Let me paint you a picture of my journey to go see Paul Thomas Anderson’s–director of quality movies such as There Will Be Blood, Magnolia, and that one about how the age of consent isn’t low enough–hit new movie One Battle After Another. One chilly fall morning, in a fit of melancholy, I decided to remedy my mood by taking a trip to the cinema. After a near-futile attempt at emotional blackmail and good old begging, I finally managed to convince my roommate to brave the HOTT-infested streets and join me in my journey to see PTA’s new Pynchon adaptation. 

We went into the theatre expecting to have a grand old time. Popcorn and soda in hand and a smile on our faces, we sat down. There was nothing that could stop us from having a good time.  Except, of course, the ironic twist—the one that left one of us leaving the theatre with a smile on their face, and the other leaving defeated and entering an existential spiral while muttering “cinema is dead” like it was their mantra. 

It was me… I was the one who left the theater in a significantly worse mood than I was in originally. One Battle After Another was not the movie that I wanted to see. My first viewing left such a bad taste in my mouth that the only cure was to drink heavily and chainsmoke the disappointment away. 

Now you might be thinking, “surely the movie couldn’t have been that bad, this must be an overreaction,” and to some extent you are correct. After subsequent rewatches, One Battle After Another grew on me, albeit in the same way a tumor would grow on you if you drew a smiley face onto it. 

However, that first viewing of Paul Thomas Anderson’s attempt at handling psychosexual politics and “the revolution” felt misguided at best and like a fumbling, cringeworthy mess at worst. 

Featuring a cast consisting of Leonardo Dicaprio, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, and Chase Infiniti, One Battle After Another sets itself in a fictional tumultuous time period within the United States. A period where the police state has way too much power, deportations are at an all-time high, and the country is being run by a bunch of far-right fascists who act like a boys’ club of idiots rather than the expected terrifying new world order. 

Wait, is this play about us? 

The story is an asynchronous chronicle of the birth of a revolutionary group named the French 75 run by Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and the post-revolutionary fallout of the group due to her actions as leader. 

The first act—which serves as a 30-minute prequel to the actual film—consists of some of the most absurdly written lines I’ve ever heard, including Perfida telling Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) to “get it up” (referring to his erection) and Ghetto Pat (Leonardo Dicaprio) screaming about how the only reason he is a revolutionary is because he loves Black women. 

This pseudo-prequel segment is simultaneously one of the best and worst series of scenes I have ever seen in a movie. I was cringing in the theater with my face literally in my hands, and yet, on subsequent rewatches, I actually, for a fleeting moment, respected what it was trying to do. 

Perfidia Beverly Hills bites off more than she can chew when she starts a psychosexual power-induced relationship with Colonel Lockjaw, just moments after declaring war on him and his representation of American tyranny, all while she keeps it hush-hush from her main piece-of-ass Pat. 

The tragedy of Perfidia’s relationship with Lockjaw is that, in a misguided attempt, she is trying to assert her power over a violent political institution through sexual domination. However, in actuality, Lockjaw is always the one who controls the outcome of the relationship, despite being ostensibly submissive to her. 

Lockjaw has full control over his domination during their trysts, and even admits as much when he catches her at gunpoint and forces her to meet him at a hotel by insinuating that if she doesn’t, he’ll destroy her “revolution”. 

Ironically, Lockjaw later attempts to depict Perfidia as a “semen-demon” and “reverse rapist” in an attempt to placate his new Neo-Nazi buddies, while accidentally implying that he was the rapist in the relationship originally.

He embodies the idea of the politically-libidinal conservative who has acquired a level of oppressive power that has become so internally normalized, that the thrill it once brought is now fleeting. Similarly to “erroneous” claims made about Republican National Convention attendees, Lockjaw must subject himself to a loss of control and quite literally get fucked in the ass by his greatest enemy to battle his brewing insecurity about his declining masculinity. 

Wow, this really is one battle after another.

As a result of their love affair, and her and Pat's constant explosives-based foreplay, Perfidia becomes pregnant with the child of one of her two lovers. She decides to keep the child with Pat as the chosen father, knowing that any serious romantic interaction with Lockjaw would imprison her revolutionary spirit. 

A series of unpropitious events follow her child Willa’s (Chase Infiniti) birth that lead to Perfida being caught and subsequently ratting out the entire French 75 to Lockjaw. This sends Pat, now renamed Bob, into a sort of anarchist’s version of witness protection with Willa while Perfidia escapes Lockjaw and does something I wish I could have done myself, by leaving this movie entirely. 

Timeskip shenanigans ensue and now we are in a failed post-revolutionary time much like our own, where Bob and Willa are living a quiet life of paranoid hiding. Willa, now a teenage girl, gets to participate in a semi-normal teenage life, albeit with the presence of her crazy ex-revolutionary hero father, whose new hobbies include smoking himself stupid and drinking and driving. What a cool dude. 

This totally dysfunctional familial bliss quickly ends with the reintroduction of Colonel Lockjaw, who is now interested in joining the Christmas Adventurer’s club, AKA the white American Neo-Nazi boys club. You see, Lockjaw made a grave mistake. By accidentally impregnating his ex-nemesis-slash-revolutionary-girlfriend, he unwittingly became the father of an interracial child. One who he desperately needs to make disappear, alongside Bob, before his new hyper-racist frat bros can discover his past indiscretion. Thus, Lockjaw flexes his proverbial muscles, in the form of US military might, and with a tight shirt and a queer little walk, starts his hunt. 

One Battle After Another brings you for a scenic ride with some of the most gorgeous shots you will ever see, a hauntingly beautiful score composed by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame, and fantastically absurd humor. Yet its beauty, like a cheap perfume, cannot hide the smell of rot that lurks beneath.

The race politics Paul Thomas Anderson tries to tackle within the first act of this film, with his portrayal of Perfidia Beverly Hills specifically, feels like a Freudian slip on his subconscious perception towards Black women. I don’t know PTA’s history enough to assume his creative intentions, or even the extent of his involvement, but the way Perfidia is depicted within the movie feels like a caricature of how right-wing Americans often portray Black people in real life. 

The movie has her embodying the Jezebel archetype, a racialized trope used to hypersexualize and denigrate Black women. The stereotype was used to justify mistreatment and sexual assault during the chattel slavery era, but continues to be used to stigmatize the actions of Black women in modern day. 

This becomes clearer when we see Perfidia portrayed as someone who is hypersexual and obsessed with dominating white men, while also using radical violence and taking needless risks to fulfill her libidinal thrills. It becomes even weirder when she literally abandons her daughter—albeit due to postpartum depression—to pursue her “higher consciousness,” and is fully unfaithful to her revolutionary group in favour of satisfying her own needs. 

It feels as if PTA wants to tell a story about good revolutionaries and bad revolutionaries, but it comes across as if it was your centrist uncle making micro-aggressions towards Black leftists. His portrayal feels like a spit in the face of historic Black revolutionaries like Huey P. Newton, Fred Hampton, and Marsha P. Johnson in a way that could be ameliorated by taking a stand and showing another Black character polar opposite to Perfidia. And the narrative does try to do that with Willa, however the poor girl gets the “woman being subjected to men's violence” treatment for almost the entire movie.   

PTA’s treatment of the other French 75 members, or the other various radical groups shown throughout the movie, is not that much better. 

Comrade Josh (Dan Charitan), is a character that I despise despite his arguably hilarious kafkaesque interactions with Bob. He is yet another caricature, this time of the woke leftist, who complains about Bob “violating his space” and “[causing] noise triggers” when they fight over a needless password. This was straight-up cringe, and I can only see it being funny to 40-year-old conservatives or the aforementioned centrist uncle.  

You could make an argument that the Neo-Nazi man-children that make up the Christmas Adventurers Club were portrayed well, in correlation to how that type of man would realistically act. But at this point, I think you could genuinely make up any absurdist scenario and stick a fascist in it and it would still be believable. 

The only character or group I genuinely felt got a fair treatment was Sensei Sergio (Benecio Del Toro) and his surprisingly well coordinated Latin-American underground railroad operation. However, past his charismatic presence, his only narrative purpose is to serve as Bob’s plot armor, and constantly save his ass whenever he inevitably fails. 

Speaking of Bob, I can’t even make a decision on whether his character was needed or not, because he does nothing the entire movie. I think besides taking a single pot-shot at Lockjaw hours into the film, Bob’s only purpose is to run around hysterically looking for Willa while being either high or drunk. He was fully inconsequential to the film and served his purpose as comic relief, making sure that audiences didn’t notice how dark the narrative's treatment of Willa was getting. 

One Battle After Another is a movie that really wants to tell its audience “yes you will take some losses, but you have to get up and keep fighting if change is what you want.” And I think to some degree, it succeeds. I think to another degree, it fails. 

The movie focuses too much on small interactions between its characters while neglecting its grander political narrative, which becomes more apparent in the third act, where it nearly abandons its revolutionary themes for a more western-style showdown.

Yet, somehow, this is the beauty of One Battle After Another. It is a film that can both be beloved and completely hated, and in spite of that, it will still have people starting hours-long discussions on why they feel justified in the direction they are choosing. 

I feel that the time I’ve spent rewatching and thinking about this movie has made me intimately familiar with One Battle After Another. Which is why, despite my griping, I don’t think I fully hate One Battle After Another. The movie has its massive flaws, but still it tries, and like your centrist uncle who sees how much his words bother you at family dinners, this movie can recognize its parallel to real life, and wants to make a change for the better. 

If there is one thing I could’ve suggested for One Battle After Another to do, it would’ve been to take its own advice in the form of Sensei Sergio’s words: “You’re not breathing. Let’s do it again”.

One Battle After Another is a three-hour masterpiece of shit I love to hate. One Battle After Another thinks Neo-Nazis should send each other to gas chambers. One Battle After Another told Comrade Josh to shoot your neighbour's dog because its bark sounded microaggressive. One Battle After Another has the most pro-drunk driving messaging I’ve ever seen.

If there is one movie I suggest you go watch this year, it’s Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, however if there is one movie I suggest you watch from this year it’s One Battle After Another. 

Now excuse me while I go light a cigarette and keep debating in my mind if I love or hate One Battle After Another.