The Oscars are tomorrow, and about a week ago I watched the first half hour of the movie One Battle After Another, nominated for Best Picture and several other awards. I was visiting a friend who lives at one of those large complexes for older people, and they show a movie for free every week. She wanted to take a look at that one, and so I went too.

But after a half hour of the movie we both left.

Simply put, it was the worst movie I’ve ever seen, bar none. Let me count the ways in which it was bad – no, maybe that’s impossible, because it was awful in every way. Its terribleness was absolutely astonishing.

Since then, I’ve searched online for people who agree with me on this. There are many, but they seem to be outnumbered by those who loved the movie (at least, online). The movie’s box office hasn’t recouped its cost, and it’s considered a flop in that sense, although it’s gotten rave reviews from critics, and a slew of awards and nominations:

At the 31st Critics’ Choice Awards, it won three awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. It was also nominated for nine awards at the 83rd Golden Globes, receiving the most nominations of any film that year and winning four, including Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. The film also became the most-nominated film in the history of the Screen Actors Guild at the 32nd Actor Awards, with a record-breaking seven nominations. At the 79th British Academy Film Awards, it led the nominations with fourteen overall, winning six, including Best Film and Best Director. Additionally, the film received thirteen nominations at the 98th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and four acting nominations (for del Toro, DiCaprio, Penn, and Taylor), the second-most of any film that year.

Let me repeat that it wasn’t just that I didn’t care for the film. It was that it was deeply offensive, stupid, chaotic, ugly, and boring all at once. It made me and my friend recoil in a combination of revulsion plus embarrassment that anyone would write such a thing, film such a thing, direct such a thing, act in such a thing. It was repellent within the first five minutes, with a sexual scene so outlandish and distasteful and preposterous that it seemed the goal was to offend everything and everybody.

Before I saw the film I had looked it up and learned the very general outline of the plot although no details. I knew it was about 60s-style revolutionaries but set much later in time, and that after the first forty minutes or so it advanced about sixteen years into the future – which would bring it more or less to today’s present. But when I saw the opening minutes I couldn’t figure out what the makeup department was going to do when these characters are supposed to be sixteen years older, because they already looked long in the tooth (DiCaprio is now fifty-one – a bit old for a revolutionary – and Sean Penn is sixty-five, past retirement age for a colonel, which is the role he plays). I didn’t end up sticking around to see the part of the film where they’re supposed to become sixteen years older, but I’ve read that the movie makes no attempt whatsoever to age them.

I guess that’s one way to deal with it. But it’s a very minor quibble indeed in a movie so very bad.

Prior to seeing the movie I had also read that one of the main characters, a black female revolutionary, was scripted in a demeaning and cliched way that was aggressively hyper-sexualized. I figured this was just one of those overreactions by the politically woke. Well, I’m here to say that it was not an overreaction. If anything, the criticism was an understatement.

The acting seemed ludicrous to me although it’s been highly-praised – over the top except for DiCaprio, who looked to be on tranquilizers (at least during the portion I watched), and cartoonish and cliched, and yet without a satiric edge that would make that approach all right. I read that the film is supposed to be some sort of satire, some sort of comedy, but there wasn’t even a hint of that perspective in the part I saw.

It was as though the denizens of the future world of Idiocracy had made a movie.

One of the things that struck me almost as soon as the Sean Penn character appeared was that he was supposed to make the viewer recall the Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper character in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. And sure enough – at least, according to Google’s AI – “The character Colonel Steven J. ‘Lockjaw’ (played by Sean Penn in the 2025 film One Battle After Another) is described as a deliberate homage to Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelove.”

That doesn’t even begin to redeem the film. All of the characters are offputting and deeply unlikable, whether they’re on the political left or right, although of course this being today’s Hollywood the ones on the right are even more evil and awful (and white) than the ones on the left. But who on earth wants to watch a two hour and forty minute movie with such characters and such action?

And it stands an excellent chance of getting the Oscar for Best Picture. Consider yourselves warned.

Just for fun, though, here’s one of my very favorite scenes from Dr. Strangelove. It features the Jack D. Ripper character, played by Sterling Hayden. He’s good, but it’s the brilliant Peter Sellers who shines here in one of his three roles in the film, that of RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. The ever-growing panic in Sellers’ eyes combined with his efforts at exquisite British politeness in the face of the utterly mad and terribly dangerous Ripper never fails to get me with its edgy humor:

[NOTE: Here are some people who agree with me about the film.]