composer Don Davis of The Matrix franchise was recommended by John Williams to take over for him. This makes a strange sort of sense. While the score doesn't have the same avant-garde experimentation of The Matrix, many of Davis's strengths as a composer are present here and actually elevate the score's quality beyond that of the film overall.
Davis returns unapologetically to the original core of Williams's themes. Davis's signature string and brass evolve them significantly, but never so drastically as to become unrecognizable. This is truly what Jurassic Park could have sounded like if John Williams hadn't been the original composer. While Davis's work is admirable, it also does the job of reemphasizing the significance of Williams's work and the film's signature motifs.
Jurassic World (2015)
With Jurassic World, Michael Giacchino picks up the gauntlet. Long cited as this generation's John Williams, Giacchino was an obvious pick. From the opening bars, Giacchino pulls in many of the core sonic elements of the first two films and then quickly begins establishing new themes, referencing the primary theme of Jurassic Park with great reverence.
This is very much a Giacchino score, which means it's reminiscent of many of his previous films such as Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Super 8. He has a deep nostalgia for '70s cinema and the classical film score. While willing to utilize a more modern palette, he also appeals to what defined the films of the '70s — and most specifically the films of Steven Spielberg.
Faint remnants of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes seep into this score through Giacchino's orchestration of choir and percussion. While in line with how Williams used a choir, it is more forceful and overtly violent, whereas Williams used a choir for more of an undercurrent of dread. There's even a reference to Williams's work on The Lost World, but it's minimal and can be easily missed if you're not listening closely. If you catch it, you'll appreciate it.
This is a version of Jurassic Park we can embrace in 2015. It doesn't have the distinct low end of Williams's score, and feels more propulsive. However, Giacchino shows that this franchise can mature to make room for a new voice that still carries Williams's childlike awe and wonder.
Garrett Tiedemann is a writer, filmmaker and composer who owns the multimedia lab CyNar Pictures and its record label American Residue Records.
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