By bringing David Williams in to score the sequel to The Prophecy, the new installment for the 5-part franchise maintained some needed continuity with the first film, since Christopher Walken was the sole thespian who returned to continue the classic good versus evil battle.

Paul Tonks' liner notes in the meaty booklet include some comments from Williams, who says he mined some themes and motifs from the first film, and developed another lengthy score, with longer cues than in the prior film.

The sequel continues with Williams' blend of sythns, samples, and sound design, but a noticeable difference is the use of less sustained bass-heavy reverberations than the first film. Cues like “Thomas” use the same construction of bass rumbles, ascending chords, and an inevitable, shrilling climax, but there's longer swathes of ambient material using higher chords and denser vocal samples.

Also more prominent is the recurring main theme, which Williams reiterates throughout the score to infer a sense of grandiloquent evil, and conversely, the emotional and moral weight the film's hero must bear in trying to stop Gabriel's latest quest for absolute conquest. There's a lack of variation, however, which makes the theme a bit monotonous unless it's followed by more diverse theme fragments.

The film's main plot device deals with a child threatening Gabriel's plan – the reverse moral order of The Final Conflict (Omen #3) – but Williams chose to focus on the heavy drama instead of interpolating hints of the child throughout the body of his score.

Cues like “Fighting the Angels” demonstrate the rising dissonance and thunderous hits used for combat scenes, while “Tattoo” makes use of a soprano and watery choral accompaniment. Similar to the digital shrilling in John Frizzell's Alien Resurrection, Williams uses the dynamic effect with moments of synthesized orchestra and chorus, which gives the score a harder edge, and recalls the insect motif in the first Prophecy. (A child's voice does permeate “Michael,” but again the emphasis is on conflict and seething rage, although it figures more prominently in the album's final cue, “Ashtown.”)

Fans of the Prophecy series will find the sequel's music compliments material from the first score, but overall, Prophecy II lacks some of the discreet nuances that humanized the first; sequels rarely manage to capture the special qualities of the original film, and that's a dilemma composers face when asked to write something familiar, yet fresh for the latest film.

Perseverance has thus far released Williams music for The Prophecy (1995) and The Prophecy II (1998). The music for Prophecy 3: The Ascent (2000) by Steve Boeddeker, Prophecy: Uprising (2005) by Joseph LoDuca, and Prophecy: Forsaken (2005) by Joseph LoDuca all remain unavailable, as of this writing.

© 2007 Mark R. Hasan