One Battle After Another is the kind of movie that wants to feel essential. It presents itself as urgent, political, and emotionally bruised—an examination of modern revolutionary fatigue, generational guilt, and the cost of ideological compromise. It has all the surface ingredients of a year-end prestige contender: a sprawling runtime, grim subject matter, handheld intimacy, and a marquee performance from Leonardo DiCaprio. And yet, by the time the credits roll, the film feels oddly hollow—less like a coherent statement and more like a bundle of half-articulated ideas fighting for dominance.
I didn’t particularly like the movie. Not because it’s badly made—there are moments of real visual and emotional power—but because it feels inconsistent, unfocused, and ultimately unsure of what it’s trying to say. For a film so concerned with commitment, loyalty, and sacrifice, it paradoxically refuses to commit to a central message of its own.
A Film at War With Itself
At its core, One Battle After Another seems to want to interrogate the long tail of revolutionary movements: what happens after the slogans fade, after the group splinters, after idealism curdles into paranoia or resignation. The French75 revolutionary group—part political cell, part surrogate family—exists in a liminal space between resistance and stagnation. They talk about change more than they enact it. They obsess over security protocols, coded language, and passwords that feel ritualistic rather than practical. The revolution, such as it is, has become a lifestyle rather than a mission.
This is fertile ground for a movie. The problem is that the film can’t decide whose story it’s telling or what emotional spine it wants to follow. Instead of sharpening its focus, it keeps adding competing perspectives that dilute the impact of what could have been a far more intimate and devastating narrative.
Leonardo DiCaprio as a Destabilizing Force
Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is the clearest example of this dilution. On paper, he seems designed to embody revolutionary burnout—the aging hanger-on, still orbiting a movement he no longer truly believes in, sustained by nostalgia, anxiety, and self-medication. He worries constantly. He smokes constantly. He forgets constantly. Passwords, keywords, basic operational discipline—all of it slips through his fingers.
The issue isn’t that the character is flawed; it’s that he feels dramatically unnecessary.
I’m going to say the quiet thing out loud. DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson… is completely unnecessary. Worse… he gets in the way of the really seminal story arc. Here me out and think about it. The really central and heartbreaking story happening here is of the Rat Mother Perfidia, and a daughter’s desire to make amends for that betrayal. This story makes infinitely more sense if we jettison Bob into the stratosphere. Keep the connection at the beginning between Lockjaw and Perfidia. Keep the question of who her daughter’s father is, maybe even keep Bob as a peripheral 3 minute character. But then cut to Willa with her revolutionary foster parents. She chooses to make amends for her mother, and take up the mantle of the revolutionary, and the movie starts to finally make sense. Bob, the stoner that can’t even keep the French75 passwords straight, just gets in the way… he muddies any sort of central revolutionary clarity and even makes the movement look like a total washed up waste of time. Could it be that Bob was added to temper the revolutionary vision or extreme of the overall message? Could it be that the writers just took Bob on a random evolution of tangential expansions over and over again that eventually lost any sort of narrative throughline power? Maybe the character could work if he really was a passionate revolutionary that was grieving and lost as a result of his wife’s betrayal? But as it stands, I don’t even think he really did like Perfidia. I mean? His presence destabilizes the movie’s emotional center without replacing it with anything stronger.
Rather than illuminating the cost of prolonged resistance, he mostly just underscores inertia. He’s not a leader. He’s not a betrayer. He’s not even a true skeptic. He’s just… there. Worrying. Getting stoned. Drifting. And for a film supposedly about consequences, drift is a strange choice.
The Story That Should Have Been Told
What’s frustrating is that buried beneath this sprawl is a far more compelling movie—one that occasionally flickers into view before being smothered again by narrative excess. As I’ve mentioned, that movie is the story of the daughter and her mother.
The mother’s turncoat past is easily the most emotionally loaded element in the film. Her betrayal—whether ideological, personal, or both—hangs over the narrative like a moral stain that can’t be scrubbed clean. She not only ratted out the entire revolution, but also turned tail and ran without nary a glance back over her shoulder. The daughter’s relationship to this legacy is rich with possibility: inherited shame, resentment, love, and the desperate desire to make things right in a world that doesn’t offer clean absolution.
If One Battle After Another had been rewritten as a mother-and-daughter salvation arc, it could have been devastating in the best way.
Imagine a film centered entirely on the daughter’s attempt to make amends—not just for her mother’s actions, but for what those actions represent. A story about whether redemption is transferable. About whether the children of ideological failure are obligated to fix what their parents broke. About whether loyalty to a cause can survive the knowledge that the people who raised you betrayed it.
That movie has a clear emotional throughline. It has stakes. It has tragedy. It has intimacy.
Instead, the film keeps cutting away to DiCaprio’s character fretting in corners, absorbing screen time that could have deepened the daughter’s interior life or complicated the mother’s moral ambiguity. The result is a narrative that feels constantly interrupted—like a conversation that keeps getting derailed by someone who has nothing new to add.
Inconsistency as Theme—or Accident?
One could argue that the film’s inconsistency is intentional—that its lack of a central message mirrors the ideological fragmentation it depicts. But there’s a difference between thematic ambiguity and narrative indecision, and One Battle After Another often falls into the latter.
Scenes oscillate between quiet, observational realism and heightened, almost symbolic confrontation without a clear sense of progression. The tone shifts abruptly. Characters behave with meticulous caution in one moment and reckless abandon in the next, not because they’ve evolved, but because the script needs them to.
The French75 group’s security measures are a perfect microcosm of this problem. The film spends a great deal of time emphasizing passwords, keywords, and protocols—symbols of seriousness and sacrifice. And yet, these measures are routinely ignored or undercut, especially by DiCaprio’s character, with little consequence. The movie wants the aesthetic of discipline without the burden of enforcing it.
This undercuts the stakes. If rules don’t matter, then breaking them doesn’t mean anything. If ideology is optional, then betrayal loses its weight.
Performances Searching for a Center
To be clear, there are strong performances here—especially in the mother-daughter dynamic when the film allows it space to breathe. Their scenes crackle with unresolved tension and genuine pain. Willa can’t believe her mother ratted them out. Can’t believe that she slept with Lockjaw, that he’s her father. You can feel the years of silence, the unspeakable accusations hovering just beneath the dialogue. These moments hint at the film One Battle After Another could have been.
DiCaprio, for his part, is doing what he always does: committing fully, embodying anxiety and moral exhaustion with physical specificity. The problem isn’t the performance—it’s the function. His character doesn’t anchor the movie; he disperses it. His ever-present bathrobe is the perfect analogy to this movie’s overarching problem. It’s just eccentricity for eccentricity sake. It’s milktoast slathered on top of milktoast. Rather than serving as a thematic lens, he becomes narrative noise.
A Movie Afraid to Choose
Ultimately, One Battle After Another feels like a film afraid to choose between being a generational reckoning, a political autopsy, or a personal redemption story. By trying to be all three, it ends up being none of them with any real clarity.
The irony is that the film’s title suggests persistence, resolve, and continuity—one battle leading meaningfully into the next. But the movie itself feels stuck between battles, unsure which one matters most.
Strip away Leonardo DiCaprio’s character. Tighten the focus. Center the story on a daughter trying to reckon with her mother’s moral failure in a movement that no longer knows what it stands for. Let the revolution be personal rather than theoretical.
That would have been a movie worth fighting for.
As it stands, One Battle After Another is an ambitious, well-acted, but frustratingly unfocused film—one that gestures at profundity without ever quite landing on it. It isn’t a disaster. It just feels like a missed opportunity, endlessly circling the story it should have told, one battle after another.
