Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another is a high-torque drama set in an agitated culture that’s markedly similar to what’s going on today. The good guys, the film tells us, are people of a rebellious nature…anti-government activists and insurrectionists (or, in the case of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Bob Ferguson, a former anti-government activist) while the bad guys, so to speak, are ICE-like military guys in starched fatigues as well as an elite cabal of white nationalists called “the Christmas Adventurers.”
The current political atmosphere in this country is not what anyone would call an opportune time to release a “hooray for the good-guy insurrectionists!” action drama.
Within the last two weeks, after all, we’ve had two anti-rightist, anti-government-affiliated shootings by nihilist, insurrectionist, left-leaning types.
On Wednesday, 9.10, the hate-deploring, trans-boyfriend-supporting Tyler Robinson murdered Charlie Kirk, with one of his bullet casings etched with at least one anti-fascist slogan (“hey, fascist…CATCH!“).
This morning (Wednesday, 9.24) some kind of anti-ICE guy shot up an ICE Facility in northwest Dallas (three killed including the shooter), with “investigators stating that anti-ICE language was found on ammunition at the scene.”
Last week I wrote the following: “In the wake of the Charley Kirk tragedy Warner Bros, is releasing a hooray-for-the-left, defy-the-malevolent-whiteys film? A movie that says almost all white people and especially guys in starched military fatigues with close-cropped hair are bad…we get that, this is what Hollywood always does…whitey bad, POCs good…whitey baddie-waddie, POCs are spirit angels and God’s chosen. But the Kirk tragedy has changed the political landscape.”
I also said in my 9.17 rave review that Battle “might run into some trouble commercially as it’s strictly a blue-cities flick from a political-ideological standpoint.
“Form-wise it’s a total homer — a knockout masterwork from a gifted director who knows exactly what he’s doing and how to deliver the right stuff — while the content is so absurdly woked-up in a POC-favoring, insurrectionist-identifying, over-the-waterfall-in-a-barrel way that it’s sure to be hated or certainly hooted at outside the big cities, especially in the wake of the Kirk shooting.
“Average Joes and Janes will say ‘yeah, a really good movie but what’s with the leftist guerilla-revolution jazz?'”
Meet Joshua Jahn.
He was the drug Addicted Gamer Leftist who shot up Dallas ICE headquarters.
He also wrote Anti ICE messages on his shell casings.
The left is the party of violence. pic.twitter.com/KE9Fr2Yqmi
— Real Defender (@real_defender) September 24, 2025