'One Battle After Another': A very woke film or a simple parody of wokism?

This week, a new feature film by Paul Thomas Anderson, titled "One Battle After Another," hits theaters.

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The film begins by focusing on a fictional far-left terrorist group, the "French 75," inspired by violent far-left groups that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Leonardo DiCaprio plays this group. His main rival, in this case, is Sean Penn, who plays a racist and unscrupulous police officer. The film also explores far-right secret societies, in this case inventing a fictional white supremacist and antisemitic organization. The film is a rather surreal black comedy that is as unclassifiable as Magnolia (1999), one of the director's best-known works.

To tell the truth, at times one might wonder whether this is a "woke" film or a simple parody of wokism, a word used to refer to the new extreme left that has emerged in recent years in the United States, with a cocktail of ideological fanaticism and detachment from reality that has ended up provoking more rejection than support. To tell the truth, this extreme left is portrayed in the film as a gang of lunatics who want to impose their ideas through terrorist acts and robberies. The doubts that the film generates about whether it is a glorification or a parody are due, in my opinion, to the fact that this left has become a parody of itself.

It must be acknowledged that Anderson has been habitually ambiguous in his presentation of both extremes, but he cheats by presenting the far right as something linked to political power, while the far left is shown as a reaction to that power. The reality is that wokeism has been widely promoted by political power, both in the United States and in some European countries, and has ended up becoming a business that moves a lot of money and a lot of influence. This trap is one of the aspects that I disliked about this film, which undoubtedly has many cinematic merits, but they are hampered by this political bias.

Personally, I was skeptical about whether this movie was worth watching, and to be honest, I wouldn't spend another 162 minutes of my life watching it. It's not my kind of movie. Of course, there's no accounting for taste. Here's the movie trailer: