One Battle After Another

Two things: 1) This film was great. 2) I do not agree with the film’s political stance. Here’s why these two main thoughts I formed after watching this film are not contradictory. First of all, all elements of the movie, from the acting to storytelling to the cinematography, are all amazing. The movie is extremely engaging (although I did not enjoy the overly sexual references at the beginning such as the boner thing—I know it’s supposed to be funny but that was just unnecessary). Second, I believe that the value of media, including film, comes from its ability to make arguments in artistic ways. And this film does exactly that. Its critique on the current American politics is very clear and direct. Now here’s a caveat: I disagree with the film that the revolutionaries are the “good” guys. I don’t think so. To me, Bob is also a bad guy who justifies his past wrongdoings with the excuse that the government is equally bad. That’s why I was not the biggest fan of the very last part of this film: it tries to embellish Perfidia by showing that she actually wanted to be a good mother but was stopped by the system. NO. She was a murderer who killed an innocent man. She is an immoral, irresponsible character who did not deserve the packaging she got as a mother. This case is a representation of the entire movie. I do agree that this film does feel a lot like another “woke” film—I’m not particularly against the films themselves, but I would appreciate more nuance. There’s a lot more I wanna say about the politics of this film; there’s probably a lot that I missed as well. I won’t go through all of them here, but I will definitely be thinking about this film for quite some time.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed the movie a lot. Just on surface, there’s a lot of funny elements. This is surely a proper political satire. And going deeper, there’s a lot of things to think about. That’s why, despite not being politically aligned with the film’s central idea, I rate this film highly and understand why it received the Oscars.  This was the first movie of Paul Thomas Anderson (or PTA as people seem to call him) that I watched, and I’m definitely intrigued by his style. I’d love to watch more of his films.