Film Review by Roger Marheine

December 14, 2025

 

One Battle After Another (Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)

 

One Battle After Another (Battle) has received glowing accolades from mainstream critics. Justin Chiang of The New Yorker, claimed, Battle is “as great an American movie as I’ve seen this year, doesn’t simply meet the moment; with extraordinary tenderness, fury and imagination, it forges a moment all its own, and insists that better ones could still lie ahead.” Actress Jennifer Lawrence declared, “It’s the best movie I have ever seen.” Manohla Dargis of the New York Times, identifies a scene in which the very pregnant black terrorist, Perfidia Beverly Hills fires a machine gun, as “a cry from the heart that’s also a crystalizing image of resistance. It’s one for the ages, wild and thrilling, and every bit as American as the red, white and blue.” Even British critic Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian praised Battle as an image of the “Anderson-Pynchonian idea of counterculture and counter-revolution.” As Hollywood award season approaches, Battle is on many lists.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s surface aesthetic dazzles with audacious names, convoluted plotting, hectic pacing, and cinematic grandeur. It is a thrill ride with spills and chills, but like a roller coaster, that jolts and pushes, it circles an empty space, an ideological vacuum. The film mocks legitimate political inquiry and portrays caricatures within a carnivalesque plot line.

Overview

Anderson’s Battle portrays a parody of political resistance. The film follows several lines of plot and theme. First, a long opening section depicts pseudo left-leaning 1960s terrorists, dominated by a highly sexualized black woman, Perfidia Beverly Hills (played by Teyana Taylor). Second comes the aftermath in which members become police informants (including Perfidia) or degenerate loners like Bob (Leonardo de Caprio) who succumb to drugs and alcohol. Third, two prongs of fascism are depicted: a ruthless military colonel, (played by a vitriolic Sean Penn) who conducts ICE-like raids; and a chillingly elite group, called the Christmas Adventurers who represent Deep State power obsessed with racial purity. Fourth, the most progressive and insightful section depicts a vibrant immigrant resistance organization and its resourceful leader, Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro). Finally, a family drama ensues in which Bob’s daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti) seeks her own clarity and activism. There are assorted other thugs and strange groups—a hitman bounty hunter and a collection of nuns who practice little religion but grow pot for their financial well-being. No wonder the film is too damn long. Big budgets lead to cluttered movie making. This is not an ensemble work, like for example those of Robert Altman at his best.

So, what’s the love for this movie all about?

What if the whole thing was one big joke? Anderson’s career has been shaped by his former mentor, David Foster Wallace, whose novel Infinite Jest (1996) epitomizes the cynical worldview—life is a jest, a joke. Anderson’s other major influence is Thomas Pynchon, the champion of historical absurdities. Supposedly, Anderson’s film is influenced by the Pynchon novel, Vineland (1990). Clusters of exotica dominate Battle’s plot because ultimately for Anderson there is no larger meaning. Anderson’s previous films include There Will Be Blood (2007), a bastardized concoction vaguely based on an excellent 1927 novel, Oil, by Upton Sinclair.

Battle opens with an overly long series of absurd caricatures in a militant group, “French 75” (both a French gun and an alcoholic drink). The group is intoxicated with its own bravado. Upon first viewing, it would seem that Anderson is teasing us with characters who are psycho-sexual and militant, but politically shallow. These scenes recall the Weather Underground and other 1960s/70s militant groups who lacked any base in the working class. Anderson’s characters merely disrupt. They are no more than pranksters and gangsters. They lack any intention of igniting a single spark to light the prairie fire. Compare this movie to the infinitely more sophisticated depiction of terrorists who are confused political players: The Bader Meinhof Complex (Dir. Uli Edel, 2008).

Since the 1980s, a major cultural movement — Post- Modernism — has discarded any theoretical understanding of our world and a possible resistance to capitalism—especially Marxism. There is a rejection of any notion of progress in human affairs. Life is one battle after another. However, this isn’t the class struggle, but rather the Myth of Sisyphus, the lone straggler endlessly pushing his rock up a hill.

This worldview sees only endless trees but rejects the idea there might be a forest. It rejects any historical understanding that might lead to insight into what might be done today. It is a theory of despair and hopelessness. This movement goes by different names, but all tend to share the assumptions of Post-Modernism. [1] For Post-Modernism, there are no grand theories, only endless details, a kaleidoscope of carnivalesque caricatures. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Battle is such a film.

For Marxists, the present world and past history must be examined systematically, to ascertain the errors and omissions of former struggles, to know the primary from the secondary, to ascertain that some truths lead more significantly to a vital theoretical grasp of capitalism’s grip on our lives—our material existence and our psyches. Battle is a potpourri, in which no genuine analysis is to be found because Anderson shuns such a task.

What does one do when there’s nothing that can be done? For the bourgeois liberal artist, there may be an honest attempt at social scrutiny, but the suspicion is that nothing can be done, no large problems can be solved. Small acts of courage to save one’s family are all that humans can muster. In the penultimate scene, Bob reconnects with his daughter Willa who has already saved herself.

Anderson’s quirkiness per se (the silly names, comic cell phone scenes and forgotten passwords) is not the issue. To be fair, he does not want to degenerate into aesthetic preoccupations of elaborate puffy films like Avatar and over 20 Star Wars movies, let alone the current obsessions with fantasy and other comic book trivia. Whether it’s high art fantasy of The Hobbit or low brow comics like Marvel, it fails to deepen any grasp of our current era. To his credit, Anderson tries not to lower himself to fantasy. He only partially succeeds.

A Few Strong Moments: What Might Have Been

On a positive note, Anderson, does show faces of fascism. Sean Penn’s obsessive Colonel Lockjaw leads his thugs on chilling personal vendettas tinged with racism not that different from our ICE raids today. The Deep State Christmas Adventurers pursue ethnic cleansing and racial purification, and are quite willing to exterminate one of their own, when he breaks from their racist agenda. Anderson portrays these horrendous creatures appropriately—the crude sadism of Lockjaw and the sophisticated sadism of wealthy elites who hire assassins to do their deeds.

That evil he can portray, but he cannot envision the antidote to that evil.

What Anderson can only partially imagine is a grounded activism, the concerted opposition to racial injustice and capitalism itself. A few activists are off camera, voices on phones with minimal screen time.

One striking exception is an all too brief section which depicts an underground movement led by Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro); the film’s only serious portrayal of resistance. Sergio tells Bob that he is running a Harriet Tubman-like, underground operation to help immigrants escape immigration authorities. Sergio and his group help Bob escape. Sergio, a martial arts instructor, is always composed: “Don’t go dark on me now,” he tells Bob. He is the calm organizer who has a broad team of activists, prepared for all contingencies. Sergio’s reality could be a wonderful plot line and a compelling set of characters for Anderson to develop. However, he can’t or won’t pursue their depth, their heroism, their compelling resistance.

In sharp contrast, consider great films like John Sayles’s Matewan (1987) and Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses (2000), both of which depict genuine working class resistance and fully developed characters. When comparing the tone of Anderson’s Battle with the South Korean film, Parasite, (Dir. By Bong Joon Ho, 2019), Parasite’s enthralling depiction of class hatred makes Battle seem like a frivolous confection.

Anderson references Gillo Pontecorvo’s film, Battle of Algiers (1966). The stoned-out Bob watches it, especially during his most helpless phase. Are we to understand that Bob is caught in some past? Is the classic film of Algerian resistance against French imperialism now merely a part of art history? Is it some kind of symbol? Why is it in Anderson’s movie? Is he comparing his work with the Pontecorvo masterpiece? It would seem a presumptuous comparison.

Conclusion

What Anderson is unable or unwilling to do is depict a meaningful collective resistance to racist injustice, to fascism, to capitalism. The film expresses the cloistered intellect of the liberal imagination which posits frivolity and fury instead of class struggle. In the face of the abyss, a little lightness of being is all that he can muster.

The film ends with Bob’s daughter, Willa, going off to a demonstration three and a half hours away by car. What’s strange is that Willa has studied martial arts with Sergio St. Carlos, whose political activism is deeply engaged in immigrant struggles. Why wouldn’t she join his efforts? Apparently, Anderson doesn’t think of it. In a final cavalier moment, Bob tells Willa “Be careful.” As she is going out the door, she answers, “I won’t.” Anderson degrades serious activism. If anything, serious activists are very careful. The exchange cheapens the moment.

We are to understand that Willa is the next generation who must build a movement upon the ashes of the old. Because Anderson is not really interested in a clarification of the old movements, their victories and defeats, he can only offer up simplistic caricatures and a parody of genuine political activism. In the absence of a nuanced political viewpoint, we witness only a flamboyant style–spectacle to distract us from substance and caricatures in the carnival.

1. For a lucid account, see Terry Eagleton’s The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996).

 

–Roger Marheine taught English at Pasadena City College and is now retired. His interests include war culture and resistance literature.