One Battle After Another (2025)

As is customary in these situations, I'll start by stating the obvious: One Battle After Another is a movie with Christmas-related elements, but it's not something I'd describe as a Christmas movie. The elements in question are interesting, unusual, and initially confusing, as is the movie itself. To a degree, I think that's intentional - One Battle After Another exists in a world similar to ours but more exaggerated, one where both the right and left sides of the political spectrum are sort of caricatures of their real-life counterparts, as imagined by their opponents. Or at least I think that's what Paul Thomas Anderson intended while writing and directing the film, only reality sort of intervened in ways that leave you feeling as though his movie wasn't just set in a different universe but was imported from one, as well.

The revolutionaries of the film are essentially the lawless renegades described by Fox News when they warn their viewers about armed Antifa soldiers or organized, paid activists. Though, to PTA's credit, even if this fictional world he understands these are still the good guys, even if the majority of those we see are deeply flawed people. The revolutionaries are out of touch and absolutely dangerous, but there's no mistaking they're fighting for freedom and everything America is supposed to stand for. The movie's crystal clear about who's on the right side of history, even when they're transformed into cartoon versions of themselves loosely based on political organizations and tactics that died out more than fifty years ago.

I think PTA approached their enemies the same way, depicting conservatives as not just reactionaries but as an extremist cabal of white supremacists consisting of wealthy businessmen, politicians, military leaders, and law enforcement. I think this was meant to be a fascist portrait of the right as described by leftists on Bluesky, a version of the police who routinely escalate conflicts with protesters to justify the use of force, who are willing to murder children for personal or political gain, who operate concentration camps, who....

Okay, here's where the delay in production time becomes an issue for the movie. You've got to remember this movie was being filmed in 2024, while Biden was still president. Hell, this started filming when it was plausible that Biden would be serving a second term when it was released. In that world, PTA's depiction of an extremist authoritarian state waging war against immigrants would have seemed to most viewers like an exaggeration (though, again, to his credit, I think the movie manages to make it clear that the underlying reality of unjust immigration practices is very realistic). But [spoiler alert] Biden didn't win the 2024 election, nor did Harris. And in the intervening time between Trump retaking office and One Battle After Another being released, something became clear that sort of upended the premise of the movie, or at least the setting.

The leftists on Bluesky had been right all along. The right actually did the things we said they'd do, their leaders were working together the way we said they were, and ideologies of racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia actually ran to their core. I'm fairly certain that PTA wrote The Christmas Adventurers Club as a sort of quasi-parody of reality, but now... it reads like a relatively realistic portrayal of those in power.

So you're left with a movie existing in a reality where the bad guys are mostly realistic, while the good guys are sort of anachronistic distortions of a political coalition resembling cartoonish anarchists. That leaves you a bit thrown off by the cinematic language of the film, even if the message still comes through. This is one of those cases where it's a very good thing the movie wasn't trying to be subtle, or it would have come across as promoting the worst kind of centrism at the worst time in modern history to be promoting that position.

Fortunately, the movie isn't centrist. The left is from a weird, alternate reality version of reality where the ideology and methods of groups like The Black Panthers endured through the present day, a fact which was used to justify a kind of martial, authoritarian response... basically identical to the one being imposed on the population right now without that justification. But even in the world of the film, the movie makes it clear the activists are fighting just battles in the interest of equality and freedom against an oppressive, white supremacist police state.

I guess that's the why movie still mostly works? Oh, right - I probably should have led with that. I thought One Battle After Another was pretty good, despite that jarring disconnect with reality (and the even more jarring disconnect with unreality).

It helps that the movie is ultimately a story of a generational struggle. The titular "one battle after another" is referencing the passing of a torch from one generation of progressive activists to the next. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a militant revolutionary from the 1960's (okay, actually the 2000's, but he's modeled on... I covered this in the opening twenty-six paragraphs) named... er... his character has a lot of names, so let's go with "Pat" for purposes of the review. He's an aging single father looking after Willa (played by the movie's MVP, Chase Infiniti), the daughter of Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). Only he's not actually the biological father: that would be the movie's primary antagonist, Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). The cast also includes Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, and host of other impressive actors, most of whom play characters who could probably have been cut.

That brings us to one of the movie's more tangible issues: it's too long. More accurately, it's got too many arbitrary twists and complications that don't serve much narrative purpose beyond extending the runtime. Things like del Toro's Sergio sending Pat a different route with a group of teens for no obvious reason, resulting in Pat being arrested in the middle of a riot, necessitating Sergio breaking him out of custody... instead of just bringing him through the tunnel he was using himself. All that padded the runtime, but didn't change much.

There's an even more egregious example at the very end, where a character is essentially executed twice by the same organization for the same reason. Like, a character is killed, is functionally resurrected, then is killed again without interacting with any of the main characters in the intervening time or influencing the plot in any way. It's weird!

But weird doesn't necessarily equate to bad. The sequences in question were interesting to watch unfold, and I think cases could be made for them individually. Pat's extended adventure does help establish his commitment to seeing this through, the ending bit could be read as commentary on the antagonist's inability to perceive how little value he has to his partners, and so on. The issue is that the movie just keeps throwing these at the viewer, rather than choosing a couple darlings to spare and disappearing the rest. There's no single, specific scene I think needed to be cut, but this movie didn't have to be two hours and forty-five minutes, either.

Let's talk Christmas. Or more accurately, let's talk about the Christmas Adventurers Club, a secret society of white supremacists. Lockjaw's motivation through the film is joining the organization, a prospect placed in jeopardy by the existence of Willa, as the club doesn't admit members who have mixed-race children. In addition to the name, the club opens and closes its business with the chant, "All hail Saint Nick." The movie also plays a version of "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" while a member descends into one of the club's bases, as well as "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" during the end credits. That's it for holiday content.

Again, I'm not arguing this is a Christmas movie.

But the use of a Christmas-themed club as the antagonists - specifically racist antagonists - is interesting. It's also a bit confusing. The movie never explains the group's name, nor does it have to - it's fine to leave this as a weird detail. But seeing as this site exists to overanalyze the shit out of everything Christmas, let's get to it.

One possible connection may be an implied "white Christmas" joke, though if so the movie declines to say it outright. It also could tie back to America's complex history with the holiday. Prior to the Civil War, the South embraced Christmas, in contrast to New England mainly celebrating Thanksgiving instead (the substantial introduction to Thomas Ruys Smith's excellent anthology, Christmas Past, goes into this, if you're curious). During the war, the North sort of reclaimed the holiday (which was of course already popular in New York and elsewhere) in part due to Thomas Nast's portrayals of Santa Claus supporting the Union. Perhaps this is connected to the decision to depict the Club as praising Saint Nick rather than Santa Claus.

If you want to dig a little deeper, Saint Nicholas has ties to genocide, both in the early days of the church and more recently of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It's unlikely that Paul Thomas Anderson was directly familiar with Baum's obscure endorsement of genocide, but the parallels between Baum's racism and the ideology of The Christmas Adventurers Club at least makes for a notable coincidence.

It's also possible - perhaps likely - that PTA was simply playing off of the supposed "war on Christmas" popularized by Fox News. The organization's name is juvenile, suggesting their inspiration may not contain any depth at all. These are, after all, men with the minds of spoiled children using their vast resources to play with the lives of others. Perhaps the connection is no more complicated than that.

Again, it doesn't really matter. The holiday connection doesn't make the movie any better or worse, though it does justify its discussion here (though I'm not sure I'd have bothered writing it up, if it hadn't been for the Best Picture nomination). And it makes for an interesting footnote in a bizarre and somewhat awkward movie.

Which, as a reminder, I liked quite a bit. Some of the casting feels a bit silly (DiCaprio's fine, but there are thousands of actors who could have played the part as well or better), but damned if this wasn't a star making role for Chase Infiniti. Likewise, the character of Perfidia Beverly Hills was controversial, but I hope we can all agree that Taylor was fantastic in the part. I also liked Regina Hall and Benicio del Toro.

The politics may be anachronistic in ways that weren't intended (in addition to being anachronistic in other ways that clearly were), but the movie ultimately gets the important part right. And more than that, it does so while telling a touching story of a father and daughter coming to terms with each other as one generation passes a torch to the next. The movie offers some hope, if not for victory than at least that our children might learn from our mistakes and continue the ongoing struggle for justice and equality better than we did.

I still don't think it deserves Best Picture, however.