One Battle after Another is a 2025 film written, produced and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Vineland. It’s a fusion of action thriller, psychological drama and dark comedy, featuring major stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, along with Regina Hall. It’s also an endorsement of violent leftist revolution in the U.S., right here and now.
The film begins with a violent flashback to the early 2000s: “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (di Caprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills, members of Marxist terrorist group “the French 75,” bomb an immigration center to free detained illegals. The revolutionaries are painted as freedom fighters who fight a wicked System, and the government and cops as the enemy.
Throughout history, Marxists have glorified such violence. For me, revolutionaries like Perfidia evoke the ruthless Red Guards during Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in China. But this character has a nasty sexual twist — she is wildly promiscuous, declaring that her gun is “for fun” and her genitalia are “for fighting.” She sexually humiliates her adversary, Colonel Steven Lockjaw, the commander of the detention facility — abasing and manipulating him. Such conduct would have shocked and baffled her counterparts in the Red Guard.
But Perfidia does share the Red Guards’ lack of normal, human emotional attachments. She callously abandons her infant daughter, and ruthlessly betrays her comrades when it seems pragmatic to do so — textbook Marxist ethics.
The Only Redeemable White Man
After his failure as a freedom fighter, di Caprio (now calling himself “Bob Ferguson”) spends 16 years in hiding in a sanctuary city with Perfidia’s daughter, Willa. By now Bob is a paranoid and hyper-fixated drug and alcohol addict — and the only remotely sympathetic white person in the film. The rest are cartoonish villains. Bob’s life fits perfectly in the Marxist paradigm: those who are in desperate conditions and socially oppressed are considered morally superior. The only way for a white guy to achieve redemption is to become like “Ghetto” Bob.
Those Wicked, Racist Christian Nationalists
The film’s antagonist is Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who epitomizes the profoundly evil forces of the white, Christian nationalist oligarchy that must be overthrown. Penn plays the character as if he’s constantly on the verge of exploding with rage or bursting in tears. Lockjaw lives up to the ugliest stereotypes that Leftists have about Trump voters, displaying hatred, cruelty, misogyny, bigotry, and racism. Ironically, Lockjaw has an irresistable attraction to black women — which becomes key to the plot.
Capturing Perfidia in the middle of her setting up a bomb, Lockjaw forces her to fornicate her way to freedom. For his lawless hunting down and murder of revolutionaries, Lockjaw becomes a rising star in the U.S. military. Soon he attracts the attention of a Christian Nationalist secret society which offers to help him move up the ladder.
The group, however, hears the rumor that Lockjaw might have fathered a child (Willa) with a black woman (Perfidia). If they find Willa, that would end his hopes of rising in the ranks of the Christian nationalists — so Lockjaw hunts Willa down with all the force of the U.S. government at this disposal. This is the picture the filmmakers wish to paint of Trump supporters and Christian conservatives.
The Wild, Free, Life-Affirming Leftist Youths
The life force of the film is the 16-year-old Willa — beautiful, spirited, fearless, quick-minded, and the least dysfunctional character in the story. Along with her non-binary friends, they’re portrayed as a breath of fresh air, standing out from the rest. Halfway through the film, it’s not clear how Willa fits into the overall narrative.
Towards the end, her importance in the storyline surfaces. In her letter to Willa, Perfidia reflects on and critiques her past revolutionary experiences, and anticipates better outcomes from the new generation of freedom fighters. After reading the letter from her mother, Willa sets off to join a protest a few hours away in Oakland, determined to follow her mother’s footsteps as a true revolutionary.
By now the core message of the film becomes explicit: It’s a call to Marxist revolutionaries to forget their previous failures, and focus on raising a new generation of young fighters with renewed vitality, strategies and idealism. In China, Communist leader Mao Zedong constantly harped on the need to indoctrinate the youth. Decades later, Mao’s American counterparts know to follow the old playbook.
The Iron Law of History
Marxist symbols play an essential role in this film. There are multiple scenes where Bob is on the phone trying to remember a code from 16 years ago in order to answer the question, “What time is it?” In the Marxist worldview, time is a pivotal concept. History progresses in one inexorable (Marxist) direction as time goes by, and so do our understanding and morality. In order to be on the right side of history, one must discern the times.
Bob doesn’t. He has been in hiding for 16 years. In the end, he answers the question figuratively by urging Willa to join the resistant movement. “What time is it?” appears as a poignant question, urging the audience to give the correct Marxist answer.
They Want Us Dead or in Prison
Colonel Lockjaw’s torturous and protracted death is not just surrealistic and dramatic, but hammers home a point to the audience: America’s current order, equated with Christian nationalism, must be defeated by any means necessary. Lockjaw as a stand-in for Donald Trump and his supporters is shot, gassed, and cremated — and this is portrayed as poetic justice. “Good” triumphs over evil.
The film is first-rate propaganda, something which Communists have excelled at over the decades. From a pure cinematographic point of view, One Battle After Another is fantastic. The 2-hour and 40-minute film is interjected with dark humor to prevent action fatigue. The action sequences are well choreographed. Riots, skaters, car chases, explosions, and gunplay intersect seamlessly. There are plenty of strong visuals and creative flare during many tense and dramatic moments, with memorable music maintaining and building the intensity. Performances are superb across the board with intense and laser-focused execution and strong chemistry between characters.
Dangerously Effective Agitprop
More often than not, a politically charged film like One Battle after Another is hard to achieve its objective because people go to a movie theatre expecting to be entertained rather than proselytized. In this regard, One Battle after Another stands as a rare exception. It capitalizes on cinema’s unique capacity to captivate and persuade. Successfully employing visual, sound, dialogue, humor and other techniques, it crafts a compelling story appealing to the audience’s sensuality. Provoking fear, terror, guilt and other strong emotions, it imposes on the audience’s beliefs and value system throughout the film, steadily exerting a subtle influence on them without their consciously knowing it.
Political films like this one have made powerful impacts before. One of the first cinematic epics in America, The Birth of a Nation (1915), helped re-launch the Ku Klux Klan as a national force in politics.
Drawn into One Battle After Another’s propulsive story, the audience is unlikely to question the credibility of its narrative. They won’t notice the fact that most characters rest on superficial, shaky and implausible portrayals. Few will likely challenge the characterization of conservative white Christians as raging with hatred toward racial minorities, and addicted to authoritarianism. The dominant atmosphere in the film leaves no room for critical reflection, completely eliding the distinction between political fantasy and sober reality.
The most disconcerting thing about this film, in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk, is that it promotes, romanticizes, and justifies political violence — presenting it as the only way to liberate a tyrannical America. This makes this film particularly dangerous. Even The Atlantic, a Leftist magazine, recently ran a headline, “Left Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise.” This film has the potential to stoke even more.This film now stands at the center of a fierce battle we’re facing right now.
Pick a side.
Chenyuan Snider was raised in Communist China and majored in Chinese language and literature in college. After immigrating to the U.S. and studying at Assemblies of God Theological Seminary and Duke Divinity School, she became a professor at Christian colleges and seminary. She and her husband live in northern California and have two grown children.
