Battle After Battle (2025). Running, screaming revolutionaries, or "for this nonsense, they should have given it an Oscar"?

So, I checked out Battle After Battle the other day. It’s not like I was expecting much, but I thought it would be a solid film with DiCaprio, as usually happens with him, tackling some hot-button social issue. What I didn’t expect was a rather stupid “arthouse” movie with a $100 million budget, which, despite everything in it, still managed to win an Oscar. For what? Let’s figure it out.

The film starts unexpectedly, without warning, with a raid by some student radicals on a camp for some refugees. What are our revolutionaries fighting for, what do they want, besides blowing things up and shooting? Honestly, by the end of the film I still didn’t really understand. But the most important thing is that the local general develops, ahem, an erection, and that’s when the main plot begins.

Right away, several problems with the film surface — it’s hard to watch without cringing. And this will haunt you throughout the entire movie, and unfortunately it’s impossible to tell whether the author was mocking it or filming it completely straight: everyone I asked said it was all satire. But I was left with the feeling that the author really did film everything in complete earnest, about some kind of “revolution” in his head.

Well, fine, the plot then gives us the birth of a child and a time skip. The main character goes into hiding. And the main heroine disappears. The revolution failed. Not just disappears — disappears from the story entirely. Maybe the actress refused to keep acting in this nonsense, but we’ll never know.

Then comes a dull arc where the hero lies low with his daughter, but the past catches up with him. Suddenly we realize it’s going to last a full three hours, and nobody is happy about that — including the actor. Another 40 minutes. And now the main revolutionary guy is running around like a madman looking for a phone, clearly trying to call himself from a payphone in another movie: The Wolf of Wall Street. But he can’t do it. In fact, the phone scene is probably the funniest and best moment in the film, really reminding us of the actor’s charisma, but unfortunately it’s the only one.

Then the hero gets caught, we’re treated to a ridiculous, in terms of staging, escape through the back door, and meanwhile the daughter gets absorbed into revolutionary ideas and prepares for a coup together with the nuns:

But the plot doesn’t stand still: the daughter is kidnapped right out of the monastery, and now our main hero races off to save her.

After that come chase scenes, action in the middle of nowhere, cool cars, and other action to justify the $120 million budget. And then our kindred spirits reunite, and the daughter, with tears in her eyes, says she’s inspired and will revolutionize just like her parents... Oh yeah, by the way, did I mention that this movie also has a Nazi in its ideology, secret Masonic organization? No. Well, fine, not everything has to become a spoiler.

So, what’s the verdict? Throughout the whole time I had a ton of questions, and some friends dropped out, unable to finish this dull trash. 

Capitalists will give Oscars only because in the film, the Revolution is shown from an incorrect, unscientific point of view. Generating thereby a disgust for the very idea of revolution among the youth. 

The problem there is that it's not clear what kind of revolution it is—left, right, communist, capitalist, or something else; the authors only showed the fighting and explosions). The plot seems more like a sexual revolution).

Exactly! It doesn’t matter what kind of struggle it is! What matters is that the very idea of struggle is boring/stupid/awful even for DiCaprio! Why go into details? Who would be interested in the idea of class struggle if it’s presented just like you described!?))