One Battle After Another (2025)

The most hostile critiques I've read of this film mention issues with the production or the people involved.  Regardless of the subject matter of the film, one expects things like this from a film so mainstream with so many big-name actors.  Still, it's vexing when a film is so outwardly political, and the ugliest fact about the production is indeed pretty bad: the clearing of a homeless encampment in Sacramento for the filming. 

This is a "political film" and decidedly not a "film made politically," in Godard's phrase. Its background and its priorities are closer to Christopher Nolan than The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived or Kanehsatake.

I've seen convincing takes that don't suppose that it's trying to be like those films. Those films are not fantastical. One Battle After Another is indulging in a kind of fantasy when it depicts the French 75, its fictional radical-left militant faction. But through Benicio del Toro's character, Sensei Sergio, the film shows us another, more constructive kind of political action.  Michael Sicinski phrased it well:

"While the French 75 were treating the counters of banks like a radical-chic catwalk, somebody was digging a network of tunnels under Los Angeles. Be sand, it's said, not oil. Agreed. But to apply an architectural metaphor, don't be the facade. Be a joist. Dig in, prop it all up, let them forget you're even there." 

It's hard to disagree with this. But the film is almost three hours long, and much of it is not devoted to Sensei Sergio. The film has other values that are at least as important.

The big one is family. The story is about a father trying to find his daughter. Bob is shaken out of his impotent stupor and personally edified by his drive to rescue Willa. Of course, in the end, Willa rescues herself. Bob's purpose is not to be a hero, but to give her someone she can trust and a place she can feel safe. This kind of relationship, as the essence of "family," is where the film finds its happy ending.

The sentimental, homey ending feels like a bit of an awkward turn for a film with this subject matter. Not that what happens between Bob and Willa isn't important, but it feels like a retreat from its radical gestures, or a concession to a wide-release audience, a need to land somewhere everyone will find unobjectionable.

I don't think this film's thematic apparatus is the strongest part of it. But I was still drawn to see it more than once. There is something about how certain scenes feel that I wanted to return to. It's a similar feeling to the gas blowout scene in Anderson's There Will Be Blood. The characters stumble and flail as quickly as they can to get control of the crisis. One Battle After Another has a couple sequences like this, and they manage to keep up the tension for impressively long stretches.

One is the extended segment in which Sean Penn's character, Lockjaw, brings federal forces to raid the town of Baktan Cross, attacking civilians en masse in the streets.  The other is close to the end of the film, when Bob and Willa become involved in a car chase with a white supremacist assassin.  They drive along a hilly section of a classic western desert road; there are several shots in which the camera watches the road while moving with the cars.  It makes the asphalt look like the roiling surface of a stormy sea.  

The feeling that things are starting to get out of control is not entirely unpleasant. These scenes are tense, and we know there are few ways they can turn out good for the characters. But there is some catharsis in seeing society finally fracture where we knew it was barely holding on. In this film, there is a feeling in the air that the world is actually capable of changing, for better or worse.

These are the best scenes in the film, though the scenes with the Christmas Adventurers also stand out for totally different reasons. They struck me as Anderson imitating Kubrick more strictly than he ever had before. You can see in the characters' tone and word choices, in the awkwardly artificial and garishly lit environments, and in the common image of the powerful man behind a desk selling masculinity to men of lesser status. Sean Penn's character is somewhere between Jack Ripper from Dr. Strangelove and an impression of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

I am not entirely in love with the film, but it has parts I was glad to be in the theater for.