U2 and REM were so overrated. Lol

Each to their own; I thought it one of the best "jukebox" soundtracks I've heard for ages. Nice that they used a few more obscure cuts.

Mind you, I probably don't know many of the artists in the current charts.

@M. LeMarchand said:

Each to their own; I thought it one of the best "jukebox" soundtracks I've heard for ages. Nice that they used a few more obscure cuts.

Mind you, I probably don't know many of the artists in the current charts.

I guess it was appropriate for the club scenes; but elsewhere they could have picked some better tunes from that decade. As for today? I keep an eye on the charts and listen when I can to my local top 40 station and with exception it's all the same sound. Just like it always has been, really. Every decade has it's stand out tracks and the rest is muck. I grew up in the 70's and everyone worshiped the 60's music as being worlds better than what was going on then. I suppose it is just human nature to elevate the past.

The music in that movie was all over the place for a film set in 1989. The movie played mostly new wave/new romantic which was early 80’s music, by 1989 it was acid house and hair bands not 99 Red Balloons.

I understand some music fits an action scene better than others but an early 80’s soundtrack in a late 80’s setting sounded weird from someone who was a teen in the late 80’s.

@NotoriousRio said:

The music in that movie was all over the place for a film set in 1989. The movie played mostly new wave/new romantic which was early 80’s music, by 1989 it was acid house and hair bands not 99 Red Balloons.

I understand some music fits an action scene better than others but an early 80’s soundtrack in a late 80’s setting sounded weird from someone who was a teen in the late 80’s.

Maybe that's what was popular in Germany at the time? I mean, they still loved David Hasselhoff.

It was a massive hit in 1983 and 1984, I'm not bashing the song just the choice of songs they chose for the movie, people bought a lot more records back then, the top 40 charts were less static than they are today, so people were usually listening to the latest chart music and buying records, tapes and CD's regularly.

The communist east was different however with bootlegs of the Beatles, the Stones and Pink Floyd huge there.

The music is, as has been noted, anachronistic. The choice of tracks makes some sense because these were either Euro -pop hits or British songs that were popular in Central Europe at the time. As for what is good or bad music, de gustibus non disputandum est. I suspect the reason these tracks in particular were chosen, from the early 80s, is that music from the late 80s simply isn't that popular today.

Whoever was responsible for this soundtrack clearly paid attention to Deutschland 83, which is well worth watching. Pity they got the time frame all fucked up here tho.

Even so, it doesn't take a decade for radio waves to travel from West Berlin to East Berlin.

And even if this stuff weren't anachronistic, I have some credibility problems with a 40 year old woman of the day strutting her stuff to Depeche Mode or whatever while wearing a Wham! sweat.

Ok, it's a live action cartoon, but if you sink 30 million into some kind of homage to an era, getting the actual era right in terms of look and sound ought to have been on the list of things to do.

@acontributor said:

The song is German so that's probably why they used it. It could also be that the song was actually popular there in that year even though it was no longer popular in America anymore by that year.

"Der Kommisar" was originally done by a German, Falco, I believe, who also hit big everywhere with "Rock Me Amadeus". His original would have been more appropriate than the American remake which even then sounded silly.

Indeed it is an issue with many period pieces that the soundtracks are off by years. Often critics or forums will take great pleasure at pointing out how a certain pop song had not been released in the year of the film\TV show it is played in. That was not so much my issue, just the choice of songs. I do not recall, but now it has been a while since seeing it, when in the 80's the movie was set. I do not recall them actually pin pointing that.

As far as other choices; "In the Air Tonight" while not a club tune scene song, would have been cool to include. Music from Dire Straits, Sting (with and without The Police)... so much went on musically in those ten years.

The movie is specifically set a few weeks before the actual fall of the wall. So 1989. This detail isn't that important to the story so one wonders why it keeps being referenced when plainly everyone involved in the movie seems to have wanted it set circa 1983.

While I agree there is a subset of cinephiles who enjoy spotting 'goofs', for most of us they are signs of incompetence, or even worse, as is the case with Atomic Blonde, not caring.

@acontributor said:

Again, it's probably true that they got their music later than the rest of us. You have to pay licensing fees to play music on the radio. Eastern Europe was really poor in those days and I imagine that it was more affordable to license yesterday's music.

The movie isn't just set in 'Eastern Europe'. It is set in London, Paris, and East and West Berlin. People in East Berlin had no problems listening to radio stations in West Berlin, or indeed anywhere else in Europe. Unlicensed music, books, and movies were widely circulated in the communist bloc in this era.

If the point of anachronistic music was to highlight the cultural differences between capitalist and communist societies in the late 80s there are a lot better ways of doing it. But none of them deliver the synthpop soundtrack the producers clearly favoured. This is a problem of adapting a graphic novel, which by definition is purely visual, and then giving it a soundtrack when you turn it into a movie. I understand that choice. What I find irritating is that they felt no one would notice or care. Would it be ok to set a movie in 00s Los Angles and give it a 90s Madchester soundtrack without some kind of contextual explanation? I think it is bonkers. It's a form of cultural illiteracy.

@Oldnewbie said:

It was evident from the soundtrack just what horrid music was produced in the 1980's. Exception being David Bowie's "Putting Out Fire With Gasoline" which came from the soundtrack to the 1980 remake of "The Cat People". The rest? Holy crap! 'The Politics of Dancing"! "Der Commissar"! What crap.

The only other bright spot was when "London Calling" from The Clash roared in; but that actually came out in late 1979!

Natch there was a ton of music in that decade so why did they pick those dreadful cuts? Where was U2? REM? Heck, Journey's "Stone In Love" would have been a great tune to have during any one of the fight scenes!

The other standout was Therone's spot on impersonation of Blondie's Deborah Harry. From the hair to the absence of feeling in her eyes throughout, I half expected her to burst into "One Way Or Another" at any given moment.

It was music played with actual instruments and singing done by real humans.

Unlike the horrid 'music' today (it isn't music) that includes programmed repetitive clicking, popping, and tapping... no sign of any instruments.

@tlm550 said:

@Oldnewbie said:

It was evident from the soundtrack just what horrid music was produced in the 1980's. Exception being David Bowie's "Putting Out Fire With Gasoline" which came from the soundtrack to the 1980 remake of "The Cat People". The rest? Holy crap! 'The Politics of Dancing"! "Der Commissar"! What crap.

The only other bright spot was when "London Calling" from The Clash roared in; but that actually came out in late 1979!

Natch there was a ton of music in that decade so why did they pick those dreadful cuts? Where was U2? REM? Heck, Journey's "Stone In Love" would have been a great tune to have during any one of the fight scenes!

The other standout was Therone's spot on impersonation of Blondie's Deborah Harry. From the hair to the absence of feeling in her eyes throughout, I half expected her to burst into "One Way Or Another" at any given moment.

It was music played with actual instruments and singing done by real humans.

Unlike the horrid 'music' today (it isn't music) that includes programmed repetitive clicking, popping, and tapping... no sign of any instruments.

Yes lived through the period. Poop is poop. Granted it is a tinge nostalgic to think most, not all, of the music from the 80's was played by real people and not programmed by techs. Thought he 1980's was the beginning of all that and many sounds, especially drums, were computer generated. Soft Cell's music had only the singer, no other human but the synth programmer. Who may have also been the singer!

Today it is rampant with "producers" creating computer made backing tracks and selling them to various artists who then come up with words and a melody. Some creativity in that but no band is hired, no musicians paid... very economical if indeed fake.