The new Paul Thomas Anderson film “One Battle After Another” opened to rave reviews and is being talked about as an Oscar frontrunner. A story in Variety today hailed it as the rare movie that might break into the national cultural and political conversation, mostly for the way it “exposes MAGA politics” and authoritarianism.

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. But as someone who has read Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland” (and everything else in the Pynthon corpus), I’m more than a bit concerned by the facile way Anderson has interpreted Pynchon’s political black comedy.

To be fair, “One Battle After Another” is “inspired” by “Vineland,” not a direct adaptation. Fair enough. But there’s something missing here that’s important — and could, in fact, give political cover to MAGA in a very dangerous way.

“Vineland,” was published in 1990, 17 years after Pynchon’s magnum opus “Gravity’s Rainbow.” This made it one of the most anticipated novels of its generation — and it basically landed with a thud. A positive review of the book by Salman Rushdie in the NY Times Book Review captured the reason very clearly. While praising most aspects of the book, Rushdie led with the thought: is this really the book you’ve been working on for 17 years, TP?

Unlike the massive, encyclopedic “Gravity’s Rainbow,” “Vineland” is a confusing, seemingly unfinished political thriller that was yet another statement on 1960s politics and “what happened to everyone?” that arrived at least five years too late for most. So much of the 1980s had already been taken up by the way yippies and hippies became yuppies that it was now a tired topic.

Even the tale of former 1960s radicals on the run and the effect it could have on a regular family had been so thoroughly covered by 1990 that the mainstream Hollywood film “Running on Empty” just two years earlier seemed to have staked out the most resonant part of the “Vineland” plot (to the extent it even had a plot) already.

So, “Vineland” has long been considered Pynchon’s weakest novel, one his fans have read and forgotten. Everyone except, apparently, Paul Thomas Anderson, who adapted Pynchon’s second worst novel “Inherent Vice” a decade ago. Anderson, one of the most gifted filmmakers of this age, couldn’t rescue “Inherent Vice” but somehow couldn’t let go of the idea of making “Vineland.”

By the time he got around to doing so, Anderson had decided to place the movie in the here and now, making the argument in interviews lately that the politics of America never changes, that the issues true 20 or 40 years ago are still the same ones today.

To some degree this is true and has been a running theme of Pynchon’s work. The ending of “Gravity’s Rainbow,” for example, jumps in time from postwar Europe, where all of the action had taken place, to a theater in the early 70s America, where a missile is about to strike. The nuclear terror and Richard Nixon’s madman theory approach to Vietnam, Pynchon argued, didn’t feel all that much different from the race for missile technology and the paranoia that followed it in the postwar years.

But even with this theory informing his novels, Pynchon’s books are still deeply anchored in history, so when he draws parallels like that, you can feel the real life parallels in his stories — it resonates because it is possible to draw connections from FBI crackdowns of 60s radicals to the anti drug campaigns of the 80s. It’s also important to point out that there’s an alternate history element to the novel — a breakaway republic in Southern California that becomes the locus of conflict.

Anderson’s movie throws history, real and alternate, out the window. We begin with a terrifying act of political violence undertaken by a group called the French 75, a raid of an immigration detention center near a border — a border wall in the background. This all makes it feel like it is happening now or possibly in the near future.

It’s followed up by a series of more brazen, very 60s and 70s level of political violent acts, done in opposition to “the fascists” that again makes it feel like something very old or very new. And given the political atmosphere we’re in now, you would figure all of these acts would be instant global news, the perpetrators well known to all.

Except we soon find out that, no, these acts happened 16 years before the main action of the film. So given that the technology of the present is displayed in these scenes were are to assume that the prologue took place … in 2010? Really? There was revolutionary violence underway in America during the Obama administration?

It all feels like left wing cosplay to me, and given the crazy rhetoric coming out of the right at this time about organized violence on the left, what idiotic point of view are you embracing, PTA? There were violent attacks on immigration detention centers in 2010, funded by brazen bank robberies by black nationalists?

This lack of historical care is important, because if you’re going to argue that we’re facing a uniquely dangerous moment in history right now, it weakens the case if the stories we tell are about even more violent (and ideologically divisive) confrontations in Americas recent past.

In short, I’m ok with Pynchon giving us a cartoonish exaggeration of American politics because we’re supposed to be in on the joke at every step. “One Battle After Another,” while comic at times, is a far more grim and serious (and extremely violent) piece.

It also happens to be really well made, making it even more dangerous. I’m genuinely concerned about the damage this movie might do, at a time when we do not need something like this.