One Battle After Another

There’s a joke about ‘Oscar bait’ which refers to films like THE KING’S SPEECH, a classic example celebrating the challenge of disability – in the context of being one of the richest, most powerful individuals in the world. But I also think ‘Oscar bait’ applies to films like ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. For these, a well-known director finds a story to fit current sensibilities and casts a mixture of popular actors and some celebrities. Usually they go in for intensive mockery of our institutions and leaders, so us little guys feel better about ourselves. Hip and cool, they often don’t stand the test of time as well as the other kind of Oscar bait.

You might guess I’m a ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER sceptic after reading this far, but it is more complicated. As with the other Oscar bait, it is a film with considerable strengths. Unlike the other type, its weaknesses undercut the film’s theme, and compromise its artistic ambition.

The film takes Steven Spielberg’s staple plot feature, the chase, and splits it across two generations, sixteen years apart. I’d almost go so far as to say this film is a satire of Spielberg’s work, hopped up on meth, but only almost. It lands indeterminately between seriousness and satire, so one has to ask why the director made choices that create this problem.

It seems it is intended to look like a 1970s film, with its use of VistaVision. This choice is no accident. The organisation to which Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and Pat Calhoun/Ghetto Pat/Rocketman (Leonardo DiCaprio) a are attached, the French 75s, cries out 1970s radicalism, motivated by Black Power themes. It’s hard not to imagine Pat as a male version of Patti Hearst (hey, Pat/Patti!), a trust-fund lad kidnapped by his own desires. Had it been a period piece, I might have liked it more. But onto this foundation, director Paul Thomas Anderson grafts a contemporary plot showing an America waging war on illegal immigration. This leads to reviewers talking about it being some kind of alternate history, but it is not. Anderson is opportunistically seizing on two eras of radicalism far apart because he owes a debt to the the novel that inspired the film, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. The problem is, from a political perspective – and I consider this the main explanation for why I disregard others’ claims that this film is a master piece – it dodges the question of why the 1962-75 radicalism is so far from 2015-26 radicalism. This punches a massive whole in his theme, which only works in a situation of parents and children.

I also found it rather questionable that ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER acts like a Netflix film. The first act offers a whistlestop tour of the relationships between Perfidia, Captain (later Colonel) Steven Lockjaw and bomb-builder Pat. This sets up the remaining two-thirds of the film, which removes Perfidia from the mix and adds Willa Ferguson (Chase Infiniti), who lives as the daughter of Pat (now known as Bob Ferguson) and Perfidia.

The core part of the film is Lockjaw’s chase of Willa and Bob. These two have become separated, establishing another core Spielberg theme, the separation and reassembly of family. The film thus, although initially about the contest between radicals and the state, turns into a father-daughter relationship drama. The trouble is that while Willa seems a normal young lady, Bob is very much a grotesque version of a middle-aged failure, a hapless stoner who can only disappoint his child. (I’ve yet to see anyone comment on how the secret that Bob keeps from Willa is revealed, while as far as I can tell Willa keeps an equally astonishing secret from Bob. She loves him more than he can possibly know.)

This portrayal of Bob (and as Pat he was no better, just his drug was different) is one of several grotesqueries that push the film into satirical territory. Everyone is a rather cartoonish character, even the popular Sensei Sergio St Carlos (Benicio del Toro), who has taught martial arts to Willa. Many bytes have been spilt on other examples film that I am relatively indifferent to. They do push at the boundaries of ‘suspending disbelief’. Perfidia’s initial humiliation of Lockjaw is a bit disturbing and, frankly, implausible to me.

The one spillage of bytes I do agree with is the depiction of Lockjaw. It’s easy to single out Penn’s performance as the reason, but Anderson could have reined him in. This spectacle is of a piece with other performances in the film. The film’s persistent depiction of the oppressive masters of America as oddballs, to put it kindly, actually undermines the intent of the film to diminish them and undermine their authority. It creates the opportunity for the ‘Bad Apple Hypothesis’ of oppression, as opposed to the correct ‘The System Creates Evil’. A completely normal bureaucrat, with a family life and regular dinner parties and card games with other completely normal people, shown issuing orders for convoys carrying illegal immigrants to concentration camps, would be far more effective at asking us to ponder what’s wrong. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER offers another hackneyed example of repressive weirdos in charge.

While the film looks more kindly on the French 75 than the anonymous militarised police force that Lockjaw represents, I don’t think it at all sympathises with the revolutionaries. Throughout the film, all of the French 75 engage in betrayals. These betrayals are understandable. Revolutionaries have vulnerabilities beyond their control, and the system of oppression’s willingness to exploit these is part of why it is oppressive. Anderson challenges his revolutionaries to question the consequences of their actions to others, and looks to another group as his heroes. But they are not his protagonists. While the foreground is dominated by his caricatures of revolution and oppression, Anderson wants us to learn from what’s going on in the background.

You really have to pay attention to the relationship between the foreground and background to understand this film. The one character in the foreground tying in with the background is St Carlos. For all his eccentricities, he remains the most normal protagonist in the film. HIs dismissal of Bob in St Carlos’ last scene is quite telling of his opinion of the effects of revolution on individuals. St Carlos helped Bob, but that doesn’t constitute agreement with Bob’s ideals. Rather, I suspect, St Carlos sees himself as helping Willa, and more obliquely resisting the oppression that the French 75 takes head-on.

In the end, we are left with a Nietzschean ‘eternal return’ motif to resolve the story. It’s said that this is linked to the title, that every generation has to fight the same battles anew. This would also make sense in the context of St Carlos’ charges being the real heroes of the film. I fear Anderson is right to end this way, but I will continue living in hope that the kind of communal action we see in the riot will eventually prove too much for the System of Oppression, and we can get on with the job of fighting the real enemies, like cancer, with the trillions of dollars we spend on oppression at home and abroad.


© 2026 Paul Brewer