{"id":482365,"date":"2025-10-08T07:27:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T07:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/482365\/"},"modified":"2025-10-08T07:27:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T07:27:10","slug":"one-battle-after-another-draws-some-conservative-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/482365\/","title":{"rendered":"‘One Battle After Another’ Draws Some Conservative Fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tOne Battle After Another<\/a> is, as the refrain goes on social media, \u201cthe movie of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPaul Thomas Anderson\u2019s propulsive, nearly three-hour loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon\u2019s Vineland starring Leonardo DiCaprio has been the rare grown-up drama that\u2019s drawn enormous critical praise, high audience scores and solid box office \u2014 crossing the $100 million mark worldwide to score the biggest opening of Anderson\u2019s career.<\/p>\n

\n\tGiven that the film is also intensely political \u2014 telling the tale of a burned out revolutionary (DiCaprio) who endeavors to save his daughter (Chase Infiniti) from a white nationalist military officer (Sean Penn) \u2014 it\u2019s perhaps surprising there hasn\u2019t been more noise so far from those on the right. The film opens with a celebratory raid on an ICE facility to free detainees, and shows government agents coldly executing unarmed suspects and sending an undercover agent into a peaceful protest to throw a Molotov cocktail to justify increased force. <\/p>\n

\n\tOne suspects a three-hour indie drama about left-wing rebels doesn\u2019t draw the same level of interest from conservative moviegoers as, say, a remake of a family classic like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But there are some grumblings out there that contend the film, which Anderson had worked on for decades, is actually the wrong film at the wrong time rather than the opposite.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou can make excuses for it, but basically the [film is] an apologia for radical left-wing terrorism, that\u2019s what it is,\u201d said Ben Shapiro<\/a>, who predicted the film will win \u201call the Academy Awards\u201d due to its politics. \u201cIt has the subtlety of a brick \u2026 The basic suggestion is a conspiracy theory in which the United States is run by white supremacist Christian nationalists and all people of color and a few nice incompetent fellow travelers like [DiCaprio\u2019s character] are going to take on that entire system. And that system must be taken on at the cost of family, at the cost of friendship, at the cost of decency, at the cost of basic human capacity for success. It is better, in other words, to be a complete loser who wastes your life bombing things randomly in order to free illegal immigrants to run willy-nilly across the border than to be a productive citizen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFor this movie to make any sense at all, one has to believe the United States, today, right now, is a fascist dictatorship,\u201d wrote David Marcus at Fox News<\/a>, under a headline that dubbed the film an \u201cill-timed apologia for left-wing violence.\u201d He continued, \u201cThat is not only a dangerous fallacy but, as we have found out recently, a deadly one \u2026 The whole movie made me a little angry, but then I remembered that the Trump administration is cracking down on Antifa \u2014 today\u2019s very real domestic terrorists \u2014 and maybe this will be a fun movie for them to watch once they are all in jail.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s a macabre coincidence that\u00a0One Battle After Another\u00a0opens so soon after the assassination of peaceable conservative debater Charlie Kirk,\u201d wrote The National Review<\/a> under a headline predicting \u201cthere will be bloodlust\u201d provoked by the movie. \u201cThe film undeniably romanticizes political assassination \u2026 Anderson intentionally provokes the bloodlust of his woke confreres (and Gen Z viewers who know nothing about the Sixties) by celebrating the insipid, heretical, and violent activities of the liberal past and present. Anderson\u2019s title lacks Pynchon\u2019s pith but daydreams a culture of never-ending political obstruction and pandemonium. It is the year\u2019s most irresponsible movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWatching One Battle After Another may not be entertaining, but its celebration of vitriol and murder is clarifying,\u201d opined The Blaze<\/a>. \u201cThis is not the usual \u2018anti-conservative\u2019 Hollywood bias. When the perpetually sweaty DiCaprio shouts \u2018\u00a1Viva la revoluci\u00f3n!\u2019 while detonating bombs, you\u2019re meant to cheer. And if you\u2019re not cheering, well, those bombs are meant for you \u2026 Increasingly, Hollywood views half the country not as fellow citizens with outdated beliefs, but as enemies who deserve punishment. Owning firearms, favoring borders, voting differently \u2014 these aren\u2019t policy differences; they\u2019re treated as moral crimes, grounds for extermination.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSome critics, however, have maintained the film\u2019s politics play more like a satirical fantasy \u2014 from its conspiratorial white supremacist cabal to its ultra-organized French Resistance-style left-wing network to Col. Lockjaw\u2019s cartoonish Dr. Strangelove-style demeanor. The opening flashback of rebels attacking a detention facility would have taken place during Obama\u2019s first presidency, many years before President Trump\u2019s first term sparked intense backlash to U.S. immigration policies.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe progressive staple The New Republic weighed in on this subject with an essay exploring the film\u2019s political themes and concluded that One Battle is a dream of a left-wing movement that doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe least believable part is the corresponding existence of a left-wing revolutionary group that physically fights back,\u201d wrote David Klion<\/a>, noting \u201cthe rebels in Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s movie resemble the Weather Underground less than the right\u2019s conspiratorial image of \u2018antifa supersoldiers\u2019 \u2026 The audience at my screening seemed to be having a total blast, laughing and cheering throughout \u2014 and while I experienced\u00a0One Battle After Another\u00a0the same way, in hindsight it was a somewhat discordant reaction given the all-too-relevant depictions of immigrant families being torn apart by armed federal agents.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd in a column for The Hollywood Reporter, Richard Newby pushed back<\/a> on the notion that the film is pro-violence in any way: \u201cWhile some argue the film celebrates political violence, it doesn\u2019t at all. It depicts it as a temporary solution, one that, when drawing battle lines, only results in casualties on both sides and creates victims out of those who suffer under the same realities of America.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One Battle After Another is, as the refrain goes on social media, \u201cthe movie of the year.\u201d Paul…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":482366,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,150003,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-482365","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-one-battle-after-another","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115337366299176779","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482365\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}