The veneer of a great movie without the meat

(Spoilers Abound - Beware)

Yesterday my girlfriend and I finally got out to see One Battle After Another. The hype for this movie has been intense - earning high praise from Scorcese, Spielberg, fans and critics alike. “A cinematic masterpiece”, “best movie of the decade”, etc. Well, we saw it. And leaving the theater walked in silence for a few minutes, I thought back on the last few hours. Finally declaring “Yeah, I don’t think I really liked it”.

I had really mixed feelings sitting through it. To be clear it was not a bad movie by any means. The soundtrack was good throughout and hair-raising in certain scenes (kudos to Greenwood again for his work with Paul Thomas Anderson hereinafter PTA). There were some beautiful shots, and good performances by actors of high caliber - Toro, Dicaprio, Penn, etc. The street riot scene from start to finish was especially riveting, and definitely my favorite part of the movie.

But it has the veneer of a great movie, without it in fact having a lot of substance.

character depth?

For one, none of the characters really seemed to have any depth or progression. I found the characters to be especially flat and cartoonish. Take for example Sean Penn’s character, Colonel Lockjaw. His cartoonish singlemindedness was a baffling use of Sean Penn’s range as an actor. His dogged obsession with Perfidia as a sex object, the Christmas Adventurers Club, hunt for his daughter. The movie’s exploration of its primary villain goes no further than exploring his comical bumbling nature and menacing military presence. Who is he? Why is he the way he is? Does he have no human characteristics at all? No love for his biological daughter? No code other than white supremacy and military order? No feelings other than anger and exceptional horniness?

anti-fascism vs. fascism

On the movie’s opening, we are introduced to the French 75, a revolutionary group who frees immigrants at a detention camp with force. I had mixed feelings about their portrayal - essentially I felt like it was everything Fox News wants you to think what antifa (anti-fascists) are like: violent, adrenaline junkies who rob banks and kill people. PTA then turns his attention to the other side - facists, or more specifically right wing white supremacists in an even more exaggerated and cartoony treatment as the Christmas Adventurers club. All I can gather from PTA’s writing is he possibly feels both sides are slightly ludicrous? He might have more grounded thoughts on the subjects (it is a Hollywood movie after all), however I don’t think this really helps the discourse ever present in these times. Especially as critics and fans alike seem to think the portrayal of this core conflict is what is making this movie extremely relevant and partly contributory to its designation as a masterpiece in the first place. It doesn’t get any better from the first 30 minutes.

writing inconsistencies

Much of the movie’s praise also seems to highlight the “epic love story” at its core - both of Pat Calhoun/Bob Ferguson (Dicaprio) and his lover Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) and their daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). However other than being exceptionally horny (there seems to be a theme at work here) I didn’t find much in Pat and Perfidia’s way of chemistry. Perfidia abruptly leaves when Willa is a baby, apparently on grounds of “I put myself first”, “I’m a badass revolutionary”, “I don’t like being a mother”, etc. She later rats out her entire team, causing many to go into hiding, and getting many killed by Lockjaw. Later she escapes to Mexico from the witness protection program she earned with her betrayal.

Willa explores some complicated feelings when she learns her mother was a rat, rather than the hero Pat told her she was. However at the end of the movie, she gets a special handwritten letter from her mother that Pat was saving for just an occasion. The letter itself is all rainbows, love, and kind words from her mother set to a tearful soft instrumental apparently intended to get us (the audience) feel like none of Perfidia’s prior actions as a character mattered in the first place - she loved her all along and can’t wait to see her again someday.

The Christmas Adventurers white supremacist club’s single-minded hunt to eradicate Willa and all evidence of a mixed race relationship between Perfidia and Colonel Lockjaw apparently just gets dropped like a fucking hot potato the minute Lockjaw dies. Pat and Willa celebrate by getting themselves a family cellular plan with iphones - because apparently the danger no longer exists and their ever-present fear of data surveillance evaporated along with that plotline.

:/

Overwhelmingly, I just left the theater feeling like the movie didn’t really impact me and on some level kind of unsatisfying. I felt baffled by the love critics and fans poured on this one, as well as the PR storm praising its virtues over the last couple of months. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised the Hollywood machine went in full effect here - it is after all a movie with a budget of over $140 million and PTA’s most expensive film to date.