Catch-Up Watch: One Battle After Another (2025)

Watched:  01/05/2026

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  First

Director:  Paul Thomas Anderson

Well, better late than never.  This was one I absolutely wanted to see in the theater, but didn't due to circumstances.

Let's not bury the lede:  I dug the hell out of this movie.  

I suspect One Battle After Another (2025) will do well through awards season - everyone in the movie is great, it's beautifully shot, the audio and score are A-level (I hadn't heard a Jonny Greenwood score in a minute).  It's on an evergreen topic in modern drag.  That said, I haven't read any reviews and I don't know what people *think* about the movie as of yet, just seen it get many stars from folks' letterboxd accounts.  

I kept thinking about how movies are made - what choices were made.  How someone else would have turned this into something preachy, or treacly, or something that was just a standard actioner.  There's a handful of directors who maybe could have done this, but PTA walks a tightrope here, and so many others would have tilted too far one way or the other.

There's a minimum of dialog telling people directly how they should feel - and when they do, it's not about the revolution or those in control.  Actions speak louder than words.  To my surprise, the movie is deadly funny, an absurdist dive into the idea that we're *always* battling at the edges.  There's always the elites who live with their own mythologies and a desire to enforce their world vision on everyone else (no matter the cost to the little people).  That drive is both a way to flex their power and a way to preserve it.  And, yet, they often aren't really any different from the trashiest militia member - they just have resources and believe themselves anointed.  

And there's always a revolutionary movement or so out there.  Scrappy, with only their lives to lose.  Uncompromising to the point of absurdity, wanting their personal utopian ideal, and they usually don't have their shit together the way they think they do.  Their actions are often performative - and, they may also see people as something mindless and used by those they're fighting - and it makes it okay if they use them.  And of course, these two groups feed off each other.

And all of that is here.  In hidden bunkers beneath mcmansions and in campsites with drunk folks talking about The Man.  

My understanding is that PTA has more or less used Pynchon's Vineland as a guide more than making a direct adaptation - Pynchon is dealing with the Reagan 80's and the fallout of the 1960's and 70's.  PTA updates the story to the modern moment.  Seas of migrants appear in cells, in holding and in spaces not too different in the holding spaces provided by those aiding them.  They never get a voice - something quite intentional.  They're the latest football.

Paul Thomas Anderson doesn't name names when it comes to organizations - except the hysterically named Christmas Adventurers Club (expect that to be a band name).  The names of the revolutionaries are as patently absurd.  

The psycho-sexual encounters of Perfidia (an en fuego Teyana Taylor) and Lockjaw (Penn - just @#$%ing perfectly unhinged) are hysterical, and maybe their dalliance says more about what each side needs from the other than either side wants to admit.  

Perfidia's steady partner is Bob (DiCaprio), who is (maybe?) unaware of her liaisons with Lockjaw.  He's left with the girl when Perfidia turns rat (and then runs).  Lockjaw, knowing it's possible the girl is his, is given a chance to join the secretive, esteemed Christmas Adventurer's Club and all the benefits and rights of membership, and now sees the girl as a loose end, a sign of his weakness to those he wishes to join - proof of his union with a Black woman.  

As Bob, DiCaprio - for all the dragging the internet wants to do - shows he's still among the best on screen out there.  He has a new mission, and it's Willa.  And he's terrible at taking care of his daughter.  His oddball pairing with Benicio Del Toro, as his daughter's karate instructor and a fellow revolutionary (who is just a tad readier for this moment than Bob), is just amazing stuff.  

I don't know actress Chase Infiniti, but she is *terrific* as Willa, going toe-to-toe with some of the best name talent working.  Looking forward to whatever she gets to do next.

I dunno.  It's a fascinating, telescoping movie - both speaking to our immediate woes and to the ongoing war that seems like it's in the DNA of a country that was founded on revolution, a desire for egalitarianism, but which was led by a gentry who expected spoils and a way that country should work - all while promising all men were created equal.  It's an odd movie that sees the cracks in both warring sides, and a child of that imperfect war is the MacGuffin.  

If I feel like I wrote all about the context of the movie and not the movie itself, I think that's pretty remarkable.  Movies don't need to be entirely about themselves - and they can speak beyond the confines of the runtime and the edges of the screen.  And if people are responding so much to One Battle After Another, I suspect maybe this is why.  We may have more in common with the folks in cages or the bank employees in the movie than the characters on the screen, but we see these people on our televisions and know this is some part of the body of America.