Film scholar Howard Suber, whom I’ve mentioned before, is celebrated for his finely honed ability to identify the repeating patterns that make films memorable. I studied with him, and his love for cinema is infectious. However, his outlook leans toward what I would define as responsible nihilism when discussing filmmaking as a career, and should you ever consider abandoning the pursuit, he would not attempt to dissuade you.
As a business, cinema has always rested on a model of scarcity set against an oversupply of talent. Now, again, the movie-going ritual faces alarming declines, with many arguing that the medium itself is on the verge of extinction. I had a meeting with a high-profile showrunner who, after praising my body of work and personal journey, also suggested I might want to brush up my old plumbing skills (a job I did quite poorly when I first moved to L.A.). The idea that the industry might disappear is nothing new, making Suber’s pragmatic stance all the more prudent.
Nonetheless, once every many years, something appears with such a sobering display of genius that, despite my best efforts to resist, it feels almost designed to reignite the stubborn dream of making films.
One Battle After Another is one of those cases that is both a film and a movie. A tale that takes up so much space it wears its epic conflicts openly. Yet, beneath the deafening automatic gunfire lies a quiet, enduring vulnerability.
As a true masterpiece, it is inevitably reminiscent of the towering pillars of cinema history. Nevertheless, not once does it fall prey to what Orson Welles called “the worst kind of cinema: the homage.” Its sequential nature shares the grandiose impression of the Kill Bill saga or No Country for Old Men; and its upper-echelon group of underground knights could make anyone think of the frail elders determining Hollywood’s destiny in velvet rooms with oxygen tubes in Mulholland Drive. But these references are rendered meaningless, as this movie consistently resists the seduction of form in favor of what is human and true.
Aesthetically, the direction and editing function as one. High-voltage scenes end just shy of conclusion, allowing the viewer to complete them through active anticipation, an expectation often surpassed with artful dexterity moments later.
Conceptually, it transforms its archetypes into characters that feel as if they live not only beyond the frame but somewhere deeply familiar to us.
Colonel Lockjaw’s spectral character, played by Sean Penn, embodies this complexity: a villain with the indestructible persistence of Terminator’s T-1000, yet possessing a human fragility that forces us to always look into his soul. The lyrics of Perfidia float through him like a prayer: “Lady, if you can talk to God, ask Him if I ever stopped loving you.” Or is he someone who simply refuses to die because love itself has made him immortal?
The mother-daughter relationship between Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), a rebel raised by rebels, and her daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), a force of beautiful nature epigenetically compelled to fulfill her mother’s unspoken dreams while forced to parent her own father, Bob (DiCaprio), seems to crystallize through their written correspondence. These letters evoke the same hopeful nostalgia found in Che Guevara’s letters to his children before leaving for Congo. Perfidia too leaves, though not by choice.
Bob is a paranoid angel. An orphan whose self-neglect and reclusive lifestyle are aimed at keeping his daughter alive in isolation. This stands in counterpoint to his wife's self-righteous claim of putting her own interests first, which reads less as awareness than as self-punishment.
And then there’s Benicio del Toro, someone by whom I’d personally want to be adopted. Having famously played “Che” on screen, here, under Sergio St. Carlos, he channels a different kind of revolutionary spirit. Calm in the face of chaos, his selfless purpose represents the true arm of a modern resistance, setting the world in motion while carrying no despair. Only compassion. His measured procedural survival instinct is intergenerational and belongs to communities trained by history to always have a contingency plan for when the world collapses, because we immigrants know very well that sooner or later shit will go down. And it does.
In his book, The Power of Film, Suber writes: “Memorable movies do not show us just the world; they show us a just world—one in which the people we identify with not only stand for the things we would like to stand for, they stand up for what we would like to believe are the most important values of individuals and societies.”
Watching One Battle After Another, I experienced a love letter to a place both lived and imagined: a land of immigrants, fighters, and dreamers who built the emotional texture of a nation suddenly lost, or, hopefully, confused, yet determined to find its way, not back but forward.
My dear friend Damian often says that movies are incomplete until we get to talk about them. And I’ve hardly stopped talking about this one. Parting ways with these endearing figures when exiting the theater was as satisfying as it was sacrificial. I wanted to stay in their company. I did not want the film to end.
Perhaps it hasn’t.