The Music of Jurassic Park and The Lost World
John Williams’s spectacular dinosaur scores revisited
Steven Spielberg changed the course of cinema in 1993, when he unleashed CGI dinosaurs upon the world in his edge-of-the-seat, blockbuster science fiction adventure Jurassic Park. As is almost always the case with Spielberg, he turned to regular collaborator John Williams for the music, and Williams more than delivered. With Jurassic Park, Williams added another extraordinary score to his already extraordinary back catalogue, introducing the world to yet more iconic themes.
The rather underrated Spielberg-directed sequel The Lost World once again reminded us of that all-important scoring truth: The only person who can outdo John Williams is John Williams. This time, Williams excelled himself with an innovative, largely percussive score that often moves away from big hummable themes, and into a more experimental, rhythmic mode. Although it sometimes echoes the thundering, jungle drums of Max Steiner’s King Kong, the music of The Lost World is very much its own beast and stands up to repeated listens. It’s a darker, fuller, more complex, ultimately more accomplished score than the more user-friendly original.
Here then are ten tracks, five from each film, that illustrate how Williams created two scores that, like so many of his…
