For all the breathless proclamations that “One Battle After Another” is the movie of our moment, there’s still room to question if it really slows down enough to truly examine our current times, if it’s that radical given its revolutionaries’ massive failures, and whether Paul Thomas Anderson is fully equipped to do justice to these matters and black revolutionary women in general. But there is one concise message it sends like a shockwave, and a long-forgotten message of hope for our perilous times – in that through Chase Infiniti’s Willa Ferguson, the youth are not the lost cause that these last several months, if not years, have trained us to think they are.
Since November 2024, if not earlier, every story concerning the youth and the times they’re shaping has painted a troubling picture. Through the efforts to rewrite and recontextualize youth activists’ fight for social justice as an embarrassment or much worse, through countless stories of the “manosphere” and podcasts radicalizing male youths towards bigotry, the right wing or much worse, and now in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and elevated martyrdom being used to validate all this and much worse, it has given us all valid reasons to fear what the youth and the next generation are being molded into in a time of rising fascism.
What’s more, pop culture has now followed suit by echoing, or perhaps contributing to, such bleak views on what the youth are becoming or being twisted by. This year alone, we have seen “Adolescence” sweep the Emmys with its horrific cautionary tale of a young boy radicalized to murder, “Eddington” reduce youth activism to something cringe-worthy and/or a pipeline into fascism, and even “Weapons” show adults as utterly incapable of protecting or saving their children from an evil force literally draining the youth out of them.
At nearly every turn in real life and in fiction lately, the message is that the socially active youth of today are either hopelessly or dangerously radicalized, incompetent, helpless, or all of the above, and there’s nothing to offer as a better example to follow. But now, in a time where real-life leaders and movie/TV creatives seem to have abandoned any positive belief in youth and the next generation, “One Battle After Another” has suddenly arrived as a loud – and perhaps revolutionary after all – rebuttal.
Major Spoilers Follow For “One Battle After Another”
Sixteen years after Perfidia Beverly Hills vanished into a world that has changed very little since her, Bob Ferguson/Pat Calhoun and the French 75 tried to change it; her daughter, Willa, has no real knowledge of her or where she really comes from. Yet it doesn’t take long at all to see the tools Willa already has inside of her, and not just from whatever she did inherit from Perfidia or Bob. Between the praise her teacher has for her commitment and passion, and the valuable discipline she has clearly learned from karate sensei and community leader Sergio, she already possesses the stability and inner peace her parents could never find in themselves or their cause.
Once her parents’ nemesis and her own potential father, Steve Lockjaw, comes hunting for her, Willa is passed on to the last remnants of the French 75 and her parents’ old friend Deandra, where she sticks around long enough for at least some added training and guidance – and a harsh if not too harsh lesson on what her mother really was. But when Lockjaw does find her, it looks like Willa is stuck as the damsel in distress while Bob bumbles his way towards finding and rescuing her. However, it doesn’t quite take that exact route.
By the end of it all, Willa does summon her inherited strength from Perfidia and Bob, the tools imparted to her by Sensei Sergio and Deandra, and her own inner power to save herself – and to then recognize she does indeed have parental love in her corner, right in front of her and even far away from her, after all. With all that gathered inside of her, Willa and the movie as a whole end up with something “One Battle After Another” might not have entirely prepared us for after two-plus hours of squandered revolutionary dreams, militaristic fascism, and Christmas-themed white supremacy – a sense of hope for the fight ahead.
Given the mistakes of Perfidia and Bob, their physical and emotional absence from Willa at the beginning, and what and who else Willa may have inherited from them, she would seem to be at a great disadvantage from “how the cards were rolled out” for her. But somehow, through her own ability to find core values, community, and inspiration from other sources, she has everything she needs to survive the battle ahead of her, and finds even more for the battles she’s ready to join afterwards. All of that strength, and especially her clear-eyed focus and stability, is something her parents never had or were capable of drawing from when it really counted, in the fight against fascism or to keep their family together.
That is especially clear in the climactic chase scene, which is not just visually stunning for the endless hills and Anderson’s low-angle shots of them, but for watching Willa as she pieces together how to escape and trap her pursuer. She embodies Sensei Sergio’s “ocean waves” philosophy of centering herself, recognizing the hills as ocean waves in their own right, as she faces and puts down her injured pursuer, and then allows herself to reaccept Bob as her dad when he arrives. And through seeing Willa survive all that, Bob lets himself finally be the hero Willa really needs – not through fighting wars for her, but by just giving her the whole truth and actually taking a teeny step back into the world, to be the kind of safety net for Willa’s fight that he couldn’t be for her mother’s.
In most standards from most eras, a story about a youthful figure fighting a great fight better than their parents ever could is a time-honored and almost tired one. But in September 2025, a story that has such trust and faith in a youthful figure to carry on a great fight, and to be more capable and resilient to do what those before them couldn’t, may well be downright revolutionary.
It was one thing to harp on this so often in the early 2010s, when “The Hunger Games,” “Divergent,” and much more made teenage revolutionaries a subgenre in their own right. Yet now we live in a time where the promise of youth seems to be manipulated more in service of fascism than against it, where youthful fighters against it are now painted as cringy walking jokes by those who likely have their own agendas in discrediting them, and the likes of “Adolescence” and “Weapons” paint dire straits of what young people can be radicalized or victimized into without any real resistance from adults.
Between all of those assaults, we don’t have a lot of Katniss Everdeen-level symbols or stories in fiction or reality right now. But if there is something in “One Battle After Another” that truly demands to be called timely, relevant, and a message we need right now, it is in giving us a new one through Willa. In an age where what young people look up to can make them more at risk, and more dangerous to society’s most vulnerable than inspiring, we need many more Willas to look up to so we can just begin to start turning it around – just as the resistance in “One Battle After Another” ultimately needs more Willas as well.
Perhaps fictional youth aren’t entirely a lost cause, with or without Willa, these days. “28 Years Later” showcases a young person in a ravaged time who overcomes his most toxic upbringing and embraces his most human one. At the same time, “The Long Walk” presents its own version of young people finding strength in themselves and each other to stand against tyranny. Eventually, the tide may turn back to making fictional young people a real avatar for change and fixing what past generations broke, even outside the Young Adult/fictional post-apocalypse genre.
Of course, even in that best-case scenario, the damage might have already been done to other youths and elsewhere. We may now have Willa to inspire us, but she isn’t exactly the type of young person most at risk of being twisted and radicalized against true progress. And even as “One Battle After Another” seems to admit, the real victory may not be winning the fight in our lifetimes, as much as it is helping and supporting others to carry on after us, which doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t have to do the same with their own children down the line.
Still, we have enough anxiety to dream up those worst-case scenarios without added help. In a time when neither movies nor real life are particularly interested in being reassuring about the youth and their future, something like “One Battle After Another” and someone like Willa feels more radical than they otherwise would.
In such a time, a character first introduced to a song that proclaims “I don’t wanna do your dirty work,” and who leaves us ready to fight as a real “American girl” is the kind of young fighter – for youths and those most worried about them – many of us really do need to take inspiration from, at least more than some other so called inspirations, now more than ever.
Have you seen “One Battle After Another” yet? If so, what do you think? Please let us know in the comments section below and on Next Best Picture’s X account and check out the team’s latest Oscar predictions here.
You can follow Robert and hear more of his thoughts on the Oscars & Film on X at @Robertdoc1984
