One Battle After Another (2025)

I think 2025 was a watershed moment in recent cinematic history.

The year was littered with releases that spoke to many Americans from different backgrounds. While I think a movie like "Sinners" spoke hard truths about race relations in our current political climate against the horrors of the Jim Crow South, I think another movie mirrored our society's current strife.

Like "Sinners," "One Battle After Another" mirrored our contentious societal problems. While "Sinners" spoke to the Black experience in America, "One Battle After Another" explored the deep issues plaguing the country's immigration scene. Both films accomplish their goals in a way only movies can: through constant entertainment.

"One Battle After Another" may come across as a rowdy stoner comedy spliced with action, but the movie expresses so much more, making it one of the best movies and most diverse of the decade. Leonardo DiCaprio is the name brand of this movie, along with veterans like Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro, but at its core, newcomer Chase Infiniti was the heart, soul, and future of this world.

Infiniti represents the present and future of a world that is skewing more toward mixed races. Sean Penn's racist Lockjaw hunts her character.

I think Lockjaw is the epitome of racial tension and hypocrisy in America. On the outside, he embodies the learned behavior that Black people or people of color are subhuman. But his character is obsessed with Teyana Taylor's Perfidia. Why is that? Is it that he believes his pursuit of her is a form of control over the race? Doesn't his obsession with her go against everything he believes and stands for?

The hypocrisy is thick, and to the bigger point, it makes so much sense in how race relations appear in our country. At one point, Lockjaw reveals to DiCaprio's Bob that he loves Black women. As I digested the movie, I continued wondering whether that is truly the case. Is it about control over a race, or is there something more, something less?

Influenced by Thomas Pynchon’s novel, this film is bound to have a unique development. It’s very refreshing to see a Paul Thomas Anderson-style story fully in a contemporary setting. His other films usually have a certain historical or nostalgic aura, being set in the early 2000s, the 1970s, and earlier. In this film, no phone is allowed for the teenage girl, and analoge techs are preferred for safety reasons! So the atmosphere still wasn’t disturbed by the phone screens or other fancy new devices. 

The representations of different minorities here are directly connected to the highly political film topics. We can say the representations of certain demographics is the main theme. Teyana Taylor plays Perfidia Beverly Hills, who is an important member of the French 75, an American far-left militant group. After she sexually humiliated the captain, Steven J. Lockjaw, he became obsessed with her. There is a scene where he was peeking at her from afar through binoculars while masturbating in his car. The camera switched between him holding the binoculars and Perfidia’s body in his gaze and in the oval frame of the binoculars. Later on, she got captured and exchanged the members’s information to avoid prison, abandoning her partner, newborn daughter, and also Lockjaw at the end. The character of Perfidia is rebellious, hotheaded, active, autonomous, irresponsible, sexy, and brave, and yet lacking a courageous dignity. This film portrayed certain scenarios that are the typical fetishization of Black women: a dangerous sexual being that allures (white) men into the trap, from the view of Lockjaw. The monologue of “Jugglepussy” during the bank robbery is a version of this archetype, while other types of portrayals are also present. Outside Leonardo DiCaprio’s Pat/Bob and Perfidia, the other interracial relationship couple (Wood Harris and Alana Haim’s characters) in the French 75 was also highlighted by their dialogue (“my little white girl”). The Christmas Adventurers Club, a far-right white supremacist secret club Lockjaw was desperately trying to join, sees interracial relationships as an absolute taboo, which triggered the series of events that happened in the last half of the movie. 

The manners of the Christmas Adventurers Club and Lockjaw are designed as a mockery of the stupidity of white supremacists. On the contrary, the Hispanic families and community under the leadership of Sergio St. Carlos are vivid, warm, casual, and insanely efficient with ease. The highlight of the whole movie for me is this fluid operation in Sergio’s house/building. It’s so heartwarming and thrilling at the same time to see Sensei Sergio calmly and confidently introducing Bob to his family members at a hectic moment. His last sentence, “a few small beers,” in the film has become a beloved phrase. With the anti-immigrant policies currently peaking in the US, especially with its hostility towards Hispanic people, showing this community and the release of immigrants from the detention center is a catharsis on the big screen.