One battle after the other would make a perfect double feature with a box office bomb in 2025

Wait there, just a minute. This article contains spoilers For “Eddington” and “a battle after another”.

In the most optimistic future I can imagine, we look back the films of 2025 with a sort of grateful nostalgia – the gratitude that political pandemonium and cultural chaos portrayed did not last, and rather became inhabitants of windows for a very specific era of cinema. It’s a section, I know. For the moment, all we have is two special films that show contradictions, grotesqueies, violence and paranoia of the present moment. I’m talking, of course, of “One Battle After Other” by Paul Thomas Anderson and “Eddington” by Ari Aster.

Released a few months apart and filmed on similar funds from the American southwest, these two films differ quite clearly when you simply watch the synopsis. “Eddington” follows the rivalry of the small town of a sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and the mayor (Pedro Pascal) in the middle of the Pandemic Covid-19. There are in -depth comments on major technologies, the culture of conspiracy theory and the power of the Internet to infect and isolate the brain. On the other hand, “One Battle After Other” is a classic Hollywood -adventure action film, focused on a militant revolutionary group and the benefits of their actions against the American government and the army – in particular, the growing military and police campaign against undocumented immigrants.

The two films are deeply anchored in the current American political moment, but it is the way they each explore the mania of this one when they really reflect. Although Anderson’s director’s feelings generally lean towards Hollywood artistic drama, and that of Aster towards the disturbing horror domain, both find an involuntary environment in their often absurd American portrait, fully crushing contemporary American tension.

While the two films cover different corners of the current American cultural landscape, so to speak, these are subjects that overlap a lot. In “Eddington”, the violence that bursts into the streets of the city holding New Mexico is fueled by the growth of paranoia and the isolation of the Pandemic era, but the true collapse of the characters in madness and despair is fueled by invisible and tried forces behind behind the scenes. The wife of the Sheriff Cross, Louise (Emma Stone), is ready by a religious worship warned of the faithful of the conspiracy, while her mother, stuffed in the house, falls into the burrow of the Rabbit Qanon. These digital radicalization engines take place against the project of the center of databases booming of the city – the one that the mayor Garcia, for all his public effects of progressive ideas, is united to pass.

The demonstrations also form the basic piece of “One Battle After Other”, when Colonel Grotesque Lockjaw (Sean Penn) launches a full -fledged military attack on the city of the Baktan Cross sanctuary under the auspices of the rooting of an alleged network of underground drugs. His true motivation is to find Willa Ferguson (Chase Infiniti), the daughter of the former French revolutionaries 75 Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). A sexual encounter with Perfidia 16 years before led Lockjaw to suspect that he could be the biological father of Willa, who would throw a key in his application to the cult of white supremacist called Christmas Adventurers Club.

Again, the cabale turns on the fuses that blow in the streets of the Baktan cross. The two films show that more serious violence was launched by external agitators – lockjaw agents in the case of “One Battle”, and darker activists in “Eddington”, although the film suggests that they were sent by donors of the City Massive Data Center.

Even with all these narrative and thematic parallels, “a battle after the other” and “Eddington” would not feel so intended for a treatment with double functioning without the specific tone that they bring to their respective stories of political disorders. The Sheriff Cross of Phoenix and the Colonel de Penn Lockjaw – men’s application of the law, although massively different scales – are painted in equal nuances of pitiful, pitiful, incompetent and deeply cruel. The two lead to brutal violence by anxiety around the concept of virility. And the two put an end to their stories in a grotesque way which make you want to divert the screen, even if you believe that they finally obtained what they deserved.

His story of interracial relations has revealed, Lockjaw is treated a double death by the worship which he aspires so desperately (at the point of tears, in his final scenes) to be part. When a hunting rifle blows with the skull does not finish it, they finish it with a cunning and an impromptu gas room before throwing it in a chute of trash can – the aesthetic Nazism of the least subtle variety. Cross also survives the ball wounds which seem deadly at the beginning, which leaves him the mayor of figurehead of an extremely handicapped city of a fully sold city with the same technological interests which indirectly led him to madness.

Anderson’s new Hollywood sensitivities offer the only traditional “happy ending” in one or the other film, Willa facing her parents’ revolutionary trends and carrying the torch for the next generation. But even with this positive pinch in the last moments, the film does not stop far from providing a wellness balm to abject violence – explicit and implicit – of the thing it calls America.