Star Trek: Ranking All 13 Movie Soundtracks

Michael Giacchino's most intelligent and elegant contribution to the Kelvin Timeline Trilogy, Star Trek Into Darkness is also the most restrained, perhaps least Trek-like score in the musical canon.

Stating that he had gone overboard with his use of choir for Star Trek (2009), Giacchino reined in the choral element from his previous score along with some of the fun. Appropriate to the film's darker tone, Star Trek Into Darkness downplays the energetic "Enterprising Young Men" theme from Star Trek (2009), favoring a more conservative, more militaristic composition for Admiral Marcus and the USS Vengeance. John Harrison's motif is similarly subdued, often played on piano with surprising tenderness for music representing a genocidal madman, best represented in "London Calling" and "Ode to Harrison".

Despite the obvious craft with which Giacchino handled these new themes, the highlights of Star Trek Into Darkness come in the reprise of material he wrote for the 2009 entry, with "Sub Prime Directive" providing rousing performance of Giacchino's Enterprise theme, "Warp Core Values" distorting that theme into an emotional, even tragic variation, and the generically titled "Star Trek Main Theme" representing the most concise and epic encapsulation of the idea across all three Kelvin films.

Keep your ears open for a brief quote of the iconic music from the TOS episode "Amok Time" as Spock and Khan resort to fisticuffs in the film's climax, heard on album in the track "The San Fran Hustle".