Both the 2009 film Watchmen and Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica use the 1967 Bob Dylan song “All Along the Watchtower”.  Why did this happen?  That Watchmen was published before Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica is a fact, so there should also be no debate over which of the two used the Dylan song first.

As someone who never had read Watchmen when it came out as a series of comic books, I approached the 2009 film Watchmen completely fresh and unbiased.  I watched Watchmen as a movie and knew nothing in advance about the story or the characters.  To me, this film is a pop culture product that tries very hard to be cool and impressive.  It should come as no surprise, therefore, that this film uses well-known music.  Most notably, Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” is put to very effective use as the backdrop for one of the most ambitious and unforgettable opening title sequences of any film of any era.  But, the use of “All Along the Watchtower” in the 2009 Watchmen film seemed to me to be primarily of service to the fans of the Watchmen comic books and graphic novel.  The fans likely would go into the film expecting that song to appear on the big screen because it appeared in the original print versions.  The relevance of using the song in the original print versions back in the 1980s is clear not only because the song has the word watch in it, but also because the themes advanced in the song directly related to the Watchmen themes.  I didn’t sit there with a stopwatch, but when you get right down to it, the amount of time that the Watchmen film devotes to the Dylan song is very limited especially compared to other songs that appear such as the lengthy use of the icon Dylan ballad for the film’s opening title sequence. 

In contrast, Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica uses Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” in a more eery way to advance an essential storyline.  This, I think, is a much more effective use of the Dylan song compared to how it was used in the Watchmen film.  Without a doubt, we’ve had the chance to hear that particular song before on the big and the small screen. Just look at the Wikipedia page and you will learn how often the Dylan song has been used in other films and other television shows. 

Since Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica has not yet concluded its final run of original episodes, it is not possible to know if the importance of “All Along the Watchtower” to the storylines will be explained.  I suspect that it would be terribly wrong if some explanation were not provided by the end of the series as to why that song was considered so important to Cylons on Battlestar Galactica.  Are we to expect that Bob Dylan was somehow connected to the Cylons?  Did Bob Dylan reincarnate thousands of years into the future as a Cylon balladeer so that his song would be relevant in more than one era?  Clearly, that song was not used as casually in Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica as it was used the 2009 film Watchmen.