Jurassic Park

While one of Steven Spielberg’s great talents is making us see the world afresh—think back to the child’s-eye view of taking flight with E.T. or the first glimpse of a UFO landing in Close Encounters of the Third Kind—John Williams has the ability to capture time and again that sense of wonderment in sound. And nowhere more so than in his sweeping orchestral score for Jurassic Park (1993), where that source of amazement is provided by the cloned dinosaurs that roam the fictional island of Isla Nublar, off the coast of Costa Rica. Williams gives us an awe-filled theme for orchestra and wordless choir as we are drawn into the park, along with the crack team of experts and scientists, headed by palaeontologist Dr. Alan Grant (played by Sam Neill), who are inspecting it before it opens to the public. Here the dinosaurs roam wild. What could possibly go wrong? The primal fears at play in Williams’ opening theme for percussion, wordless male chorus and electronic music hint at the potential horror in the answer.