Challengers, a movie where Zendaya plays a tennis star who has a threesome, came out last week and, while I haven’t seen it yet, I sure do plan to. Director Luca Guadagnino’s new romantic tennis thriller/drama is getting pretty good reviews, has a fun premise, and would seem to harken back to the days when fun, pulpy sex dramas were a mainstay of American popular culture (those days were the 1990s). On top of everything else, the movie has a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Can you beat that?
Reznor and Ross, of the Nine Inch Nails, have notably created some of the most memorable movie scores of the past twenty years (some of their hits include The Social Network, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and Watchmen). Their music, which tends towards the dark and the sinister, has frequently been favored by some of Hollywood’s greatest filmmakers.
Well, Reznor and Ross seem to have hit it out of the park once again. The online consensus seems to be that the Challengers score, which seethes with synth-laden techno pulses, is frickin’ awesome, and goes with pretty much anything. And now it’s a meme. On Twitter, users have been affixing the movie’s titular track to scenes from different movies. Having watched those mashups myself, I think I can safely say that this track instantly makes any movie just a little bit better. Dune? Check. The Matrix? Check. Uh...Snoopy? Also, somehow, check. Here’s a quick look at how the music duo’s latest banger is taking the internet by storm.