Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is simply not a very good movie, but it is also a morally irredeemable call to commit violence against white Christians.
Naturally, the basement-rated and increasingly irrelevant Academy Awards lavished the box office bomb with six Oscars Sunday night, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor.
From my October review:
One Battle After Another is basically an inverted remake of D.W. Griffith’s racist 1915 movie Birth of a Nation.
…
Battle is definitely a woke movie: full of black girlbosses and white guys who are either hapless sitcom dads or virulent racists. The legions of villains (all white) are obvious stand-ins for our true-life heroes in ICE. The good guys are violent, leftist Antifa-style revolutionaries.
Most movies tell you what they are about at the end, and you can definitely include Battle in that group.
While watching the overlong Battle, I kept hoping it would redeem itself at the end by legitimizing the dumb white guy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his simplistic but moral view of things: that family is more important than politics, especially the kind of politics that involves guns, bombs, and murder.
That didn’t happen.
Instead, the movie legitimized Antifa by having DiCaprio’s young daughter run off to join the movie’s version of Antifa while her simple-minded white-guy of a dad stayed home looking like an ape as he tried to figure out how an iPhone works. Worse still, the movie closed with the Tom Petty classic “American Girl.”
This is a movie where all the white people are either evil or dumb, while all the non-white people are noble, brave, selfless, and capable of redemption.
Because I have a sense of humor about myself, I try not to get too sensitive or outraged about all the dumb sitcom dads and uncool white guys and Caucasian villains. Battle is different. Battle didn’t even try to hide the fact it was putting a target on my back and the backs of every other white guy who celebrates Christmas.
Battle is a despicable movie that legitimizes violence for a group of deranged people who lack the emotional maturity to deal with losing an election.
And as I said, it’s also not very good. Nowhere near as good as Sinners.