John Williams wrote the iconic theme and film score for Jurassic Park, a movie I was raised on. Williams also composed the film score for the sequel Lost World. When you talk or even think about Jurassic Park, John Williams’ music comes directly to mind. That being said, how is it possible to have Jurassic World without John Williams composing the film score? Easy. You hire Michael Giacchino and ask him to compose something to match John Williams’ theme.
First a bit more information about Giacchino. At fist I did not even know who he was. One Google and Wiki trip later I find out that he has been composing beautiful scores that we all know and love. He has composed scores for Lost, Alias and Fringe as well as, the Medal of Honor and Call of Duty games. More impressively, in my mind, he wrote the scores for Mission: Impossible III, The Incredibles, Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness, Cloverfield, Ratatouille, Up, Super 8, Cars 2, John Carter, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Inside Out, and The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz. So he’s not some random guy that popped up out of no where to be a clone of John Williams. No, he’s a really cool dude that has an awesome portfolio to back him up.
I am not saying that the music in Jurassic World is of a lower quality, it is quite the contrary. Giacchino did an amazing job blending his own compositions with John Williams. It can be clearly heard after having been re-watching every Jurassic Park film for the entire week leading up to the release of Jurassic World.
I was going to go through song by song and scene by scene to compare and contrast the music of both movies. Instead I would like to share a quote from anther article written by Christina Radish.
So, how challenging was it to pay homage to one of the most famous composers and one of the most well-known film scores while still making the music new and your own?
GIACCHINO: The great thing about John’s music is that you could stick it anywhere and it sounds amazing ‘cause he’s just the greatest there is. For us, as fans of the film, neither Colin [Trevorrow] nor I wanted to make a Jurassic Park movie without hearing that theme. It was about saying, “Okay, where can we put it? Where does it make the most sense?” Colin had this idea that the beginning of the film is delivering on a promise that was made 20-some years ago, when we said we were going to make an actual functioning Jurassic Park. So, what we thought was, when we show that, that’s where we should deliver John’s theme. It was a really targeted approach, as to where to do it and where would make the most sense and where would we most appreciate it, as fans ourselves. And then, there were a couple more places, here and there, in the rest of the film, where we thought we could use a little bit, but it was a very targeted thing. We really thought it out. When you heard it, we wanted it to mean something. I’m lucky, I work with guys who allow and really love music and they love melody and they love those sorts of scores. But, so many movies these days are made where you could have just thrown anything into the movie and it wouldn’t matter. So, it’s really wonderful to work with people that respect that old school way of doing it. I feel very lucky.
With that being said, I have nothing more to write. Included in this article is a link to the article written by Christina Radish and a link to the Spotify Playlist Geek Spectrum – Jurassic Music, which has both albums. Please take some time to listen to both soundtracks to fully understand how amazing both Williams and Giacchino are.
Geek Spectrum – Jurassic Music
Article by Christina Radish
Geek Spectrum 