The first complaint that many people had was the lack of much use of the beautiful themes that made Jurassic Park so memorable. This is one area where I must defend Mr. Williams to the extent of my abilities. As I've already mentioned, the movie was awful, and though not nessesarily for this exact reason, it contained little to compliment something like the soaring majesty of the score for the original. It was all action, action, action, and understandably unfit for much truly dramatic treatment. Williams makes up for this by complimenting the score with the best music that he can, and it is, of course, action, action, action. Let's not criticize here though, because it's probably the best action music that the movie could have hoped for even though it probably didn't even deserve it. This is all said without yet mentioning that is shows great creativeness on Williams' part to not use his older music as a crutch like other certain movie composers might have (*cough* *cough* Horner *cough*).

The second complaint was that the new main theme that was used was not very memorable. I must concur and say that this is somewhat true, though the theme is perfectly serviceable in the way that it is used and comes off quite well in the end, even after all of the jagged pitfalls that it had to overcome (being in such a bad movie was the main one). Not only is the theme serviceable, it is well though-out and tribal in construction, to suit the movie even more. It is much more effective, I think, in the scenes that do have some of the feel of the oringinal film. The best track I can think of to demonstrate this is track 3, "Malcom's Journey". "Tribal" is, in fact, probably the best single word to describe the music that dominates this soundtrack. For the most part is has an almost overly-"jungly" feeling about it, which once again adds to the overall effect of the poor movie.

Though not excessively used throughout the majority of the soundtrack (basically just little hints), the main themes of the original film do make major appearances at the end of the score, working their way into the end credits. Though some people (many, actually) are going to want to kill me for saying this, I think that the use of these themes for the end credits is one of the score's main downfalls. It seems to me that the use of these inspiring themes is out-of-place and completely inconsistent with the rest of the score. Another huge complaint I have, and this has been the largest complaint from all fans about the CD itself, is the fact that the soundtrack is packaged in an incredibly annoying fold-out dinorama case. Actually, for me, it is beyond annoying, and you would probably do best to just keep the disc in an extra jewel case that you can find in just about any store. This should prevent you from scratching the CD, and you can always cut up the original case and make it fit somehow into a jewel case. If you're willing to go through the trouble, that is...

Basically, I think that far too many people are too hard on this score. It may not be the best purchase you could make, but it is easy to find and it is one of Williams' more effective action scores. I think that if more people accepted this for what it is instead of what they think it should be, then they'd like it a whole lot more.