One Battle After Another may be the worst movie ever made

One Battle After Another may be the worst movie ever made. Not in the petty and obvious way of a normal bad movie, though. It is a grand, multifaceted masterpiece of badness. It is dramatically bad, morally bad, historically bad and even erotically bad. And to cram in all this badness, it is an hour too long. But you won’t be bored – it is even entertainingly bad. This film is so bad that most people will think it is good, and it will probably make a lot of money. Proving only that America is the kingdom of Cain. But we knew that.

But why not start with praise, eh? The film has a beautiful celluloid look. I saw it from the second row of a baby IMAX, centered like a potentate amid my intrepid team of Urban Tigers (Jeff Goldblum’s team of chads in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou). Wow! It had been way too long since I saw such a film in the theater. My sensorium was thrown into total global overload, like a Tasaday tribesman before his first television. Will digital ever be able to match this? Yeah, probably, with artificial intelligence. Sad.

Paul Thomas Anderson remains a brilliant visual director. One Battle is a film-school masterpiece. Most bad films are boring. But PTA, while often bad, is never boring. Perhaps that makes him the perfect director for the eternally bored 21st century.

But! But! Let’s get back to the dramatic badness of One Battle. Like all of PTA’s badnesses, it passes as great. Great dramatists can mix the tones of drama. Tragedy flows smoothly into comedy into romance. Thomas Pynchon, from whom PTA is stealing in One Battle, has this in Vineland (1990). Pynchon can master every tone without being cringe.

One Battle is completely off the rails. Melodrama swings abruptly to tragedy to slapstick to romance to action to erotica. These transitions are unnerving and harmful to the soul. They do not naturally cause the audience to engage with the work, but to be thrown off it like a cowboy off a bull. Pynchon, of course, has an element of this – but Pynchon is under control.

PTA is just random. The first rule of classical drama is: action must be necessary. Randomness creates detachment. You know what else is random? AI slop is random. Expect 21st-century art to move away from anything that AI can do well. Gratuitous randomness will come to feel dated and 20th-century. It’s bad, and it disengages the audience.

Only when the audience then feels some ulterior attraction (such as political or sexual energy), a complicated structure of tension is created. I, of course, came to One Battle with an ulterior repulsion – creating a completely different vibe. So take this review with a grain of salt.

Speaking of repulsion: let’s go straight there. In Vineland, the revolutionary heroine, babe and mother Frenesi Gates, is the blue-eyed, stunning child of mid-century Hollywood communists. Her beauty enables her to win the love of the evil chad-prosecutor Brock Vond and of the stoner-hero Zoyd Wheeler.

One Battle opens with an action sequence in which Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), the stoner leader and technical mastermind of an American revolutionary cell (of mainly women of color? Set in what looks like 1990?), storms an ICE detention center and frees women and children from cages.

Ferguson’s beautiful revolutionary partner in crime has become Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). Even PTA’s character names are AI-slop Pynchon. Perfidia captures the evil ICE villain, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). At gunpoint, she forces him to flexcuff himself and, in a timeless Western trick, trap himself in his own spotlit cage. But on the way, excited by this bondage moment and by her stunning beauty, Lockjaw springs a boner! This allows Perfidia to sexually torment him, which is cool. Lockjaw is a mix of the stock villains from Avatar, American Beauty, Dr. Strangelove, etc., with a touch of Leslie Nielsen. This slapstick dick moment, which would have seemed heavy-handed in a Leslie Nielsen film, is also the inciting incident of the plot.

While this is bad enough, the real problem is that Taylor, given a three-hour, $4,500 stage makeup job which involves stitching actual eagle feathers to her temples, might pass as a five. PTA sometimes shoots her with makeup. But generally not. She and all the other glamorous women of color who make up Ferguson’s unit, the “French 75,” (a) have feminist body types, and (b) tend to elocute in those dialects of English to which Hollywood refers as “street.”

When we feed these traits into the Tinder simulator, it doesn’t look good. It’s not clear why PTA did a cross-racial casting. Maybe Hollywood antifa has dirt on him – a Hail, Caesar effect? Maybe he thought it would work at the box office. Still, Penn and DiCaprio are among our great leading men, and have at least remained so. But they’re only human. (Don’t get me started on Benicio del Toro as Chuck Norris meets Harriet Tubman.)

I estimate that this movie will probably inspire between one and ten murders – maybe even my own

Imagine Sean Penn planting a deep, hot kiss on Snoop, the lesbian gangster girl from The Wire. While Taylor is not quite Snoop, she is also not Naomi Watts. Penn can’t quite vibe it – and PTA has already put us in the domain of implausibly perverse eroticism. The result is that, for the first 45 minutes of the movie, we are treated, both with Penn and DiCaprio, to some of the worst romantic chemistry ever shown on screen. The vibe is so bad that it forces us to confront a trope sometimes seen in the work of Julius Streicher, but seldom in a major Hollywood motion picture: interracial romance as a paraphilia. It does not help that Lockjaw’s cartoonish fascist cabal, the “Christmas Adventurers,” see it just this way.

So it is almost a physical relief when Perfidia’s place on the screen is taken by her homely, biracial teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti, with a real-life Pynchon name). Eros is wisely avoided in the world of Willa. Infiniti would make an excellent character actress but will no doubt be abused, Zendaya-style, as a leading woman.

Fundamentally, One Battle is a religious film. It is entirely set in the fantasy landscape of the great American religion, progressivism, the 20th-century evolution of our ancient Puritan tradition. If you are a true believer, imagine watching Battlefield Earth without being a Scientologist. For non-progressives, One Battle may be necessary viewing. It displays the interior landscape of the narcissistic narrative of our world’s dominant cult of power. We seldom get to strap a GoPro to the inside of a lib’s forehead.

Let’s take the approach to leftist violence. In the 1930s, a real communist terrorist was part of a genuine global revolutionary organization. His 1960s equivalent was at least part of a genuine revolutionary cell, and of course could take liberating sugarcane-harvest tours of Cuba (as did Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles). This was still real power. Evil, communist, murderer Joanne “Assata Shakur” Chesimard, perhaps the closest thing to a real-life Perfidia, just died in Havana. Venceremos!

Take a moment to think about the first time you heard about the Weather Underground – and the emotional context in which you received it. You probably thought it was cool. This was an organization that got its greeting, a four-fingered salute, from Bernadine Dohrn, who for all her faults was genuinely hot. Before becoming a law professor at Northwestern University, she praised the Manson Family for sticking a fork in the uterus of a pregnant woman they had just murdered in an attempt to start a race war. And you thought the Weather Underground was cool! I thought it was cool. The name was certainly cool. The power of 20th-century marketing. What a product! What a cunning humiliation of a whole society!

Feminists speak of “body betrayal” when a woman feels involuntary sexual excitement while being raped. The journalists who taught us to revere Dohrn and the other allies of Charles Manson and Jim Jones raped our brains. They corrupted us with the satanic joy of evil. We will never get our innocence back, not even by killing them. It’s important not to fantasize about killing journalists. We shouldn’t stoop to their level. It’s fine to picture them spending the rest of their lives harvesting sugarcane – I’d start sweetening my coffee for that.

Even by the 1980s, though, all this homegrown terrorism was in the past. One Battle is a fantasyland where the 1930s and 1960s are still alive in the 1990s and the 2000s. And in the 2000s, they are even still the 1930s. Reality has voted differently. Yes, there is real-world 21st-century leftist violence. I estimate that this movie will probably inspire between one and ten murders – maybe even my own. Stuff happens. But the leftist murderers of the 21st century are all lone nuts. They are actually just like the rightist murderers, except that their murderous ideas come from Whole Foods, not the dark web. At most, they might have a few equally deranged accessories on a Discord server. They are as likely to form a new revolutionary state as Jacob Chansley, the QAnon Shaman. Horseshoe theory as murderous farce. Again: America is the kingdom of Cain.

So this film is out there – recruiting damaged people by presenting them as romantic heroes in a propaganda fantasy. Few will kill. But many will clap. When bad movies succeed, as One Battle will, they diagnose something bad in the audiences they entertain. Corrupt art is the pathognomonic mark of a corrupt society. Shitty people will watch this shitty film, and love it. Shitty journalists have already given it a standing ovation – the politics makes them hard, like Lockjaw. This evil is at the very heart of our culture.

As Leonard Cohen noted: “I have seen the future, brother. It is murder.” Murder is as old as Cain. The anonymous internet is young. Nobody asked for the combination. But they’ll get it.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.