One battle after another would be a perfect double function with a 2025 box office pump

Wait there, just a minute. This article contains spoil for “Eddington” and “one battle after another”.

In the most optimistic future that I can imagine, we look back in the 2025 films with a kind of grateful nostalgia: the gratitude that the political pandemmonium and the cultural chaos portrayed did not last, and instead they became a showcase for a very specific film era. It’s a stretch, I know. For now, everything we have are two private films that show the contradictions, grotesquerías, violence and paranoia of the present moment. I am talking, of course, about “One Battle Afher” by Paul Thomas Anderson and “Eddington” by Ari Aster.

Released with only months of difference and filmed in similar funds from the southwest of the United States, these two films differ quite clearly when you only look at the synopsis. “Eddington” follows the rivalry of a sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and the mayor (Pedro Pascal) in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. There are extensive comments about the great technology, the culture of the theory of conspiracy and the power of the Internet to infect and isolate the brain. On the other hand, “One Battle After another” is a classic Hollywood action action, focused on a militant revolutionary group and the consequences of their actions against the government and the military of the United States, specifically, the growing military and police campaign against unnegmed immigrants.

Both films are deeply based on the current American political moment, but it is the way they explore the mania of this moment in which they really reflect each other. Although Anderson’s feelings of direction generally inclined towards the artistic drama of Hollywood, and Aster towards the disturbing kingdom of horror, both find an involuntary marigroñón medium in their frequently absurd and completely overwhelming portrait of contemporary US tension.

While both films cover different corners of the current American cultural landscape, so to speak, they are subjects that overlap. In “Eddington”, the violence that explodes in the streets of the titular city of New Mexico is fed by the growing paranoia and the isolation of the pandemic era, but the true collapse of the characters in madness and despair is driven by inviscent and tentative forces behind the scenes. Sheriff Cross’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone), is pressed by a religious cult of the Internet expert conspiracy, while her mother, full at home, falls through the burrow of the Qanon rabbit. These digital radicalization drivers are established against the flourishing project of the city’s data center, one that Mayor García, despite the fact that all his public presentation of progressive ideas is covered.

The protests also form the central piece of “One Battle after another”, when the grotesque Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) launches a full -fledged military assault in the sanctuary city of the city of Baktan under the auspices of rooting an alleged network of drugs of underground immigrants. His true motivation is to find Willa Ferguson (Chase Infiniti), daughter of former 75 French revolutionaries Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). A sexual encounter with perfidy 16 years before leads Lockjaw to suspect that it could be Willa’s biological father, which would throw a key in its application to the cult of the white supremacist called The Christmas Adventurers Club.

Once again, the clique lights the fuses that blow in the streets of Baktan Cross. Both films show a more serious violence initiated by external agitators: Lockjaw agents in the case of “One Battle” and more gloomy militants in “Eddington”, although the film suggests that the financiers of the city of the city’s massive data center may have sent it.

Even with all these narrative and thematic parallels, “a battle after another” and “Eddington” would not feel so destined for a double function treatment if it were not the specific tone that lead to their respective stories of political agitation. Both the Sheriff’s cross of Phoenix and Colonel Lockjaw de Penn, police men, although massively different scales, are painted in equal tones of unfortunate, unfortunate, incompetent and deeply cruel. Both carry out brutal violence for anxiety around the concept of virility. And both end their stories in grotesque forms that make you want to look the other side of the screen, even if you think they finally obtained what they deserved.

Its revealed interracial relationship history: Lockjaw receives a double death for the cult that desperately longs for (to the point of tears, in their final scenes) of being part. When an explosion of shotgun to the skull does not finish it, they finish it with tricks and an improvised gas chamber before leaving it through a garbage channel: the aesthetic Nazism of the less subtle variety. Cross also survives the bullet wounds that are fatal at the beginning, which leaves the mayor of the figure of extremely disabled figure of a completely sold city to the same great technological interests that indirectly led him to madness.

The new sensibilities of Hollywood of Anderson provide the only traditional “happy end” in any film, with Willa assuming the revolutionary trends of their parents and carrying the torch for the next generation. But even with that positive stab in the final moments, the film stops much less to provide a balm to feel good to abject, explicit and implicit violence, what America calls.