🎞️One Battle After Another, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025
This is very highly rated on rottentomatoes, but it seems super bad? (Maybe I should read the reviews at some point and try to figure out what they liked about it.) I guess the setting with anti-ICE terrorists is slightly topical? But the anti-immigration raids are just used as "generic authoritarian" window-dressing, nothing in the film really deals with our particular moment in America. It could equally well have been set in e.g. the 2000s, with some equally perfunctory reference to the 1999 Seattle WTO protests.
Apart from the politics, on a craft level I think this was a mess. First, the comedic premise of the main act is that Bob used to be a super-competent high tech terrorist and now he's a washed-out stoner, but in the prelude the terrorists are also comedic clowns, so you don't actually get the contrast. (The prelude has one brief break into a realistic tone when the mom shoots a security guard and is arrested. I don't get what they were aiming for.)
Second, the pacing is super weird, because they spend so much time on just the setup. There is a super-long terrorist raid on an ICE detention camp, including the first erotic scene between Lockjaw and Beverly Hills, and then the title card happens, and then there is a long series of little vignettes (including the sudden tonal break), and then finally the 16 years later transition. By then I thought that they were deliberately going for an experimental collage-like effect, but after the the transition it turns into a basically standard action movie with a few comedic elements so there isn't even any payoff. (The main act feels boring and way too long).
The one thing I thought was actually funny was the Christmas Adventurers Club, a white-supremacist secret society that use the phrase "Hail St Nick" in their secret ritual. The meeting takes place in a bunker underneath a cozy suburban house, and the scene is preceded by "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" (sung by Ella Fitzgerald, which also makes some kind of point about whiteness in America). The actual right-wing organizations in America are super stupid, so it makes sense to make broad comedy about them.
On the other hand, the "fair and balanced" approach where the film equally lampoons stupid far-left terrorists rings really false, because there are no far-left terrorists in America, there hasn't been any since the 1960s. Supposedly the film inspired by some Thomas Pynchon novel, and Pynchon is known for including anachronisms, so maybe this is an element carried over from the book? Let's see what Wikipedia says…
It is loosely based and inspired by the 1990 novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon.
a 1990 postmodern novel by Thomas Pynchon set in California in 1984, the year of President Ronald Reagan's reelection. Through flashbacks, its characters, who lived through the 1960s, account for the free spirit of rebellion of that decade, and describe the traits of the "fascistic Nixonian repression" and the war on drugs that clashed with it. The book portrays transformations in U.S. society from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Oh for fucks sake.
