There is a certain kind of film that, in its ambition, in its sheer, manic refusal to be categorised, begins to feel less like a work of art and more like a force of nature. It’s a storm of images and ideas, a hurricane of cinematic energy that doesn't just ask you to watch but demands that you go along with the ride. Paul Thomas Anderson has, for years, been carving out this particular, ferocious territory, a landscape of American obsession and delusion, but with One Battle After Another he has done something altogether different, something so sprawling and audacious it feels like he's not just holding up a mirror to the American experience, but is shattering it and then painstakingly reassembling the pieces into a mosaic of shared madness.
American movies, as a rule, have become domesticated, tamed by a studio system that believes in the soothing balm of consensus, in a carefully calibrated politeness that ensures no one is truly challenged or unsettled. A movie like One Battle After Another is a rude, beautiful and necessary disruption of this complacency. A declaration and sprawling epic that plunges headfirst into the muck and the madness of the U.S.
Anderson, working here with a Pynchonian source for the second time, understands that there's no need for clean, linear tales but sprawling, anarchic mess, full of tangled motivations and bizarre asides. This is not a film that follows the rules of the genre, it's something new and strange. It is a non-specific period piece of a saga that owes as much to the sun-baked landscapes and moral ambiguity of the spaghetti western as it does to, say, Mad Max.
The very notion of a hero is subverted. We are introduced to Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), a man whose defining characteristic is not his strength or his moral clarity, but his chronic inebriation and a memory so riddled with gaps that it seems to be actively working against him. Calhoun is a leader not because he is a shining example of heroism, but because, in a world gone mad, his particular brand of unreliability seems the most honest form of resistance. He is a relic of a softer time, a stoner saint navigating a world of brutal efficiency, and his journey—if one can even call it that—is less about winning a war and more about simply remembering what he’s fighting for.
What is so deeply unnerving about the film is its strange, unmoored state. It refuses to be placed. Not just geographically—which is a well-worn trick. It is, to be sure, a film about this moment, a violent, chaotic mirror held up to a world that feels not just on the brink, but actively tumbling over it. Yet, the specific contours of its political landscape—the who, the when, the why—are left tantalisingly, maddeningly blank. This is not a failure of clarity, but a triumph of purpose. By untethering the story from a particular year or a recognisable administration, Anderson forces us to confront the cyclical, inescapable nature of political and social strife. It is not just a film about one kind of fascism or another; it's a film about the endlessness of the fight, a horrifyingly beautiful testament to the fact that the very notion of "peacetime" is a fiction we tell ourselves. We are presented with a world where the lines between resistance and chaos are so blurred they cease to exist.
The film's narrative structure is a kind of high-wire act, a constant, daring leap from one scene to the next without a safety net of exposition. We are thrown into the middle of things, into a world where a band of revolutionaries called the "French 75" are holding a detention centre, and where their captured leader is a figure of such grotesque, comic villainy that he could only be portrayed by the likes of Sean Penn. Penn, as the terrifying and absurdly named Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, is a marvel of physicality and timing, a study in the grotesque humour that can be wrung from a man utterly, frighteningly sure of his own power. He is a caricature, yes, but one drawn with such precision and conviction that he feels more real than the more conventionally "realistic" villains of other films. He is a living, breathing monument to authoritarian idiocy, a man whose every word and gesture is a testament to the fact that evil, in its purest form, is often just laughably, terrifyingly stupid.
And this is where the film finds its rhythm, a strange, propulsive cadence that alternates between moments of genuine terror and bouts of surreal, almost slapstick comedy. The humour isn’t cheap; it is the kind of dark, gallows humour that emerges from a world where absurdity is the only constant. The film is populated by a rogue's gallery of characters who seem to have wandered in from different genres entirely. Teyana Taylor is an absolute revelation as Perfidia Beverly Hills, the fiery leader of the "French 75," the kind of incendiary femme fatale who makes the screen itself feel like it's smouldering. She is a woman of action and of mystery, and Taylor plays her with a kind of coiled, electric energy, a performance that is both commanding and heartbreakingly vulnerable. Her revolutionary spirit feels born of a deep-seated rage, but also a kind of defiant joy, the joy of living fully in a world that wants to extinguish you. The question is, what, precisely, is their goal? The film is frustratingly, and I think intentionally, vague on this point. They bomb buildings, they hold up banks, they cause mayhem, but for what end? It’s not about building a new world so much as it is about tearing down the old one. The revolutionaries are as much a product of their time as the forces they oppose, a mirror image of the very chaos they claim to be fighting. This is not a film that endorses a single ideology; it uses them as a framework, a jumping-off point, to explore something far more fundamental.
The great, grand conceit of the film, the idea that truly resonates and lingers, is the transfer of this burden. The film, we are told, is not just about the battles themselves, but about the inheritance of them. DiCaprio's Pat Calhoun, a man with a genius for explosives and a penchant for falling in love with his leader, is the first generation, the one who fought the good fight—or at least a fight—and then, in a moment of paternal instinct, fled. He takes his daughter, Willa, and disappears, renaming them both, convinced he can outrun the past. But the past, as a spectre, as a ghost, as an unrelenting force, has other plans. Sean Penn's Steve Lockjaw, a military colonel who has dedicated his life to hunting them, becomes the physical manifestation of this inescapable past. He is the personification of the idea that what is left undone, what is left un-fought, will always, always come back to haunt you. DiCaprio’s character is a fascinating study in delusion. He has not only given up his political convictions; he has wilfully, almost comically, regressed into a state of self-imposed oblivion, a bathrobe-wearing, drug-addled man-child who hopes his old life will simply cease to be. The genius of the film is that it uses this almost-clownish figure to highlight a serious, profound truth: that the attempt to shield a new generation from the battles of the old is a fool's errand. It is not an act of protection, but an act of denial. The things we think we have left behind—the conflicts, the hypocrisies, the battles won and lost—are not gone. They are merely dormant, waiting to be rediscovered by those who come next.
The real heart of the film, and this is where the genius of Anderson’s direction truly shines, is not in the grand explosions or the chaotic shootouts, but in the quiet, painful realisation of the daughter, Willa, played with an astounding blend of naiveté and burgeoning power by newcomer Chase Infiniti. She is the inheritor of all of this—of her mother's revolutionary fire and her father's desperate flight. The film's marketing, which places DiCaprio front and centre, is a beautiful and deceptive misdirection. The film is not his story; it is hers. It is about a young woman who, through no choice of her own, stumbles into a history that was actively hidden from her. The moment of her awakening—the stripping away of her childish clothes and the gradual assumption of her own identity—is a far more compelling narrative than any of the action sequences. It is the story of a new generation, a new "Zalpha," who must, with or without guidance, find their way through a world that their parents failed to fix. Anderson, as a storyteller, doesn't offer easy answers.
Benicio del Toro's character, a quiet, community-based social worker, offers a glimpse of an alternative path, a different kind of battle—one fought with patience and compassion rather than bombs. But this path is presented as an aside, a quiet counterpoint to the raging torrent of violence that defines the main narrative.
And then there are the other players, each one a note in this grand, dissonant symphony. Tony Goldwyn, part of the “Christmas Adventurers” is a marvel of understated vileness, a man whose cheerful veneer only serves to make his cruelty more palpable.
The film, in its constant, restless motion, its dizzying shifts in tone and perspective, demands a great deal of its audience. The plot, such as it is, is less a straight line and more a series of drunken zigzags, a reflection of our protagonist Calhoun’s own confused state. When he is called upon to recall a password that has been lost to the "boozy, weedy mists of Bob-time," it is not just a moment of narrative tension but a perfect metaphor for a nation trying to remember its own past, a collective memory clouded by decades of self-deception and wilful amnesia.
It's also very long, clocking in at 2 hours and 50 mins. The first 30 minutes although contains some great scenes including one amazing car chase after a heist gone wrong feels jarring to the rest of the movie when it comes to tone. It feels more angry and uneven , never finding its stride like the movie does from the second act onwards. It has great performances especially from Teyana Taylor and some interesting things to say on the role of how society sees black women and power dynamics. But the first 30 seems to drag and feels like a montage of a whole another movie. The first act seems to last 90 mins whilst the rest of the 2 ¼ hours fly by.
Despite my reservations it is a film that says, yes, things are as bad as you think they are, but look closer—there is still humour, there is still love, and there is still the possibility of a better tomorrow, even if you have to fight for it one battle at a time, one half-remembered password after another. It is a film that doesn't just entertain us; it engages with us, confronts us, and, in doing so, reminds us of the power of a great, uncompromising movie to h
old up a mirror to society.
"One Battle after another, Gelli Monotype Prints" by Basesketch