"One Battle After Another" (2025)

One Battle After Another is not my kind of movie. Outside of some flashy camera tricks at the very end, it was a bit of a slog. That said, it is trying. It feels less interested in preaching than in observing. But it is a message film. Beneath its story of resistance and struggle lies a question that refuses to go away: Who actually knows how to make the world better? Every generation believes it does.

The film’s intergenerational tension quietly exposes this assumption. The older generation fights because the world is broken. The younger generation fights because the previous one failed to fix it. Each believes change requires doing things differently from those who came before. New methods. New urgency. New certainty. Yet the brokenness remains stubbornly unchanged. Evil survives every revolution.

What begins as an effort to resist injustice gradually becomes something more complicated. The characters discover that meaningful change appears to demand compromise. Violence answers violence. Manipulation counters manipulation. Moral restraint starts to look like weakness when the stakes feel high enough.

The temptation is familiar. If the cause is good, then harsher methods begin to feel justified. The logic emerges almost naturally: we must use the tools available to defeat those who threaten what is right. Use evil to combat evil in the sense of using fire to fight fire.

But something subtle happens when evil methods are embraced for righteous purposes. The fight begins to reshape the fighters themselves. The film never turns this into a speech, but it lets us watch the transformation unfold. Resistance hardens into identity. Opposition becomes survival. The line between justice and vengeance grows difficult to see. Victory requires becoming increasingly comfortable with actions that once would have been unthinkable.

This is not merely the story of the characters. It feels like an observation about our cultural moment. Across today’s culture wars, both ideological extremes share a growing conviction that moral limits are luxuries we can no longer afford. Humiliation becomes justice. Deception becomes strategy. Cruelty becomes necessary defense. Each side believes the danger posed by the other excuses what would otherwise be condemned. Everyone is certain they are saving the world.

History suggests otherwise. Movements that attempt to defeat evil by adopting its tactics rarely end cycles of conflict. They prolong them. One battle simply leads to another because the underlying problem remains untouched. External enemies change, but the human heart carries the same capacity for domination, fear, and self-justification. The film’s title begins to sound less heroic and more tragic. Conflict becomes perpetual because the methods used ensure it cannot truly end.

There is an older moral wisdom, largely forgotten in modern political imagination, that understood resistance itself carries danger. Not only the danger of defeat, but the danger of becoming what one opposes. The greatest failures of the twentieth century were not only caused by obvious villains, but by ordinary people convincing themselves that necessity excused compromise.

The desire to fix the world is not wrong. The impulse toward justice is deeply human. But One Battle After Another quietly asks whether the world can be healed by people willing to abandon moral responsibility in order to win. The answer this film offers is, “no.”

Because evil is not overcome simply by changing who holds power. It persists wherever people believe good outcomes justify corrupted means. When righteousness adopts the habits of unrighteousness, victory itself becomes hollow. We inherit a broken world. Every generation tries to repair it. Few agree on how. And no one acts from perfect wisdom. The deeper challenge is refusing to surrender the very moral vision that made the fight necessary in the first place.

Otherwise, the struggle never ends. O battle after another.