One Battle After Another is— in the words of my own father— “not really my kind of film.” So of course, I went to see it anyway. Settling into my seat at the cinema I remember noticing that my flatmate and I were submerged in a sea of lone-male-cinemagoers, and— as someone who is at best ambivalent about Pulp Fiction— I began to wonder if we should have looked beyond the few lines of synopsis on the Cameo website before stumbling in on a Tuesday evening with the film bros. And maybe we should have, because One Battle After Another was not at all what I expected it to be.
The few things I had gathered about this film had me sceptical. The brief synopsis and my dad’s cryptic comments had led me to expect a hyper-masculine action film, centred on a slightly cliché father-daughter relationship in which a somehow violently heroic and tenderly loving father tears his hair out to save his passive and two-dimensional daughter. The cringe-worthy, clunky dialogue in recent cinematic depictions of Gen Z and their parents seemed to ring in my ears, while the mention of an ‘evil nemesis’ and ‘revolutionaries’ was conjuring visions of a caricature-like mastermind, plotting to thwart a boyish fantasy of revolutionary heroes.
But this is not what I got. While the film is, undeniably, (and unapologetically) action-filled, bloody, and totally over-the-top at times, it also felt firmly rooted in our times, and in what it feels like to live in the 21st century. And this tension is, maybe, the magic of the film. Somehow, modern life feels best portrayed, and most at home, in One Battle After Another’s landscape of extremes. Absurd political realities – right wing extremists, street riots and immigrant detention centres – are placed in the realm of dizzying rooftop chases and exploding cars, and they do not feel so out of place. The film guides you through this chaotic landscape with protagonists that feel complex, flawed, and real; investing you in the gripping, action-filled world of revolutionaries which nonetheless feels tightly woven into the specific realities of our time.
In some ways, this subversion of my expectations exposed prejudices and a lack of imagination on my part. I could not imagine that the theme of revolution, transplanted into 2025, and portrayed through the genre of action, was going to be a convincing watch. Whether this is because films too often fail at depictions of Gen Z, because revolution feels like some fantastical beast of the past, or because of my internalised cultural snobbery towards action films, I do not know. What I do know, is that One Battle After Another rudely flipped these assumptions on their heads and has now boldly established itself in my mind as my kind of film.
“Leonardo Dicaprio – World Premiere ‘One Battle after Another’” by RON RAFFETY is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.