Like the devastating impact of climate change, the cold civil war being fought in America heats up incrementally degree by degree. The constant pressure applied to the body politic by the flickering bullshit cascaded down by the White House and smeared like excrement through the relentless algorithms that haunt social media threaten to explode into mass violence – a social climate change of Biblical proportions.
The fire storm that ran wild through the recent news cycle after the murder of Charlie Kirk, through the temporary removal of Jimmy Kimmel, Oregon suing the Trump administration for deploying the National Guard that will use “full force” if protests occur at ICE facilities, Hegseth strutting and railing against “beardos” and “dudes in dresses” at the mass gathering of US generals, Trump as the same meeting, Patton-like in front of a giant flag vowing, “We will vanquish every danger and crush every threat to our freedom for generations to come” had the horrific stench of his third-term ambitions.
There comes a time you can’t bury head in the sand anymore and take a side. That meeting was a show of power, the threat of purges to come in the military within the shadow of former FBI director James Comey’s indictment on two charges.
Cut to the opening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and we’re in the single most prescient film of the last two decades.
Jonny Greenwood’s thunderous score hammers down on a bridge as Perfidia Beverly Hills, the black female leader of the far-left revolutionary group, the French 75, strides towards a Californian detention centre. She’s electrifying as she propels her plan into action, the perfect fuck you antidote to the tail end of George W Bush’s failed Republican experiment.
Make no mistake, this film is a nailed-on masterpiece and deserves to be seen on the grandeur of the largest IMAX screen you can find. The opening forty minutes alone that set up the rise and fall of the French 75 are so propulsive you’ll feel like you’ve been pulling 10Gs. Anderson, like his cinematic hero Stanley Kubrick, has achieved total mastery over the medium as we watch the dreadful fate that befalls Perfidia, her newly born daughter, her lover and bomb maker Ghetto Pat Calhourn and the rest of the French 75.
Their demise comes at the hand of Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, the red-faced, vein-bulging racist who commanded the camp. He’s the bastard, vivisection creation of Generals Ripper and Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove crossed with Colonel Kilgore from Apocalypse Now and the Duke himself, John Wayne.
Lockjaw is humiliated by Perfidia and delves into a complex psychosexual obsession with her that has echoes of Pino and Mookie’s conversation in Do the Right Thing where Pino tries to explain his racism whilst venerating black heroes like Magic Johnson and Eddie Murphy: “they’re black but they’re not really black”, he stutters.
Lockjaw articulates his pent-up contradictions through his rigid walk and his Hitler hairdo, his racist doctrine in constant turmoil with his sexual attraction for black women. Lockjaw swallows it down until he looks fit to burst. A secret that will unleash a hurricane of vengeance 16 years later in Trump’s America against Pat and his now-16-year-old daughter Willa.
Anderson turns Willa into the bruised conscience of the film. 16 years after the firestorm that incinerated her parents’ dream of resistance, she walks through Trump’s America with a gaze that could curdle milk. This is not the archetypal ingénue waiting to be saved by paternal wisdom; she is the inheritor of trauma; a daughter forged in failed revolution and raised on the brittle air of betrayal. Greenwood’s strings coil around her every step like barbed wire, whispering the unbearable truths history would rather bury.
If Perfidia embodied the insurgent spark, Willa becomes the smouldering aftermath; a reminder that oppression mutates but never disappears. The scenes where she confronts Lockjaw crackle with a fury that’s more unsettling than cathartic, because Anderson denies us the tidy victories Hollywood loves to peddle.
Instead, what we get are bruising collisions of ideology and flesh, filmed with such stark precision that you feel complicit just for watching. Willa’s rage is volcanic, yet Anderson keeps the camera tight on her face, leaving us to drown in the silent, suffocating spaces between words.
That’s the genius of One Battle After Another: it’s not just an action film, not just a conspiracy thriller, not just a political allegory, but a mirror dragged across the cracked American psyche.
Every frame is a reminder that history’s wounds don’t close, they fester. Anderson takes the sprawling rot, the racism, the authoritarian theatrics, the corruption dressed as patriotism and compresses it into three hours of cinematic napalm. It sears, it scorches, and when the smoke clears, you’re left with the sickening realization that the “future dystopia” on screen isn’t futuristic at all.
It’s now.
That’s the genius of One Battle After Another: it’s not just an action film, not just a conspiracy thriller, not just a political allegory, but a mirror dragged across the cracked American psyche
In the end, One Battle After Another doesn’t offer comfort or resolution, because Anderson knows there is none not when the same toxins continue to pulse through the bloodstream of the republic.
What it does offer is a furiously funny, unflinching reckoning: a call to acknowledge that the battles we pretend are behind us are still raging in the marrow of the present.
Watching it, you can imagine Kubrick nodding with approval from beyond the grave. Here is the next great American film, stripped of sentiment, carved from rage, and destined to endure as both prophecy and warning but hopeful in the impact of youth to right the wrongs of the previous generation.
And as the credits roll, you can’t help but think of Trump pacing the stage at yet another rally, of DeSantis snarling through culture war soundbites, of tech bros pumping poison into the bloodstream of democracy while cable news sells it all back to us as entertainment. Anderson isn’t predicting the future, he’s filming the present with the clarity most politicians can’t afford to speak.
One Battle After Another lands like a body blow because it knows the real villains are already here, already in charge, and already writing the script for the next act of American decline.
Time to take a side.