Listen To Michael Giacchino's Very Intense, Very Different 'Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom' Theme

John Williams' Jurassic Park music is iconic. And while no one can come close to capturing the magic of Williams' music, Michael Giacchino is a great composer in his own right. Giacchino is handling the music for the new Jurassic World sequel, and you can hear his Fallen Kingdom theme below.

Entertainment Weekly is offering our first listen to Michael Giacchino's Fallen Kingdom music, and it's...different. Perhaps it's because I'm so enamored with John Williams' original theme, but the music here is not what I was expecting. Part of that is by design, of course. Giacchino tells EW:

"John Williams certainly set the tone, so I wanted to stay in that realm, but now here we are, five Jurassic Parks in, and I didn't want to do the same thing I did on the last film. This film has a very different tone, so I basically went to the director, Juan Antonio Bayona, who I've known for many years, and said, 'What if Bernard Hermann and Stravinsky had a baby who wrote the score for this film?'"

Giacchino also wanted to make his Jurassic World music much darker, to reflect the darker tones of the new film. "I thought this was a great chance to be a little darker and more tense, to go in a direction that felt new, and it didn't mean that I would abandon the orchestral element, but just texturally how you use melody and chords and eighths and the sort of ugliness that you can get out of an orchestra to create these frightening moods," he says in the EW interview. "The main theme is really about the darker world they're going into, and it's used in many different ways: in a positive way, a dark way, a humorous way, if you need to. There's all kind of things you can do with it, but it needs to speak to what the story needs."

I love many of Giacchino's soundtracks – particularly his Pixar work – but I'm not quite sold on this yet. Perhaps I need to hear it in context with the movie to appreciate it, but as of now, all this track does is make me pine for something new from John Williams. Giacchino says that he returned to Williams' themes "only when it's absolutely necessary, and only when it's absolutely earned," going on to explain: "It's not about avoiding; it's about being very careful about planning out the trajectory of the score."

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom opens on June 22, 2018.