Buy it... to appreciate brilliantly precise and perfectly sufficient music at the periphery of Williams' style in this solidly exciting but technically cold recording.

Avoid it... if you continue to wonder how Alexandre Desplat can so intelligently write immense music that somehow provides absolutely nothing memorable.

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•	Digital Album

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Desplat

Jurassic World Rebirth: (Alexandre Desplat) Because Steven Spielberg and Universal Pictures will never seemingly be able to restrain themselves from attempting to recapture the mystique of 1993's classic, Jurassic Park, a seventh film in the franchise now shows dinosaurs chasing and eating humans just like they always have. There's only so much of the same formula that audiences can tolerate, but 2025's Jurassic World Rebirth slots in after the Jurassic World trilogy narratively and postulates that evil corporate scum wants to harvest the DNA of rare dinosaurs for pharmaceutical reasons, hiring a team of a mercenary, paleontologist, and other yummy snack targets to descend upon yet another abandoned island laboratory to retrieve samples. Honestly, how many of these goddamn tropical islands with destroyed labs can there be? Once the unlikely team gets to the island, their boat is annihilated by some nasty sea-dinosaur and they find themselves navigating the land alongside some random family that was also stranded there. As expected, half the people involved get spectacularly consumed by increasingly bizarre-looking dinosaur creations that humans must have thought would be a good idea at some point. Critical and audience reactions to the movie were middling, the concept running on fumes. Director Gareth Edwards is clearly a Spielberg enthusiast and spent much of the movie making homages to the famed director's prior works, and one area of loyalty comes in the soundtrack. Edwards doesn't have a plethora of films to his credit, but composer Alexandre Desplat was instrumental in his first two blockbusters, Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The French composer's music was rejected from the latter movie, setting up Michael Giacchino to take the assignment of emulating John Williams music for Disney. Giacchino also, of course, took the reins of the Jurassic Park park franchise for the three Jurassic World films starting in 2015, the first two of which quite strong. In no small dose of irony, Edwards tasked Desplat with replacing Giacchino in this franchise for Jurassic World Rebirth, perhaps a make-good for Desplat's removal after not being allowed to handle music from Williams' storied history in another franchise.

For both the industry and listeners, Jurassic World Rebirth is at last an opportunity for Desplat to show what he can pull out of Williams' shadow, and the results are highly predictable. At the very least, the assignment allows the composer an opportunity to handle a major blockbuster fantasy adventure, his first such high-profile work since Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets in 2017 before sliding back into his native dramatic genres of lesser scope. For this score, Desplat's London recording employed a 105-piece orchestra and a 60-member choir, with lead actor Jonathan Bailey making some feel-good news by performing on clarinet. Edwards encouraged Desplat to write a memorable score in the style of Williams, and it's fascinating to hear how the composer tackled that directive. His precise orchestrations and impressive choral usage are really smart technically, the constructs and level of rampaging activity in the score superb from start to finish. In terms of style, he applies the base Williams sound for the concept, including shakuhachi flute for the exotic element, but sparingly, and jungle percussion from The Lost World: Jurassic Park joins the fun in "Hurry." Desplat doesn't go wild with unique additional layers, though his trademark, deep electronic thumping is used early in the score without interfering in the soundscape. (It's mixed pretty far back.) A marimba is an interesting touch for locale applications in a few cues. You can tell that Desplat was attempting to apply low woodwinds and harp in Williams' usual methods, which is nice. But Desplat will always be Desplat, and this score is no different. Whereas Williams' natural tendency is for his structures to flow dramatically, even in horror sequences, Desplat is known for his prickly and staccato precision, and that sound guides almost every figure in this work. Such striking pluckiness sometimes makes the score sound uncomfortable with its preceding inspiration. Desplat expertly adapts Williams' progressions and other mannerisms, but he intellectualizes them severely, and you can't really do that without losing the appeal of Williams' classic melodic approach. The resulting homages to Williams show less overt love of the style than Don David accomplished in Jurassic Park III, which in turn was lessened a bit more in the Giacchino scores. In short, this score is proof that Desplat's erudite style, for all his intentions, is incompatible with Williams' melodic grace.

While each individual component in Jurassic World Rebirth exudes a dose of brilliance from Desplat conceptually, he simply cannot write, develop, and prevail with memorable themes. This characteristic of his methodology is likely because he doesn't use the majority of his scores' running time to nurture and repeat his motifs in "hummable" fashion. He has always struggled with this tendency, the absolutely precise and intelligent executions of his themes seemingly more important than crowd-pleasing simplicity sometimes demanded by a story. In this work, Desplat tends to ramble for minutes at end without stating a meaningful recurring theme, with "Dart Show," "Zora and Kincaid," most of "Mayday," "The Pistol/Scare in the Trees," "What's This Smell?," and most of "Mutadons Fly In" devoid of any meaningful thematic advancement. The narrative therefore isn't tight at all, leaving none of Desplat's many new themes in memory. There are also singular melodic highlights like the opening of "Boat Chase" aren't connected to anything. The charming melody early in "Do the Job" is likewise orphaned. Several odd bits litter the path as well, with "Bridge of Deal" sounding like a Bernard Herrmann leftover and light piano romance in "Zora and Kincaid" seeming totally out of place. Desplat's actual narrative consists of eight recurring new themes of interest, some of which will require close attention to pick out of the mass of the composer's suspense and chasing material. It's interesting that Edwards implored Desplat to write memorable (or "hummable") new themes and the composer responded with a group of at least eight, none of which remotely as engaging as Williams' legacy identities, two of which remain in this score. For whatever reason, Desplat opted to replace Williams' famous adventure and fantasy themes with his own alternatives but heavily borrow Williams' progressions from Jurassic Park and beyond for them, causing all these ideas to bleed together. The main new identity in Jurassic World Rebirth is Desplat's adventure replacement, which represents the overarching concept and location. While a decent identity, it has distinct similarities in its opening notes to both the legacy adventure theme and Williams' E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, depending on its harmonics. Per usual, Desplat heavily manipulates those harmonies in his statements, so the idea sometimes resides closer to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial than at other moments, but the similarities are generally distracting.

Desplat's main adventure theme in Jurassic World Rebirth explodes with a brief moment of relief at 4:38 into "Opening Lab" and occupies the first minute of "Natural History Museum" in vague Williams tones before returning on solo horn at 3:34 over hints of Williams' fantasy theme. It opens "Voyage" with optimistic gusto from the whole ensemble and diminishes to worried shades against slight Williams hints, later lamenting the situation on solo horn at 4:21 into "Boat Chase." Returning with nervousness on brass at 0:08 into "Walking the Swamp," the adventure theme is pleasantly expressed at 0:11 into "Dino Lovers" with Williams' magnificence of locale suggested. It's suspenseful with clanging percussion at 3:31 into "Crossing the River/T-Rex," factoring with more strength at 6:20 but still darkened by the rambunctious horror surroundings. The theme interrupts the rowdy action at 1:30 into "Bird Strike" and several times thereafter, closing the cue with an exotic fanfare mode, and a bassoon rendition at 3:31 into "Tunnel/Helicopter" is cool but lost in the overall action. Finally, the idea accompanies the action rhythms on brass at the start of "Bella and the Beast" but otherwise diminishes at the end of the score. The other primary new identity from Desplat is a protagonist theme that largely replaces Williams' legacy fantasy theme, which is ironic because this new theme extends directly out of the opening three notes of that Williams fantasy theme. It also takes a while to develop in the story. Briefly on hopeful strings at 3:17 into "Mayday," this theme offers respite at 3:47 into "Boat Chase" in fuller form, which exposes its redundancy with the Williams alternative. It informs solo violin elegance at 2:02 into "Dino Lovers," where it stands apart with choral beauty; the secondary phrases of this theme are really lovely in this moment. The protagonists' theme pleasantly offers a single statement in "Clifftop" before succumbing to suspense again, and it returns as a slight and muted solution for strings at the end of "Climbing the Wall." It unoffensively bubbles along in its chords during "Let's Go Home" and resolves with a pretty rendition from the ensemble at the end of "Bella and the Beast." By this point, it sounds almost inextricable from Williams' fantasy theme, and the idea's secondary phrasing opens "Sailing Away" as a direct precursor to that 1993 identity's closing performance. Ideally, these two themes would have been combined into one by Desplat, with the legacy Williams material in support, a strategic move that would have greatly helped this work's memorability.

Average:		3.15 Stars
*****		27
****		43
***		62
**		34
*		17
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Rebirth is Narratively the 7th Film   Expand >> Jason Caskey - July 18, 2025, at 9:47 a.m.

2 comments  (112 views) Newest: July 19, 2025, at 2:28 p.m. by Allen

John Powell Florian - July 7, 2025, at 5:47 a.m.

1 comment  (616 views)

• 1. Opening Lab (4:53) • 2. Bridge of Deal (0:59) • 3. Natural History Museum (5:04) • 4. Team Gathered (1:12) • 5. Voyage (2:51) • 6. Dart Show (1:18) • 7. Zora and Kincaid (2:24) • 8. Mosasaur Attacks Yacht (4:00) • 9. Zora and Loomis Chat (1:57) • 10. Mayday (3:32) • 11. Mosasaur Bumps Boat (1:12) • 12. Boat Chase (5:15) • 13. Fins Attack - Part 1 (4:49) • 14. Fins Attack - Part 2 (1:31) • 15. Cave Swim (3:48) • 16. Hurry (1:42) • 17. Walking the Swamp (3:21)

• 18. The Pistol/Scare in the Trees (1:33) • 19. Do the Job (2:28) • 20. Dino Lovers (2:59) • 21. Dino Spectacle (1:43) • 22. What's This Smell? (1:16) • 23. Crossing the River/T-Rex (8:10) • 24. Clifftop (0:36) • 25. Climbing the Wall (3:37) • 26. Bird Strike (3:40) • 27. Let's Go Home (0:31) • 28. Gentle Boat Ride (4:05) • 29. Mutadons Fly In (4:55) • 30. The Old Lab (2:38) • 31. Tunnel/Helicopter (4:19) • 32. Run to the Gate (2:44) • 33. Bella and the Beast (4:50) • 34. Sailing Away (2:08)

There exists no official packaging for the digital version of this album.