It was 1999 when I first heard the name Michael Giacchino – he’d been around for a few years by then but really came to prominence thanks to his music for the video game Medal of Honour. From there, it only took him a few years to become an overnight success – five years later he’d done Alias and Lost on tv and really made his big breakthrough on the big screen, with The Incredibles. He hasn’t really stopped since.
A million years ago I remember writing about his music for J.J. Abrams’s Super 8, saying it was my favourite work by him up to that point – primarily because I thought it sounded really personal, there was no hint of pastiche or doing things the way he thought others wanted them rather than the way he wanted. It’s been fascinating to watch him insert that more personal style into bigger and bigger blockbuster movies (especially the Apes ones, I think) and now here we are in 2026 having heard him score every conceivable type of film, tv show, video game in every genre and we can finally answer the question we’ve all been asking ever since 1999 – just what would a Michael Giacchino score for a dinosaur movie sound like?
The End of Oak Street is based on the first-hand experience of director David Robert Mitchell, emboldened to use all three of those names indeed having survived in his youth his suburban community being plunged back in time – to a time when dinosaurs ruled the world. It is by design very 80s Amblin – a little like Super 8 in that respect – so here we are, full circle, my inanely facile route complete to saying how personal this score sounds as well.
With one circle complete, I have to go and start another one. When he did come to prominence in 1999, I do remember the prevailing sentiment being that Giacchino was “the next John Williams” – by which people didn’t mean they expected him to start conducting the Boston Pops and writing music for the Olympics, I think rather they meant that one of the cues in Medal of Honour sounded like it was clearly modelled on “Desert Chase” from Raiders of the Lost Ark (and it did!) But apart from that specific piece of inspiration, I never thought he sounded much like Williams, really – and now we’ve got a quarter-century (and more) of work it’s fairly obvious that he’s generally always sounded primarily like himself, really, pastiches apart. In the process, he’s built up so many Giacchino-isms, familiar sounds and devices and approaches that by now all those like me who have followed his music with such a keen interest can hear anew and smile at. This time the facile prose are leading up to me making a statement of such profundity it will likely be quoted in most of tomorrow’s leading newspapers around the world – The End of Oak Street is absolutely full – chock-a-block full – of these Giacchino-isms, from start to finish.
There are two primary themes (one of which in particular has some offshoot variants used for different purposes) and if I just use a few words to say what they’re expressing, most seasoned Giacchino fans will immediately know exactly what they sound like. One is a long-lined adventure theme for all the dino hi-jinks; the other, a very sweet and in some ways innocent-sounding theme for the family at the heart of the story (the Platts, if you were wondering, but that isn’t particularly relevant to how the theme sounds).
The composer gets a lot of mileage out of each of the themes – they go high, they go low, they go everywhere in between – and as is often the case, they both get full explorations in the closing pair of tracks, the wonderful “Main on End of Days” and “The End of Oak Suite”.
Two other big ideas complete the score: a kind of spooky, twinkly suspense sound (very much from the Super 8 / Lost wheelhouse) which doesn’t sound like any specific score for a 1980s Amblin movie but certainly evokes that spirit; and batshit crazy action music, loud and gnarly and menacing and brilliantly effective. (And there is so much great action music, there really is – it’s brash at times and can get dark, and yet it is so full of colour and feeling.)
OK, so I did take the briefest of diversions away from my usual super-serious approach a few paragraphs ago when I said that we could finally find out what a Giacchino dino score would sound like – an angry mob had already formed outside my house protesting against this blatant ignorance – but it was a joke OK, I realise that he has in fact scored some films with dinosaurs in them before. And if I’ve learned anything in thirty (three-zero!) years of writing about film music, it’s that it is essential to take any opportunity that presents itself to lazily make comparisons between things which may be similar, however surface-level that similarity may be. So: no, this really isn’t anything like the Jurassic World scores.
They’re great and I love them so I’m not saying it’s better and I’m not saying it’s worse – the difference comes because there is this kind of Hollywood sheen over those scores – you don’t need to listen to more than a minute or two of any of them to know you’re listening to music from a $200m summer tentpole movie – there’s just something a bit more raw about The End of Oak Street, something that makes it sound like it’s the product of some friends getting together and doing what they enjoy rather than the product of extraordinarily professional and high-quality work done at the behest of bloated plutocrat studio executives. No, I can’t explain it any better than that, regardless of how little sense that may make.
He’s not for everyone but Michael Giacchino really is for me – whatever he does I tend to be impressed, and this is nowhere near being an exception. It’s exciting, adventurous, touching – his meteoric rise to the top of the film music A-list came because young filmmakers who went on to achieve their own meteoric rises heard his very early music and realised how good it was – it didn’t come because he toiled away on the factory floor, churning out product for some other big name until it was his turn to get his name above the line. And of course luck played a part and not everyone with great talent gets such luck, but still – I love that. He keeps turning these things out and maintaining such a high quality bar and I can confidently say that there’s no fan of Michael Giacchino who won’t absolutely love The End of Oak Street.
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