Dec 09, 2025
Oscar watchers are buzzing like green-bottle flies around a clump of satirical mischief called “One Battle After Another,” directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and co-starring Leonardo DiCaprio, as a barely recognizable besotted leftie, and an impressively pumped Sean Penn.
In its stripped-down essence, the film stages a collision between updated ’60s–’70s left-wing militants, complete with Black Power echoes, and a vague lineup of MAGA-flavored right-wing reprobates. Hovering in the background is a wink-and-nod persecution of undocumented Spanish-speaking immigrants. Add a camo-clad bigot (Penn) boasting of his taste for “black meat,” a Vietnam-era Angela Davis stand-in denouncing the pigs, and DiCaprio’s aging radical — later seen repudiating his own mixed-race daughter for supposed trans sympathies — and you have the heart of Anderson’s parable, if “heart” is the right word.
I disliked the film, not because it is ineptly acted or shabbily directed—it is neither. Once you accept Anderson’s stylized parameters, he handles the confrontations, the car chases, and the slap-in-the-face racism with real confidence. I objected to the film because its timing makes its invented dystopia feel embarrassingly timid compared to the nightmare we’re living through.
A Satire Without a Tyrant
Political allegories endure because they give tyranny a face. Orwell gave us Big Brother, the distilled icon of surveillance. Huxley offered Mustapha Mond, the velvet-gloved despot of engineered happiness. Animal Farm has Napoleon, the revolutionary who becomes the monster he overthrew. Even Lord of the Flies gives us Jack, the boy who personifies the instinct toward domination.
“One Battle After Another” offers no such figure. Though the film gestures toward a Trump-like establishment, it refuses to personify that power—no supreme leader, no ideological architect, no embodiment of the authoritarian impulse it supposedly mocks. Instead, we get scattered bureaucrats, smirking media caricatures, and Penn’s clenched-jaw Colonel Lockjaw, an enforcer without an emperor.
A satire without a target is a satire without consequence. It is as if Animal Farm tiptoed around Stalin, or 1984 removed Big Brother’s looming visage and replaced him with a rumor.
The filmmakers may think this vagueness sophisticated, a way of capturing “authoritarian drift” without naming names. But the effect is the opposite: a world unanchored, unserious, and oddly tranquil despite the mayhem on screen.
Watching Fiction While Reality Outpaces It
What amplifies the film’s thinness is the world into which it is released. When people step out of the theater today, they enter a political environment more volatile and authoritarian than anything the film even attempts to conjure.
We inhabit a moment where political violence is openly theorized, bureaucracies face threatened purges, loyalist legal theories promise presidential impunity, and a twice-elected, twice-impeached figure openly speaks the language of retribution.
Against this reality, Anderson’s dystopia feels like a theme-park diorama, stylized menace, safely curated. Its radicals rail at a regime that seems far less dangerous than the one Americans scroll past in their morning headlines.
This mismatch drains the film of urgency, at least for me. A political satire should sharpen contemporary fears or distill them into metaphor. Anderson’s does neither. It instead presents a lukewarm tyranny, a dictatorship without a dictator, a system without a center.
It feels, in the end, like a cautious cop-out.
The Real World Makes the Film Look Small
One cannot help comparing the film’s cartoonish conspirators to the actual political landscape, where the survival of the right-wing hinges on suppressing evidence of a monumental sex scandal involving its titular leader, and where military commanders struggle to justify the cold-blooded killing of two shipwreck survivors during an undeclared pretend-war. Anderson would have had to be clairvoyant to anticipate these storylines, and he is nothing of the kind.
His film seems conceived in some pre-Trump temperate zone, before grievance culture metastasized into a movement, before the Supreme Court began twisting constitutional restraints into instruments of executive dominance. What the film lacks is exactly what our reality has in abundance: an overbearing, malevolent figure whose ambitions bend institutions to his will.
Instead, we get the “White Christmas Group,” a clutch of white bigots vaguely committed to keeping power in the hands of an insulated minority. They are a Heritage Foundation fever dream without a charismatic anchor.
The real-life threat, the genuine authoritarian phenomenon, is far more focused, far more dangerous, and possessed of a single face voters know all too well.
Where the Film Truly Misfires: No Antidote, No Counterforce
Another absence troubled me as the action unfolded: the film offers no antidote to its own nihilism. Its title, “One Battle After Another,” implies a relentless churn of ideological combat without purpose or progress, as if history is merely a repeating scuffle, a blood feud with new masks and slogans.
But that is not our history. Reality provides its own antidotes: Lincoln, the abolitionists, the anti-McCarthy voices, the civil rights movement, the “No Kings” multitude. For every monster, there has been a counterforce.
Anderson’s film recognizes only the monsters.
His world contains no possibility of redemption, no counterweight to the grinding horrors, no character whose courage or decency complicates the film’s cynicism. The film denies its own audience the hope that reality, at critical moments, has actually delivered.
Which is why, when I left the theater, I felt not enlightened but irritated, aware that the real world outside holds deeper dangers, greater stakes, and sharper moral choices than the safely stylized battles I had just watched.
And for that reason, however artfully the film is crafted, I do not like it enough to reward it. Not now. Not in this moment. Not when caution masquerades as boldness and the true authoritarian drama is unfolding, unfiltered, on the national stage.
If you want a film with true contemporary relevance, check out “Nuremberg,” with Russell Crowe playing Hermann Göring so seductively that he almost beguiles us. That’s a proper warning for this age.