By now most of you have seen One Battle After Another. I saw it three times theatrically because I really liked it and Paul Thomas Anderson might be my favourite American filmmaker working today (aside from Scorsese). Maturity is realizing that Tarantino was for your boyhood and PTA is for your adulthood. (As a brief side note here: there is a passage in my new novel that discusses both filmmakers that goes into a bit more detail at a greater length about my thoughts about them. DO NOT LOVE THE WORLD is available this Friday, October 31st, 2025. I hope you read it and enjoy).
Anyway, all that being said: One Battle After Another is not my favourite thing he’s ever done; in fact, it’s not even in my top 5 of all his work. But I still wanted to talk about it because it’s been making the rounds lately. There’s no reason to: I don’t really write on here anymore or use this website the way I originally used to, partly because it’s going down next year and there’s no point in keeping it active in the interim. And also because I want to step away from talking about the work of others — in a way I feel like it overshadows my own work as an artist. This is why critics of anything are usually losers because they aren’t the actual ones standing in the arena, as the Roosevelt quote goes. In all honesty, as I get older I am becoming less interested in what other people are doing and I think artists should be narcissistic and have their heads further and further up their own assholes, obsessed with their own work. They should be so obsessed with their own work they sometimes miss entire years of culture. It should be about production to a real artist, not consumption. They have to be so immersed in themselves they lose track of time and life outside of their ideas. This is when I am personally at my best when it comes to writing. However, despite everything I just said, there is stuff surrounding this movie conversationally that has sort of gotten stuck in the nest of my brain I wanted to talk about a little bit.
First off, something I have found annoying is that there has been this slight push to make this movie more political than it really is when that could not be more wrong. The truth is (in my view), this movie is simply Paul Thomas Anderson having fun. To me, the idea that this is some big revolutionary statement is a bit absurd to me. And even funnier: people like Bret Easton Ellis have taken the bait, offering up their predictably retarded takes about how the movie is too leftist or progressive. It’s like these people have run out of things to say so they’re just going with whatever they think that media version of themselves should say. The people praising this movie as a masterpiece when it’s not even two months old are not quite correct, and the people attacking it are also in the wrong.
This movie doesn’t really show us anything controversial in terms of politics, to be honest with you it felt like a Disney version of a movie about revolutionaries. If there was a cartoon about revolutionaries or something, they would be like Leo’s character. I mean, he literally feels like he’s right out of a comic strip or something. It’s nothing to be offended by or praise as genius. The revolutionaries depicted in the film are actually quite incompetent, for all their efforts at the beginning of the film they don’t really accomplish much in the end, and the movie isn’t saying much politically speaking. There is no grand statement, especially when you consider the fact that it was put out there by one of the world’s biggest movie studios ever. It makes zero sense that a movie studio would put out a revolutionary film as that is contradictory to their goals, which is to make more money. I know that may sound like someone militant nitpicking, but it’s pretty much true and how capitalism works. It is against their best interests to make something truly revolutionary. The idea that a movie studio would put something out that would undermine their existence as a company is ridiculous and would not really happen, that’s partly why the revolutionaries in this movie feel like watered down versions of revolutionaries (the other reason is that PTA based them on real life people who were also similarly incompetent).
I don’t want to come across as entirely negative here though, because as I began saying: the movie is pretty damn good nevertheless and I did see it in theatres three times. I liked it a lot. But that’s my main point here: there is nothing exciting politically here that people should have boners over, it’s a good movie and that’s it. It doesn’t have to be more than that. I felt that PTA was not really concerned with trying to sway minds or anything of the sort, his main interest was about aesthetics. And rightfully so: it’s a fucking movie. It’s not a manifesto, it’s just good entertainment. On this note, however, in contrast the movie released this year I felt that got fairly close to being a revolutionary statement (but still ultimately wasn’t and I wouldn’t consider it a masterpiece either) was Eddington. I’m not a big Ari Aster fan and have spoken negatively about him in the past (you can click around and find it, I’m too lazy to link), but in Eddington he flirts with a controversial topic: the idea that we as a society care more about technology than humanity. In Eddington a homeless guy a whole town of people no one cares about is inevitably shot and killed by a person in power, and the town cares more about the progress of the town and looking ahead than anything else. It’s a tragedy, it’s arguably the most important aspect of the film in my opinion, and yet it’s treated so brusquely. And that’s what makes it striking to me. This is pretty much what is happening in today’s world, and I do wish Aster had explored this a bit further, but it felt like he went just shy of going for the jugular. So anyway, when it comes to “political” or “current” films, I would have to say that Eddington got the closest to anything else I’ve seen all year. I want more of that in mainstream movies that are widely released. OBAA felt like a really good director trying to make a really good blockbuster in his unique way, but nothing that cerebral or timely or prescient or anything. People have made the case that Charlie Kirk’s assassination makes the film somehow more relevant than it really is, but again, to me it’s just a good director having fun. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
The other thing I wanted to talk about regarding this film is how excited I have seen people get about it. For a lot of people it seems like it’s their first time seeing a PTA movie in an actual theatre, and I found this reaction in particular the most interesting. The youth excitement surrounding this movie was cool to me because it shows there is still a demand for talented directors and auteurs to make unique stuff we haven’t seen before, people still want to see stuff in theatres, but it’s a rarity these days. As I said, this wasn’t even in the top 5 of my favourites by PTA (I mean, is he really ever gonna top There Will Be Blood?), but I was happy for people who loved this and were talking about it like it was a new masterpiece. To me I get the vibe that people so very badly want something exciting to happen that they are willing to read more into stuff and force themselves to appreciate art a bit more, even if it happens to be not that great. I hope this doesn’t sound unnecessarily cunty, because I don’t mean it in that way at all. What I’m getting at here is that this is how people should be with their art, and something I feel that having too many options as a society has taken away from us. We’ve lost the ability to appreciate stuff beyond what it is.
Sometimes I think back to when I was a kid and had a limited amount of VHS tapes: due to sheer proximity to these limited movies I had, they eventually became my favourites simply because I had no other choice. That’s what I think is sort of happening with One Battle After Another: it’s not PTA’s best by any stretch of the imagination, yet this is what we’ve got at the moment and people are really excited about it. I think that’s really cool and I’m happy for them, but I also still want more out of the movie business these days. Movies could be so much better and we’re not quite there.