At the end of the first trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, Leonardo DiCaprio — wearing a beanie, wraparound shades, and a tartan bathrobe — pumps his fist and yells “Viva la revolución!” Benicio del Toro answers his cry by silently raising his fist and disappearing down a hatch, which is promptly covered by a rug.
The moment is classic Anderson: cinematic, cine-literate (del Toro once played Che Guevara, hero of the Cuban revolution associated with that phrase), exciting, but also archly funny and destabilizing. The trailer has spent the previous two minutes introducing us to DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson, a washed-up activist who used to be part of a revolutionary group called The French 75, and who is taking up arms again on a quest to save his daughter. There’s loads of exciting imagery: car chases, choppers, people firing machine guns in the desert, and an army of nocturnal skaters, one of whom declares, “It’s world war three out there!” But we’re also left unsure if DiCaprio, the deadpan del Toro, and their band of rather out-of-date countercultural warriors are the heroes of this story or the butt of the joke. (Knowing Anderson, it’s probably both.)
Anderson, Gen X centrist dad that he is, is on the record saying that One Battle After Another focuses more on the personal than the political. Still, resistance and revolution clearly run strongly through the movie’s themes and imagery. (It is loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, a novel about how the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s was crushed by Ronald Reagan’s 1980s America.) Anderson is not alone in his preoccupation at the moment. This fall will see a slew of movies with political resistance on their mind.
One Battle After Another’s closest kin in this respect is probably Bugonia, the latest collaboration between director Yorgos Lanthimos and star Emma Stone (The Favorite, Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness). Adapted from a 2003 Korean movie called Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia is a satire about a man (Jesse Plemons) who kidnaps a company CEO (Stone), convinced she is an alien intent on subjugating the Earth. “Welcome to the headquarters of the human resistance,” he says in the trailer. Like Anderson, Lanthimos tends to be an ambivalent observer rather than an impassioned rabble-rouser. But, just as in the Korean original, Plemons’ character seems to be presented as both delusional and, on another level, absolutely right. It can often feel like corporations and the people who run them are invaders from another planet.
Eat-the-rich fables have been a running theme at the movies for a few years now — from Parasite to The Menu — and there are others in the offing this fall, too, like The Housemaid, a thriller starring Sydney Sweeney about a live-in maid working for a wealthy family with dark secrets, and No Other Choice, Park Chan-wook’s latest satire about a wronged employee on the rampage. But, if anything, in 2025 the focus seems to be shifting to outright political oppression.
You can see this in a pair of films adapted from early works by Stephen King (both published under his Richard Bachman alias). The Long Walk depicts a totalitarian U.S. where young men are subjected to a murderous last-man-standing walking competition. The Running Man (which was published in 1982 and is set in 2025, no less) is also about a contest to the death, this time televised, in which the contestants win by evading teams of hitmen sent to kill them.
A 1987 adaptation of The Running Man with Arnold Schwarzenegger depicted this as a sleek, futuristic bloodsport. But this fall’s version, directed by Edgar Wright and starring Glen Powell, looks to take a more down-to-earth approach in a world that’s semi-recognizable as our own. In the trailer, the emphasis is less on the killers sent after Powell than on the general public who are encouraged to turn him in. The movie is presented as a fast-paced and inventive action-comedy in typical Wright style, but also seems to be pretty unequivocal about how the systems of power oppress the masses by turning them on each other.
In fact, while auteurs like Lanthimos and Anderson look at the topic askance, it seems mainstream Hollywood will be tackling resistance and revolution head-on — albeit within the comfortable confines of fantasy. We already know Wicked: For Good, based as it is on the second act of the smash musical, will show how Elphaba is demonized for her opposition to the tyranny of the Wizard’s regime in Oz. In this part of the saga, she’s an insurrectionist and animal-rights activist, fighting on principle. There’s a tragic outcome, but the moral scales of the story are very much tipped in her favor.
And while plot details are more scarce for Avatar: Fire and Ash, there’s no question that ecologically motivated armed struggle will come up in this film, too. After all, it’s been the main thread of the two Avatar movies that preceded it. James Cameron’s sci-fi universe is all about Na’vi resistance against human colonialism and environmental destruction on their home planet of Pandora. Complicating the picture in this third movie is a violent new Na’vi tribe that has rejected Eywa, the deity/superorganism that connects all life on Pandora. Presumably the film will deal with how this tribe is co-opted by the invading human force.
Why is this theme so common and so resonant now? Just look at the news. Even if you ignore any specific parallels for the struggle against political oppression, it’s easy to detect a widespread sense of frustrated powerlessness that might respond to depictions of the fight for agency — ambivalent or otherwise. But for a film that holds a mirror up to our current moment rather than refracting it through either triumphalism or cynicism, it might be a good idea to look beyond Hollywood.
The Secret Agent is a Brazilian drama that premiered at Cannes earlier this year. Its title makes it sound like a spy thriller, and it has elements of one, but that’s not exactly what it is. Set in the 1970s, when Brazil was a military dictatorship, The Secret Agent stars Wagner Moura (Narcos) as an academic who is not really a dissident but, after a row with a government minister, ends up on the run in his own country anyway. A revolutionary cell takes him in and transforms him into somebody else. Circumstances and corruption turn him into a sort of spy. The system gave him no choice.
The Secret Agent is fiction, but it’s also testimony from a society that went through these struggles not so long ago. It doesn’t present the faded romanticism of the counter-culture, or the heroic allegory of pop fantasy. In this world, resistance is the only real option.
