One battle after another - A Review
There's something about Paul Thomas Anderson movies that cuts straight through. When I first watched Boogie Nights, I was struck by how humanistic the entire film felt, this rich emotional world that reveals new facets each time you return to it. Magnolia is one such film. I can revisit it endlessly and always find something new. With One Battle After Another, PTA finally made the action movie he's been circling for decades, and watching it in IMAX felt necessary, urgent even. The scale demands it.
The first thing that struck me is how dynamic this film is despite its nearly three-hour runtime. There are remarkably few lag points, and PTA uses this sprawling canvas to do something unexpected: he makes a weird, profoundly weird movie about revolution, fatherhood, and the fragile pockets of community that persist in the face of brutal oppression. Without naming names directly, with smart racial representation woven throughout, the film offers searing commentary on the current state of American politics. Immigrant detention, white supremacist power structures, the surveillance state, all rendered with a surreal edge that makes the horror both more bearable and more cutting.
Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) are the emotional core holding everything together. Willa has had to grow up faster than she should have. There's a teenage resentment simmering beneath the surface, the burden of caring for a parent who should be caring for you, the exhaustion of managing someone else's paranoia and substance abuse while trying to figure out your own life. But DiCaprio's Bob is trying. Imperfectly, messily, but genuinely. He's a washed-up revolutionary living off the grid in a haze of weed smoke and old movies, but when Willa goes missing, something clarifies in him. The film doesn't romanticize his failures or his redemption. It just shows a father who loves his daughter and is willing to run through hell in a plaid bathrobe to get her back. And somehow, that's enough.
Sean Penn plays Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw with no restraint, all coiled menace and desperate need, and it works precisely because the character is so clearly attracted to things he believes he shouldn't be indulging in. He's terrifying, pathetic, and darkly hilarious, often in the same scene. His core pathos is self-betrayal: he has decided that belonging in a specific group, the Christmas Adventurers Club, a bougie secret society of Christian nationalists, is more important than being himself. Watching him curry favor with these men, watching him perform cruelty to prove his worth, is both revolting and heartbreaking. Penn makes you understand the psychology of fascism: the way insecurity curdles into violence, the way people trade their humanity for a seat at a table that doesn't actually want them.
Then there's that chase scene. I need to talk about the chase scene. It might be one of the best I've ever seen in cinema. Maybe Ford v Ferrari comes close to eliciting the same emotions in me, but this felt different. The cars cresting and plummeting over hilly terrain, the rhythm of up and down until you feel like you're falling into the screen. It's viscerally stunning, yes, but Jonny Greenwood's score elevates it beyond mere spectacle. What makes it land emotionally is the desperation underneath. You want Bob to survive. You need him to make it. That primal desire for the protagonist to just get there, to save his daughter, to not fail again. That's the emotional weight the chase carries, and it lands perfectly.
Benicio del Toro's Sergio runs what he calls his "Latino Harriet Tubman situation," a modern underground railroad for undocumented immigrants. The film doesn't sentimentalize this. It shows the danger, the precarity, the constant threat of violence from Lockjaw's forces. But it also shows the skater sequences, those moments of joy and movement and togetherness that exist in defiance of the system trying to crush them. PTA is arguing something essential here: people naturally gravitate toward helping each other. These pockets of resistance and mutual aid have always existed, and they are the core of what we should be trying to protect. There's an understated nobility in del Toro's performance. He's not playing a saint or a savior, just someone who refuses to stop helping. And that refusal is its own form of protest.
Because that's what this film ultimately is: a protest movie. It finds joy in togetherness and community even in the face of harsh, dehumanizing systems. It doesn't look away from the brutality. The detention centers, the white supremacist violence, the authoritarian creep, all of it is plain for everyone to see. But the film also insists that beauty can be snatched from the jaws of oppression. The bonds that hold people together, the ways we care for each other when the state has abandoned us, the messy imperfect love between a father and daughter trying to survive their own past. These are the things worth fighting for.
PTA has made something strange and vital here. It's frenetic and funny and frightening, often in the same scene. It's his most entertaining film and one of his most thematically rich. In times like these, we need stories that uplift us not through false hope but through clear-eyed recognition of what endures. One Battle After Another is that rare thing: a film that acknowledges the fight is rigged, the revolutionaries might fail, the daughter might inherit an unfinished battle, and still insists that showing up, trying, protecting each other, is worth everything.
I'll be catching it again soon. Some films demand to be revisited. This is one of them.