Why This Film Fuels Political Hate

One Battle After Another glamorizes political violence and vilifies conservatives, twisting empathy into a weapon that deepens America’s divide.

This film review is a guest post by Joseph Holmes.

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Film critics and filmmakers alike have been going crazy for One Battle After Another. Collider called it “a generation-defining masterpiece”. Rolling Stone called it “an act of resistance, and a stone-cold masterpiece”. Bloomberg says it’s a “Spectacular Tour De Force” that’s “so good it’s almost hard to believe”. Empire calls it a “stone-cold instant classic”. RogerEbert.com calls it “breathtaking” and “immediately essential”. Indie Wire dubbed it, “one of the defining blockbusters of the 21st century” and “an absolutely generational home run”. Legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg praised it as “really incredible” and Martin Scorsese championed it as “fascinating and extraordinarily made.”

Along with praising the film as a film, these voices have been emphasizing how “timely” and “relevant” the film is, unafraid to tackle head-on our political moment. Spielberg told director Paul Thomas Anderson that what he portrayed in the movie has “become increasingly more relevant than perhaps even when you finished the screenplay and assembled your cast and crew and began production”.

Unfortunately, the film is primarily timely in a negative sense. One Battle After Another reflects and encourages the worst instincts of our political moment, distorting and misrepresenting our political enemies in a way that justifies political violence. It is, in short, an “anti-empathy” manifesto that’s become all too common in Hollywood. But rarely as baldly as this.

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood), One Battle After Another follows Bob Furgeson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a washed-up revolutionary who lives in a state of stoned paranoia, surviving off-grid with his spirited and self-reliant daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti, in her acting debut). When his evil nemesis Col. J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) resurfaces and Willa goes missing, the former radical scrambles to find her with the help of a resistance fighter, Sensi Sergio (Benicio del Toro), as both father and daughter battle the consequences of their pasts.

The film works very well as a paranoid political thriller in the vein of Tom Clancy adaptations like Clear and Present Danger, superhero movies like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and blockbuster action films like the Mission Impossible franchise. Paul Thomas Anderson brings an impressive blend of humor, pacing, and musical sensibility to the material that makes the nearly 3-hour runtime feel like 90 minutes. (It’s therefore no surprise that he apparently always wanted to direct a Mission: Impossible film.)

But the film also wants to be more than that. It frequently drops in references to modern-day politics that make it clear that the heroes are stand-ins for modern-day left-wing political terrorists (the “French 75”) and villains for MAGA government spooks. The French 75 attack and “liberate” a border patrol holding site for illegal immigrants. They bomb government buildings for passing anti-abortion laws. They decry capitalism and call America fascist and imperialist and demand “Free borders, free bodies, and freedom from f–ing fear”. Sensi Sergio smuggles illegal immigrants into the country in what he calls a modern “underground railroad”. The villains are all open white supremacists who oppose such measures because they want to keep America racially pure.

From an artistic standpoint, I can’t say that this adds a great deal of depth to the film. The story never delves deeply into these ideas or themes in a way that is substantial. But from a moral standpoint, it’s outright indefensible. I’ve written for a long time about how spectacularly harmful it is that Hollywood (and many faith-based films) insist on constantly portraying our modern world as a dystopian tyranny and valorizing those who fight back with violence. Whether that’s the plot of nearly every MCU movie, the “Eat the Rich” genre of films like Glass Onion and Blink Twice, or the constant comparisons between the empire and modern America in the discourse around Andor.

Not only are we a) by no reasonable measure living under a fascist regime, but b) all the data we have says that non-violent political action is much more effective at promoting the political change we want and yet c) the constant messaging–by Hollywood and elsewhere–that says the opposite is causing a growing embracing of political violence in America–particularly on the left side–both in polls and in actual political violence (including but not limited to Charlie Kirk’s assassination).

Yet, the problems with One Battle After Another run deeper than that. They cut to the heart of the humanizing and redemptive power of film and twist it: the film corrupts our empathy. The legendary film critic Roger Ebert once said