The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: A Review of One Battle After Another

BY: JOSHUA ST. HILL

Leonardo DiCaprio (2025) in One Battle After Another via Fox News

I love Paul Thomas Anderson. If Boogie Nights flickers on the Roku, or at a friend’s apartment, I’ll stop and stay until the credits roll. But One Battle After Another breaks that spell. 

It has all the signatures of a PTA classic–a fevered cast, immaculate lensing–and still, it evaporates. What we got instead was a hypersexualized revolution, a muddled plot, and a man emasculated while the women meant to define him drifted to the edges. 

I left the theater in disbelief, not at its boldness, but its absence of one. For a director whose chaos often feels composed, One Battle After Another unravels into spectacle without substance.  

The first act introduces the French 75—a band of rebels led by Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) who fights and flirts with equal fire. The opening scene of Revolutionaries includes Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), Deandra (Regina Hall), Laredo (Wood Harris), and his partner, Mae West (Alana Haim), seasoned actors who consistently deliver.

For a moment, Anderson’s camera feels nostalgic, catching revolution in the sweat of its participants. It is the brevity of this nostalgia rooted in the underutilization of these characters that breeds early disappointment.

Deandra’s nurturing nature and Perfidia’s neglectful spirit could’ve provided real dramatic friction, but Anderson rushes past it. Why does Perfidia engage in an affair? What drew her to Bob–and what made that attraction unsustainable? And why doesn’t Bob respect himself enough to lead instead of follow?  The easiest answer would be to look at the film as a warning that the revolutionaries of old are too out of touch with contemporary issues. If that’s the case, then Anderson embodied his own message. 

The film collapses into confusion: Perfidia’s hostage-turned-lover, Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), becomes both a symbol and symptom of the director’s worst instincts. Lockjaw is one of the major antagonists of the film, representing everything the French 75 would be against, so why would his first interaction with Perfidia be sexual? 

It may serve as subtext for how Anderson views the white male gaze: an infatuation with black culture coupled with the fear of black people.  Anderson seems uncertain whether Perfidia’s lust is strategic, hedonistic, or simply masochistic - a confusion the film never resolves. Perfidia and Lockjaw have a child, Willa, whom Bob mistakenly believes is his own. Willa grows up in the ruins of that affair, parenting the father who failed her mother–a haunting metaphor for a film that mistakes consequence for catharsis. 

Anderson floods the film with echoes of contemporary America-- detention camps at the border, secret societies of wealth, and an obsession with moral optics. There is a scene where Lockjaw and his soldiers are closing in on Bob via his sensei Sergio’s community (Benicio Del Toro), mirroring the ICE raids.

The Christmas Adventurers’ Club, the secret society Lockjaw is so desperate to join, resembles that of a Tucker Carlson panel. An elitist regime culling the country for the most malignant minds to amalgamate people of hatred. Their right-winged ideology is obviously a nod to the leaders of our country and their regressions into a controlled society. 

Yet, for all its movement, for all its courageous attempts, nothing truly changes. Bob remains static, lost in a sea of plot holes that do a disservice to DiCaprio’s performance—maybe the point, definitely the failure. To prove the irrelevance of old revolutionaries, Anderson needed Perfidia to stand for something–either loyal or selfish, saint or traitor. Instead, she’s stranded in ambiguity. The film claims rebellion, but its action amounts to a stagnant battle cry. 

One Battle After Another wants to be a sermon on revolution, but ends up a confession of exhaustion. Its characters fight, flirt, and philosophize–but never evolve. For the first time in his career, the battle Paul Thomas Anderson seems to be losing is against his own conviction.