One Battle After Another Looks poised to earn a boatload of Oscars after winning four Golden Globe awards. At first glance, it appears to reflect the worldview of the left-wing Trump resistance. It assumes a belief that the United States is sliding toward something resembling Maduro-era Venezuela, with a post-Trump portrayed as comparable to the recently ousted strongman and devolving into an Apartheid system. That is, more or less, the message the film initially conveys. The trailer leaned heavily into this framing and seemed designed to attract audiences who strongly despise MAGA politics. Hollywood will fall over itself to award it many Oscars, some of which may be undeserved because it appears to align with Hollywood's Woke elite. However at it's heart it is a neo western, following the plot of an old gunslinger who settled down but gets pulled back into the violence when it comes for his family.
The film depicts the revolutionary activities of the “French 75,” a terrorist organization forming a violent political resistance against a white-supremacist government allegedly using secret, highly militarized police forces to deport undocumented migrants, an unmistakable parallel to current Trump administration policies. On its face, the film appears to be a straightforward piece of left-wing dystopian propaganda. However, once viewed in full, it becomes clear that the film is far more concerned with how ideological movements manufacture false heroes, rely on deeply flawed narratives, and are ultimately betrayed and destroyed by their own leadership.
The film’s real genius lies in its portrayal of ordinary life continuing under an oppressive oligarchy. People still work, socialize, and pursue normal routines despite the political chaos surrounding them. Characters like Lockjaw, Bob Ferguson, and Perfidia illustrate the moral compromises, personal contradictions, and unintended consequences that arise within both resistance movements and state power.
In what is a masterful performance by Sean Penn, Colonel Lockjaw embodies the paradox of authoritarian order maintained by personal doubt. As a senior enforcer of the regime, he projects discipline, loyalty, and absolute commitment to “security,” yet his actions repeatedly betray an underlying uncertainty about the legitimacy of the system he serves. Lockjaw follows orders with mechanical precision, but he also circumvents protocol when it suits his conscience or self-preservation. His selective mercy and hesitation during critical moments reveal a man who understands that the state’s moral justification is hollow. A man sometimes openly states that he is quite willing to let resistance members go free, even as he continues to uphold a racist regime, Lockjaw is not a true believer. He only cares about the status that comes from being a high ranking member of the regime. He is a bureaucrat of violence who recognizes the rot but lacks the courage or imagination, to exist outside it.
Bob Ferguson and his relationship with the movement that he leaves represents the rot within revolutionary leadership in America today.. Publicly, he styles himself as a principled strategist and moral counterweight to state brutality, but privately he is driven by ego, paranoia, and the need to control narrative rather than achieve justice. Ferguson preaches sacrifice while insulating himself from risk. His greatest contradiction is that while he claims to oppose authoritarianism, he replicates its methods internally, surveillance, coercion, and information control, in his parenting methods while raising his daughter, ultimately proving indistinguishable from the regime he claims to fight.
Perfidia is perhaps the most psychologically complex of the three, embodying the conflict between ideological purity and human attachment. She is deeply committed to the cause and sincerely believes in its stated ideals, yet she repeatedly compromises those ideals in moments of fear, loyalty, or emotional vulnerability. Unlike Ferguson, her betrayals are not calculated power grabs but survival-driven decisions that accumulate moral weight over time. Perfidia oscillates between resistance fighter and self-protective individual, revealing how revolutionary movements often demand an inhuman level of ideological consistency that real people simply cannot maintain. Her arc exposes the cost of absolutism—not just in lives lost, but in the erosion of personal identity and moral clarity.
In happens to be one it's most funny scenes, Multiple times throughout the film Bob is trying to arrange a clandestine pickup over the phone with a contact in the resistance but has forgotten the passcode due to his heavy use of Marijuana. He becomes aghast, cussing out the contact, to which the contact begins to claim he feel unsafe and that his space is being violated. The various intersectional movements in real life have been savagely mocked by MAGA acolytes for their embrace of therapy speak. Bob Loses it here "come on man this is a revolution, we are talking on the phone here like Men! This scene clearly lays bare the ridiculousness of a revolutionary movement that prizes passive victimhood. A biting satire that perfectly illustrates how a resistance movement so allergic to aggressive masculinity manages to revolutionize nothing at all.
While the first portion of the film clearly panders to a radical left audience, it eventually executes a bait-and-switch, growing more nuanced as it progresses. Both government agents and revolutionaries are portrayed as corrupt, incompetent, and self-serving. The military forces lack anything resembling real-world professionalism or tactical discipline. Militarized police are routinely captured, disarmed, and humiliated, while the revolutionaries prove equally inept, frequently betraying one another and getting caught through sheer carelessness. In the action sequences, neither side demonstrates credible shooting, movement, or communication.
Hollywood often depicts tactical forces unrealistically, usually due to poor or nonexistent military advising. However, the film’s final act suggests this incompetence may be intentional rather than accidental. We follow a 16-year-old girl, the daughter of former revolutionaries, who is being hunted by government agents not for anything she has done, but solely because of her parentage. Unlike the adults around her, she moves with tactical competence—using cover and concealment, staying below windows to avoid detection, remaining behind ridgelines to mask her profile, and carefully setting up firing positions to neutralize her pursuers.
This moment reframes the entire film. It suggests that John Paul Anderson is not ignorant of the realities of the military operations he depicts on screen, but deliberately portrays both its protagonists and antagonists as tactically incompetent to make a broader point: that the current political factions driving America’s conflict—on both the left and the right—are largely run by fools. While the film retains a left-leaning bias, it does more than simply criticize right-wing figures. It ultimately holds a mirror up to the radical left itself, exposing its dysfunction, arrogance, and self-destructive tendencies.
The message is most direct in a monologue at the end by DiCaprio's character Bob in which he tells his daughter that his is done with the revolution. He shares letter with his daughter from her mom in which she that she lost her family in a revolution that was ultimately a failure while maintaining hope that her daughter can make a better world.
I found this willingness by the film to critique both right wing and leftist resistance movements a bit refreshing. Despite this harsh critique , the film retains a hope for progressive movement in the next generation as it shows it's one competent character heading off to join a peaceful protest in its closing shots, perhaps a message to the left that violence is not the answer. I found One Battle After Another to be is a biting satire that perfectly illustrates a resistance movement so allergic to aggressive masculinity, it manages to revolutionize nothing at all. For that reason One Battle After the Next deserves to win the Oscar. But the film's true message will be lost on the Academy's Oscar voters.
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