'One Battle After Another' Isn't Up For The Fight | Defector
To paraphrase the late, great Prodigy, there are wars going on outside no one is safe from. They are cultural, political, racial, class-based, and literal. It’s increasingly difficult to shake the feeling that across multiple fronts, I’m on the losing team. It is equally difficult not to be overcome by the anxiety that these battles…
I had to do so much active work during the first 40 minutes of the film—which felt unintentionally farcical to me—to understand what he was telegraphing: people sublimating traumas into trying to push revolutionary movements but disconnected from the principles of it, so they only produce chaos.
Anderson has a practiced talent of pace and structure, and it makes sense so many reviewers have dubbed this an "American epic," because it looks and plays like one, even if it lacks the essential heart and soul of one. It reminds me of the brand of prank/social experiment in which someone sets up a fake gourmet restaurant, where they serve pedestrian takeout carefully organized on fancy dishware to resemble high cuisine.
On the backstretch of 2025, it portends profound losses in the battles that loom on the horizon. Where we need honest self-assessment and bold political imagination, we are still passing off posturing as revolt, empty measures as countermeasures. In that sense, Anderson’s film does capture our moment: To date, we've proven incapable of rising to meet it. We haven’t even found the language or self-awareness to name it. We can’t begin to imagine what collective resistance looks like, or what shape communal support in the face of economic collapse might take.
