Is One Battle After Another woke?
Movie · 2025
One Battle After Another has a wokeness score of 8/10, which we rate as Strongly Ideological. Woke messaging is very prominent and often feels forced or shoehorned in. Characters and plot are primarily shaped to serve the ideology. Many viewers feel the agenda overshadows the entertainment.
Key points
- Progressive messaging dominates, romanticizing diverse ex-revolutionaries as anti-fascist heroes against caricatured Christian nationalist villains.
- Critics decry film as pro-terrorist propaganda glorifying left-wing violence, ICE raids, and political assassination.
- Forced diversity and emasculation of white protagonist alienate audiences, overshadowing storytelling despite critical acclaim.
Wokeness analysis
One Battle After Another exemplifies heavily ideological, message-driven filmmaking where progressive social and political messaging dominates the narrative, often at the expense of organic storytelling and entertainment. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, the film loosely adapts Thomas Pynchon's Vineland into a contemporary black comedy action thriller that romanticizes ex-revolutionaries—portrayed as sympathetic anti-fascist figures akin to Antifa—reuniting against a villainous Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who leads a shadowy cabal of Christian nationalists, white supremacists, and authoritarian forces linked to immigration crackdowns and police-state tactics. This setup shoehorns in clear progressive tropes: diverse revolutionaries (including strong Black women like Teyana Taylor's character 'Jungle P###y,' Regina Hall, and Benicio Del Toro) battle caricatured right-wing villains, with Leonardo DiCaprio's washed-up white protagonist emasculated as a stoned, paranoid failure reliant on 'diverse' allies. Conservative critics, including those from Breitbart, Fox News, and Ben Shapiro, decry it as pro-terrorist propaganda that glorifies political assassination, ICE facility raids, and left-wing violence, especially amid 2025 real-world events like assassinations and shootings. Viewer backlash on Reddit and IMDb echoes this, calling out 'corny' humiliations of white men by 'strong black sistas,' shallow female characters serving agendas, and forced diversity where heroes embody social-justice terrorism while villains are irredeemably evil white nationalists. Even left-leaning audiences walked out, labeling it propaganda. While PTA's style embeds some satire—mocking both extremes and modern activists as incompetent—the film's prescient commentary on fascism, rebellion, racism, and immigration feels intentional and unbalanced, prioritizing ideological provocation over character depth or fun. Critics praise its craft (94% RT), but for audiences fed up with Hollywood's lectures, the agenda overshadows pulsating action and father-daughter heart, alienating viewers and contributing to its box-office underperformance despite acclaim.
Plot
In Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, washed-up revolutionary Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) lives off-grid in stoned paranoia with his self-reliant daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). When his nemesis, the unhinged Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), resurfaces after 16 years and Willa vanishes, Bob reunites his ragtag band of ex-revolutionaries—including figures played by Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall, and Teyana Taylor—to rescue her. Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, the film blends high-octane action, dark comedy, and political thriller elements, depicting clashes with authoritarian forces, white supremacist cabals, and riot police in a dystopian mirror of modern America. Amid prison breaks, bank heists, and generational reckonings, father and daughter confront the fallout of radical pasts in a chaotic, pulsating epic hailed as a 2025 masterpiece.
Analyzed by AI on January 11, 2026