One Battle After Another

PTA headbutts Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Todd Lyons and Tom Homan singlehandedly with his audacious, undaunted yet hysterical film about a breeding underground counterculture revolutionary gang with a modern spin but radical take. Somebody send a memo to Ari Aster how to make a no-holds-barred film on the current political climate and ideological rift in a divided USA as wide as it was maybe during the Civil War, and to think of the fact that the novel it has been adapted from was actually a critique of the Nixon era, that says a lot. A simmering rallying cry through a love letter from the Boomers and Gen-X to remind the new generations that the battle is never over even though it seems like it has long been. 

This movie is freaking bonkers with a B, It’s comrade with a C and funny with an F. It’s as serious and frenzied as the ponytail worn by DiCaprio and as comically evil and abominable as the alt-right militia haircut of Penn which to be honest must have its own X account, you know, for the obvious reasons surrounding the recent pivot and slant of the soon-to-be first trillionaire overlord and planet-hopping Messiah who might one day seek for humanity’s ultimate salvation akin to a deadbeat father with his special club abandoning his home. 

A cocktail of a wet dream for Counterculture, Antifa and Open Society enthusiasts. A disorganized attempted guerrilla warfare within an urban setting against some of the most full-on Infuriatingly racist, integrationist, misogynistic and xenophobic slimy characters yet hilarious in its execution, almost cartoonish where at first the politics becomes personal and then in a full circle moment the personal becomes heavily political. 

Had it not been for the long tracking shots and shouting matches, the yelling spells and the never-ending close-up shots, I probably wouldn’t have pegged it as a PTA movie. It was like watching him channeling his inner skills with a rare synthesis of Wes Anderson blended into a Coen Brothers’ masterclass act. I haven’t watched this unabashedly radical and incisively political a movie like this one since How To Blow Up a Pipeline or way back when The Baader Meinhof Complex was released. All that while an intensely kickass background score blasting behind the screen. 

P.S.- I wouldn’t hold it against the accolade lords if Leo doesn’t get the statue for this but I will definitely lose it if a Johnny-Lawrence-looking Sean Penn doesn’t get nominated. Chase Infiniti sure is here for the long distance run. One Battle After Another is as close as we could have gotten to a new but political version of No Country For Old Men with splashes of screwball comedy, controlled chaos, chase and flare n flair.

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