[Battle]

Mjmills

7 min read

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Feb 10, 2026

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I love Oscar season every year. I don’t necessarily watch every movie but the fact that so many good movies get their moment in the sun and so much of the conversation centers on what makes movies good is a lot of fun for me. This year, as happens every year, there is a current frontrunner for much of the primary accolades: Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. There are other movies that seem poised to do well (the most nominated film of all time, Sinners), movies that seem to have been nominated by accident (F1? Really?), and movies that I am excited to just see acknowledged (Weapons having a presence in the Best Supporting Actress category is fantastic), but One Battle After Another seems to be positioned well. As an arthouse movie it still has a significant amount of public support, drawing in regular audiences and film aficionados alike, and it comes from an oft nominated but thus far unawarded filmmaker (i.e. The exact kind of film that gets its flowers on Oscar night). I am not a betting man, but it seems likely that One Battle After Another can do well and be a film we can all celebrate being awarded this year.

Or maybe not, as is also often the case, One Battle After Another has been a source of some consternation from various factions. The movie has been accused of propagandizing leftist ideologies, trafficking in insensitive racial stereotypes, and perhaps even seeding the ground with the kind of rhetoric that led to the death of Charlie Kirk. The movie is certainly not apolitical, its heroes operate on the fringes of society as part of the radical left-wing organization The French 75, and its villains, The Christmas Adventurers Club, are barely concealed Christian nationalist white supremacists operating in the upper echelons of society and politics. But political or not, it is clear that all of this just functions as a framing device for a much more intimate story: a story about a family and their faltering attempts to hold themselves and their little piece of the world together. In case it wasn’t clear, I really enjoyed One Battle After Another and the way it wove together elements of historical left-wing radical groups (a subgenre of terrorism studies I personally find fascinating) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s penchant for compelling character drama. But simply saying, “I enjoyed this movie” isn’t going to cut it in 2026, we need more drama, so let’s dig into what makes this movie so controversial and, to an extent, what that says about our ability to talk about art in this weird, goofy age we are living in.

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Audiences that fall along the right-side of the political spectrum seem to be split on which element warrants the most pearl-clutching. The sanitization of the film’s radical left-wing revolutionary characters or the fact that the government of the United States is secretly influenced (run?) by a cabal of ultra-rich white Christian nationalists. Both would be egregious affronts on their own but, satirical or not, there is no reason to sully Ella Fitzgerald’s rendition of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing with conspiratorial white supremacist meetings in the suburbs. There has also been consternation forwarded by the ever-pragmatic Ben Shapiro about the film’s anti-family lean. A movie that white-washes violent left-wing politics and tacitly accuses the United States of systemic racial animus is one thing, but to disparage the inherent value of family? Perhaps I spoke too soon, this movie deserves to be flayed on those grounds alone.

But, alas, the United States is a pluralistic society and there is more to be said about the critiques of this movie than just what the conservative talking heads would like said. Counter to these angry denunciations, leftists want it known that the movie’s portrayal of radical left-wing revolutionary characters is a cheap framing device and fails to reckon with the actual politics of these ideals. One can play-act at revolution but if they are not willing to actually explore the ideas in full, they are just cheap words. The fact that the movie bothers to include a plot and character beats that distract from the potential to give general audiences a two-hour plus crash course on leftist politics is a huge, wasted opportunity. Further, the character of Perfidia Beverly Hills has elicited a slew of think-pieces and debate around whether she is an icon of black femininity, a caricature of black female sexuality, or another poor attempt at nuance by a woke white man trying to win accolades from his woke bros in the academy. I was wrong, this movie should be critiqued solely on the grounds of its failure to effectively capture the full scope of the human experience.

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Ironically, considering their milquetoast response to much of anything these days, the liberals seem the most taken with One Battle After Another. Boiling down harsh leftist politics to something more digestible while still utilizing the language and iconography of revolution hits just the right notes. Making right-wing politics out to be ridiculous in a way that cannot be effectively legislated against, it is simply too powerful an apparatus, further coddles. As it turns out, this is a comfort movie. Maybe the leftists were right and this is a fantasy movie about a world where the revolution is not only televised, but can be wrapped up in a convenient two-and-a-half-hour span? Neato!

Somehow the thing that seems to be consistently missed in these discussions is the text of the film itself. One Battle After Another is a movie about the trials of trying to raise up the next generation to make things better than those of us who came before have. This thesis is stated explicitly in the denouement by the aforementioned Perfidia Beverly Hills, the character who seems to elicit the most controversy for failing to be what different audiences wanted. It is also, bafflingly, the title of the movie itself: One Battle After Another. None of this is any kind of novel read on the film, it is not subtle and I am not so self-aggrandizing to assume I discovered something others haven’t already noted extensively. The reason I felt compelled to even discuss this, obvious as it may be, is because I find the dialogue around this movie, particularly its politics, to be frustratingly reductive.

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I have read plenty of think-pieces about how the liberal media subtly indoctrinates individuals through insidious means: a character expresses criticism of America’s immigration policies? That’s an anti-conservative message: a plot-point about how raising children is hard? That’s an anti-family message: and so on. Funnily enough, I have also seen trends of easy offense and bad faith assumptions from camps on the political left. A film uses radical left-wing politics as a framing device? That’s a cheap facade: a white writer includes a black female character who makes questionable decisions? That’s racial fetishization. I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise; human beings tend to be tribal and assuming ill-intent on the part of those who oppose you is a defense mechanism. But in the case of art, I think such biases and assumptions of malfeasance are counterproductive. Particularly in the case of art like One Battle After Another that is clearly invested in something that extends beyond our immediate politics.

Being in a family is hard. Being in a society is hard. Trying to be in a family while living in a society of other families, some with ideas about how that society should function that differ, is hard. None of this is new and if One Battle After Another were purely interested in reiterating the inherent hardness of life, I have no doubt it would done very well for itself as a Charles Dickens novel*. But One Battle After Another is not about how hard life is, it is about how we manage to screw one another up, make mistakes, but keep pressing through one battle after another. That is how we break through to a better version of ourselves and the world we live in. To boil this down to a purely political message, one that can be twisted to offend just about anyone depending on preference, is just a crushingly dull way to engage with art.

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*I enjoy the literary output of Charles Dickens and the above crack should not be construed as a disparagement of his body of work.

Another point I have seen made frequently is the idea that a movie that utilizes radical left-wing politics as the frame in which its heroes are drawn qualifies as an endorsement of those politics. The logic being that after the assassination of Charlie Kirk and concerns about increasing left-wing political violence, such framing is inappropriate on its face. To be blunt, this is a stupid take. Not only does it fail to meet the film on its merits but it also reduces art to its most pointless and gutless.

I would make the same argument to leftists who have tried to argue to me that the film utilizes the “aesthetic of resistance” as opposed to truly engaging with radical politics. If you do not recognize that so much of what we qualify as radical politics is performative then buddy, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.