One Battle After Another (2025)
dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
Rated: R
image: ©2025 Warner Bros. Pictures
Paul Thomas Anderson spent years dreaming of adapting Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, a novel published in 1990. He then filmed his adaptation of that novel nearly two years ago. Yet somehow, One Battle After Another, Anderson’s latest masterpiece, feels like it was made expressly with the headlines of the last few months in mind. It also feels eerily prescient, showing us a twisted, fun-house mirror version of the depravity to which the United States will likely sink in the coming years under the hideous Trump regime.
Comparing the movie to the Wikipedia plot description of the source material – I must admit that I haven’t read Vineland and didn’t even know it was the inspiration for Anderson’s film until the credits rolled – to say that One Battle After Another is loosely based on Pynchon’s novel is to say that the 2012 action blockbuster Battleship is loosely based on the classic boardgame. Some similarities exist, to be sure, but they might as well be two unique projects.
Not having read Vineland, but being familiar with Pynchon’s style after doing my homework for another PTA movie, 2014’s Inherent Vice – based upon Pynchon’s 2009 novel of the same name – it’s apparent that while the movie and book share almost nothing in the way of plot detail, they most likely share a shaggy-dog, rambling approach with the same off-kilter sense of humor. In the parlance of the kids these days, Anderson’s movie is a vibes-based adaptation.
(If memory serves, this is the first time I’ve mentioned Inherent Vice in this space since I reviewed it in the wake of its initial release. I want to take the opportunity to distance myself from 2014 Josh’s reaction to the film. Don’t even bother to read my review. I rewatched Inherent Vice a few months ago and discovered that my negative take was woefully misguided. I found endless things to love about Anderson’s movie the second time through. I must admit to the fact that 2014 Josh was an idiot on this one.)
Set in either an alternate version of the United States or our version in the not-too-distant future – the movie never makes clear which, and there’s a sixteen-year time jump approximately a third of the way in – One Battle After Another begins with revolutionary group the French 75 orchestrating and executing the liberation of undocumented immigrants from a US military detention camp on the US/Mexico border.
Two of the French 75’s staunchest members, "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun, the group’s explosives expert, and Perfidia Beverly Hills, a woman who, according to her mother, comes from a long line of revolutionaries, are also lovers.
During the detention camp raid, Perfidia holds at gunpoint and (hilariously) sexually humiliates the camp’s commander, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw. The aptly named Lockjaw, who Sean Penn expertly embodies with a clenched jaw and a beartrap physicality, becomes obsessed with Perfidia. He tracks the French 75 and confronts his prey as she places explosives in the bathroom of a court building.
But Lockjaw doesn’t intend to arrest her. Perfidia can keep blowing up whatever she wants, he tells her, as long as she meets him alone at a motel of his choosing. The two have sex – a less charitable description would be that Lockjaw uses his position of power to coerce Perfidia into rape – and Lockjaw allows Perfidia to dominate him sexually. (Anderson doesn’t show us too much, but it’s heavily implied that the young, Black revolutionary pegs her captor with his own sidearm.)
I mention that Perfidia is a Black woman for a very specific reason. Both Lockjaw and Ghetto Pat are white, and, when she later gives birth to a mixed-race baby, we’re left to wonder exactly who the actual father is. Perfidia never mentions her encounter with Lockjaw to Pat.
Anderson specializes in dysfunctional family dynamics, and Perfidia becomes disillusioned with the trappings of familial domesticity once baby Charlene arrives. It’s a fleeting moment, but Anderson briefly delves into the subject of postpartum depression and parental jealousy when Charlene becomes the center of Pat’s world. As we see Perfidia on a training run, we hear her, in voiceover, confiding to her mother that she feels like something is wrong with her for being jealous of her own child.
Unable to convince her to give up the revolutionary life, Pat tells his now-former lover to “go do the revolution, baby,” when she attempts to slink out of the house to rejoin the French 75. When an attempt at a bank robbery to obtain operating funds turns deadly, Perfidia is captured and convinces Lockjaw that she loves him, in order to secure a witness-protection deal in exchange for giving up the identities of her fellow revolutionaries. The French 75 scatter to the four winds, and Pat and infant Charlene become Bob and Willa Ferguson. They relocate to the town of Baktan Cross to assume undercover normie lives.
If it feels like I’ve given away too much of the plot of One Battle After Another, I should mention that everything detailed above covers only about the first 30 to 45 minutes of the picture’s 162-minute runtime. It’s at this point that Anderson’s editor, Andy Jurgensen, smash cuts from an image of baby Charlene to the now-16-year-old Willa. This moment is also the first instance of Anderson’s tone effortlessly shifting from tense, politically charged action to a loose hangout movie in the vein of the aforementioned Inherent Vice.
The director is known for the exceptional needle-drop moments in his movies, and One Battle After Another is no exception. The cut eliding over a decade-and-a-half of story time is accompanied by Steely Dan’s certified banger Dirty Work. We meet Willa as a confident, self-possessed teen practicing karate under the supervision of her sensei, Sergio St. Carlos, who, unbeknownst to Willa and Bob, is running what he calls a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation” in Baktan Cross.
When the French 75’s communications expert, Howard “Billy Goat” Sommerville, is located, black-bagged, and abducted by Avanti – a bounty hunter in the employ of Lockjaw – a government-sanctioned paramilitary group known as Mankind United threatens harm to the revolutionary’s sister in order to coerce him into giving up the aliases and locations of the still-hunted French 75 members. From here, the race is on for Bob, now a drug-addled burnout, and Willa to escape the fascist clutches of Lockjaw and Mankind United.
And this is where the movie presages what many of us fear will be the eventual outcome of Donald Trump’s ongoing slow-motion coup to rebuild the United States in his own image with the help of far-right fascist and white supremacist alliances. Anderson couldn’t have known when he started work on One Battle After Another that the federal agency known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, would quickly morph in the first months of Trump’s second term into his version of Hitler’s Schutzstaffel, or SS, the paramilitary organization that used terror to subdue the German population and directed Hitler’s Gestapo, or secret police, to commit widespread atrocities. For the purposes of this review, anytime you read the name Mankind United, or MKU, you can substitute the name ICE. They are virtually indistinguishable.
In a scene preceding the Battle of Baktan Cross, the once-rumored original title of the movie, Lockjaw tells his strategy team to “give me a reason to deploy to that town.” And there’s the heart of PTA and Pynchon’s clairvoyance about our current moment. At the direction of Donald Trump, ICE is now looking for a reason to deploy to American cities like LA and Chicago, ostensibly to round up undocumented immigrants. Their actual goal is to cow and terrorize the American people in an attempt to crush dissent and make us used to our own military being an occupying force in the country.
Mankind United, like ICE, use explicitly military tactics and naked violence that showcases a horrific truth about empires: on a long enough timeline, the weapons and tactics of an empire are inexorably turned on its own citizens. The money that began to flow in response to the September 11 terror attacks on New York City has been channeled into militarizing every law enforcement agency in the nation.
Trump and his regime are desperate to make us believe that cities like Portland are crime-ridden hellholes that must be invaded (by their own military) in order to restore peace. Anyone with a shred of critical thinking skills can look at the video footage from these deployments and deduce that it’s the ICE Gestapo causing all the lawlessness and violence.
Lockjaw tells his strike team that several businesses in Baktan Cross, a “sanctuary city” full of “wet and stinkies” – also referred to by MKU as “wet bodies” – are the targets of the impending raid. But the real reason they’re deploying is so that Lockjaw can investigate the teenage girl who may or may not be his daughter.
The reason he has such a keen interest in the matter is due to his impending acceptance into something called the Christmas Adventurers Club, an elite secret society of Christian nationalist white supremacists who are obsessed with the racial purity of its membership.
Anderson’s sly, dark sense of humor is on full display in One Battle After Another. As funny and ridiculous an idea as the Christmas Adventurers Club is, these old white men’s pathetic and nonsensical obsession with racial purity echoes Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper’s paranoid obsession with protecting Americans’ “precious bodily fluids” in Dr. Strangelove. (In researching for this comparison, I was reminded that one of Ripper’s obsessions is that the Soviets are using fluoride in the water supply to pollute the American body. Two US states have recently banned municipalities from fluoridating public drinking water, with several others considering it.)
I’m sure Stanley Kurbrick felt like the world he was satirizing in Dr. Strangelove was every bit as mad as he was interpreting it to be, but he could never have conceived of how hard truly biting satire becomes when the world actually goes crazy. The views expressed by the members of the Christmas Adventurers Club are on par with what you might see from dozens, if not hundreds, of rightwing social media influencers. Trump himself said that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” WE MUST PROTECT OUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!
The bulk of the rest of the picture’s humor comes from Pat/Bob’s efforts to shake off his drug-fueled haze of the last decade in order to find his daughter and get to safety once the MKU has begun their assault. The biggest laugh lines of the movie come from a few telephone conversations in which Bob tries to convince the resistance fighter on the other end of the line (the hilariously named Comrade Josh) that he is who he says he is, even though he can’t remember the cloak-and-dagger code phrases.
Leonardo DiCaprio takes his first swim through Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography in One Battle After Another. As the burned-out Bob, DiCaprio delivers some extraordinary physical comedy. There must have been some digital trickery to get DiCaprio’s character to fall forty feet from the roof of a building to the pavement below in one unbroken shot, but DiCaprio and the effects team make it look completely seamless.
Anderson’s shaggy style must have felt like home to DiCaprio, who has worked with Martin Scorsese on six films. That director is known for the frenetic pace and drug-addled protagonists of his movies, so, as dissimilar as the characters are, Bob and someone like Jordan Belfort in Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street feel like incongruous kindred spirits.
More fascinating is watching Benicio del Toro as Sergio St. Carlos. This is del Toro’s second collaboration with PTA, after a small role in Inherent Vice. Del Toro has also worked for another director named Anderson, a filmmaker whose aesthetic and approach to his craft is diametrically opposed to that of his colleague. The meticulous and exacting performance from del Toro in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch is about as far removed as you can imagine from what he delivers as the laid back, go-with-the-flow karate instructor/freedom fighter St. Carlos. (I’m sorry to have to admit that I haven’t yet caught up with The Phoenician Scheme, the other collaboration between del Toro and Wes Anderson.)
Leonardo DiCaprio (left) and Benicio del Toro in a still from One Battle After Another.
Del Toro’s St. Carlos is as cool as a cucumber – that’s the entire point of his character – as the chaos erupts around him in Baktan Cross. He repeats his mantra, “ocean waves,” as he calmly goes about the necessary steps to help his undocumented brothers and sisters evade the clutches of MKU. One of the most hilarious things about the dynamic between Bob and Sergio is that Bob is running around like mad, convinced everything that’s happening is because of him (which is mostly true), never for one moment noticing or questioning the mass evacuation calmly happening all around him.
Newcomer Chase Infiniti is quietly stunning as Bob’s teenaged daughter Willa. The actor possesses an effortless ease on screen, and she more than holds her own with the likes of DiCaprio, Regina Hall, and Sean Penn. As Col. Lockjaw, Penn evinces a rigidity to a character whose idea of love involves complete control. Lockjaw’s hairstyle hints at someone who longs to be a loud-and-proud skinhead, even if he can’t quite commit to the literal interpretation of that designation.
Penn’s tortured walking gait throughout the movie hints at someone who is in physical pain, but refuses, as much as he can, at least, to let it show. Lockjaw has an unexplained limp, but Penn makes his character walk in such a way as to telegraph that he’s desperate for no one else to notice it. This same pathetic and tortured performative masculinity hilariously shows itself again when Lockjaw claims he was “raped in reverse” late in the film. In Lockjaw’s diseased mind, only a woman can be raped, and only a man can rape, so what he claims happened to him can only be “reverse rape.”
I could spend another couple thousand words on the serpentine plot of One Battle After Another, including the absolutely bravura climactic car chase sequence, which uses multiple blind summits along a sprawling rural highway to brilliant dramatic effect. (Seriously, I need an entire documentary on the technique used to get the camera to glide inches from the road at breakneck speeds.)
Paul Thomas Anderson used 35-year-old source material to shoot a movie almost two years ago that somehow feels like it was made specifically to address our current moment. Like Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood before it, One Battle After Another continues to confirm Anderson as a creator of sprawling, idiosyncratic epics and as one of the greatest living American filmmakers.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- I do not know how Paul Thomas Anderson makes the comedy work in this, despite the subject matter being so bleak. He is an expert at tone management, one of the inexplicable mysteries of the movies. I also believe we now have an Oscar Best Picture frontrunner in One Battle After Another.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I left so much on the table in the above review, and not because I’m forgetful. My review would have crossed over into manifesto territory if I had continued to sing the movie’s praises.
- As is usual, PTA uses Steadicam tracking shots throughout his movie to spectacular effect. In particular, the tracking shot during the opening raid on the immigration detention camp is stunning.
- Jonny Greenwood’s score, while not as flashy as his work for There Will Be Blood, is a thing of wonder.
- Bob’s tête-à-tête with Willa’s history teacher is pretty much exactly what I would be like as a parent.
- I love it when movies are playing in other movies. Right before the nonstop action of the middle third of the film, Bob is seen watching The Battle of Algiers, an apropos pick from PTA.
- There are a few plot issues that gave me pause — a working pay phone, how certain characters are able to find other characters, and one character talks about football and being on the “90 yard line,” which exactly no one who has ever watched a football game would call it — but when the message of the movie and the bravura filmmaking is this good, it was easy to let go of most of my reservations.
- Hail Saint Nick!
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
I was able to see this twice in preparation to write a review. Both screenings were at the Alamo Cedars location. I saw it with Rae the first time and solo on the second screening. I was very sad to have missed a 70mm IMAX showing, which I’m sure made the VistaVision look even more spectacular.