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The Surrender of (Commercial) Auteur Cinema to the Algorithm? On One Battle After Another and Chance as the Only Narrative Weapon

“The excessive use of narrative coincidence, in that context, is a symptom of a deeper illness: the loss of faith in dramatic causality. There is no longer any trust that a well-told story can, on its own, hold the audience’s attention.”

Por Mauro Lukasievicz

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For decades, there existed the idea that within so-called commercial cinema there was also a world of “commercial auteur” filmmaking — regarded as the last bastion of resistance against the empty spectacle of fast entertainment, the kind that demands less from the viewer and rewards the algorithm more. In recent years, however, it has become evident that even the most venerated names in contemporary cinema — directors who once embodied the promise of a more reflective, more honest, more human art within the American machine — have ultimately surrendered to the logic of fleeting spectacle. One Battle After Another is, in this sense, a symptom rather than an exception.

What was, in theory, meant to be an exploration of complex characters — a long-form narrative about moral exhaustion and the loss of meaning in a society in crisis — turns instead into a succession of cheap thrills, arbitrary twists, and coincidences so implausible they can only be justified by the need to keep the viewer in suspense, even at the cost of narrative coherence. Narrative coincidence has always existed; it is neither a new sin nor an isolated flaw. The problem is that today it has become a structural device — the very engine of films that aspire to the appearance of depth without the effort of constructing it. One Battle After Another does not use chance as a nod to fate or as an ironic play on randomness; it uses it as a shortcut. The story moves forward not because the characters evolve or their choices carry weight, but because something — always something — must happen for the film to keep moving. Thus, when the highway chase stalls, a character suddenly appears at a gas station — an improbable witness who, in the middle of the night and at full speed, claims to have seen a truck go by and even recognized who was inside. That coincidence, as convenient as it is absurd, seeks neither irony nor magical realism; it merely serves to jump-start a plot that would otherwise have to stop and confront its own emptiness.

What is most striking is that this kind of indulgence no longer belongs solely to traditional commercial cinema. It has also invaded the supposed territory of auteur filmmaking — that realm once expected to deliver stories of psychological density and carefully crafted structure. What used to be expected from a director like Paul Thomas Anderson — an organic plot, characters with complex moral dilemmas, a balance between drama and human observation — now seems to have dissolved into a desperate pursuit of visual impact. The grand shots, the exuberant montage sequences, the meticulously calculated tracking movements — all are still there, but no longer in service of an idea or a character, only of sheer spectacle. Shots that could easily belong to a Fast & Furious installment, except here they are framed with a veneer of auteur sophistication meant to justify their emptiness.

The viewer has changed, too. The one who once sought in auteur cinema a reflective experience, a deeper emotional bond, now seems content with the illusion of watching “something different,” even when, in essence, it is not. One Battle After Another embodies that paradox: a film that presents itself as auteur cinema — or at least as commercial auteur cinema — yet behaves like a product manufactured by a streaming platform. Everything appears negotiable, as long as the rhythm and the audience’s attention are not lost. If a character must change radically to sustain a joke or a plot twist, it is done without hesitation.

The most obvious example is the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who ages sixteen years only to become an alcoholic who spends his days on a couch smoking marijuana. There is no psychological development, no moral consequence — only a functional, almost cynical justification. What’s needed is a touch of decadent humor, a dose of self-destruction evoking The Big Lebowski, and that’s it. What could, in another context, have been a study of failure and alienation becomes here an excuse to recycle cult stereotypes. This lack of narrative rigor is not innocent. It reflects a broader trend: that of a cinema which conceives of itself as aesthetic merchandise rather than discourse.

The director, shielded by the prestige of “auteur cinema,” is no longer an artist probing human conflict, but a curator of visual stimuli. One Battle After Another could have been written, directed, and edited by an algorithm, and no one would notice — except that it would probably sell fewer tickets. Its structure is designed to satisfy the logic of consumption: every ten minutes, something must happen to break the previous rhythm. If that means resurrecting a dead character, so be it; if it’s convenient to kill him again to provoke a laugh or a jolt, he dies again; and if all else fails, one of the oldest clichés in film history — a long-lost letter pulled from a drawer — will do, as long as it can wring one last sigh from the audience. Immediate effect replaces the need for meaning.

What’s tragic is that this trend disguises itself as creative freedom. Being considered an “auteur director” grants the filmmaker carte blanche to justify the most arbitrary decisions under the banner of personal vision. But that vision dissolves when everything seems governed by the mechanics of shock. One Battle After Another is not a film that explores the chaos of the world; it is a film that simulates it. Its characters believe they possess depth because they shout serious things or look tormented. The plot rests on a scaffolding of improbabilities that no one bothers to question.

At one point, to motivate an attack by a group of white supremacists against Sean Penn — a group to which he himself belongs — it is revealed, purely by coincidence, that they somehow know he might have a Black daughter. There is no investigation, no discovery — just a line of dialogue thrown at random. Such devices, which once would have been considered a lack of rigor, are now accepted as part of a “style.” Ellipsis is confused with laziness, ambiguity with improvisation, narrative freedom with lack of control. The result is a cinema that believes itself bold for breaking rules it never understood how to follow.

The screenplay becomes a battlefield where aesthetic decisions cancel out narrative ones. The camera decides what the story cannot justify. The editing imposes a rhythm that replaces emotion. The viewer leaves the theater with the sensation of having witnessed something intense, yet cannot recall what moved them — because nothing truly did.

In that context, the excessive use of narrative coincidence is a symptom of a deeper illness: the loss of faith in dramatic causality. There is no longer trust that a well-told story can sustain the audience’s attention on its own — an audience that is underestimated, or perhaps has learned to underestimate itself. Constant stimulation is required: endless surprise, the intrusion of the unexpected without cause. Characters who, for twenty minutes, appear as sinister hitmen can suddenly sacrifice their lives for a girl they met five minutes earlier “to do the right thing.” Everything that once was construction is now distraction.

This kind of cinema — once the territory of introspection and critical gaze — has become a simulation of itself. In One Battle After Another, the greatest battle does not occur between the characters, but between the desire to narrate and the urge to impress. And the tragedy is that, in that war, narration has lost. What remains is a collection of moments, gestures, and winks — coincidences masquerading as destiny. The viewer leaves the theater shaken, not moved. And the director, wrapped in his own prestige, may believe he has won another battle, without realizing he has already lost the war against his own emptiness.