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Having been recently removed from Star Wars: Rogue One, Desplat's transition on Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets represented a relief to fans eager to hear the composer's space opera variant to his much revered, incredibly intellectual music for The Golden Compass and Godzilla. Without a doubt, Desplat delivers the goods in the 2017 fantasy epic on the technical front; rarely does film music exist in such startlingly overwhelming complexity in this era. The composer's writing style is so massively intricate in its orchestrations and hyperactive level of activity that you cannot help but appreciate this score as a marvel of texture. All the Desplat techniques you've heard before are on affectionate display here, from wildly fluttering woodwinds to synthetic bass pulses, and there are times when you must revisit an action cue several times to take note of all the concurrent lines of performance, particularly on brass, in this work. Some nods to the furious wall of sound approach of Elliot Goldenthal in Final Fantasy and others is made, including the obnoxiously suspenseful trilling trombone technique. Desplat supplies love to a woodwind section like none other, using flutes especially as well as John Williams to supply the full sonic spectrum something to do at any given moment. The synthetic elements in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets are tastefully applied, even those bass thumps that tend to ruin less frenetic Desplat scores. (That said, they are pretty irritating in parts of "Showtime;" Desplat's truest collectors have probably grown immune to that sound.) Arguably his most electronically manipulated cue, "Medusa," is actually a highlight of the score in how it uses a processed piano in a driving bass rhythm (under those wild flutes and resolute brass lines) to create the tension of a countdown. One can't help but compare this ticking clock technique in a slow crescendo of ominous force by Desplat to the Hans Zimmer crew's far less interesting application of the equivalent technique in the concurrent Dunkirk.