One Battle After Another is a rollicking battle cry about the pain of adolescence and a world lost in chaos. Director Paul Thomas Anderson lights a bitter-sweet fuse that burns deep into the political turmoil of the modern American landscape. It's a frenetic frenzy of a world where the farcical and the political dance in rhythmic fusion, and light up the screen in technicolor. Anderson has ingeniously crafted an action-packed political polemic that drops the viewer straight into a live-action battlefield. While the narrative draws from Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland, this is by no means an orthodox adaptation; this is its own capricious cinematic affair. It’s a fully loaded visceral assault on the senses, a cinematic onslaught that hits hard, like a hail of bullets, or a stick of emotional dynamite, and that blasts in terms of megatons.
Anderson goes off the beaten track, hits the accelerator on the action, and pulls the trigger on the violence. This is PTA as you have never seen him before. Imagine if Hunter S. Thompson wrote an action movie, and Jonathan Demme directed it, you’d end up with something like the magic mayhem that is One Battle After Another. PTA’s latest venture on the silver screen deviates from his more anachronistic approach. Instead, he charges into the uncharted territory of the now, making this his first contemporary film since the bona fide romance Punch Drunk Love.
In this unpredictable Pynchonian realm, the seriousness of dramatic politics mixes with the anarchic energy of a comic book, and they snap, crackle, and pop on screen. The narrative cuts straight into the Zeitgeist, with a raw visceral edge that bleeds as it brings the cultural war to radical extremes. Anderson’s revolutionary rollercoaster races over minefields of racial conflict and partisanship, in search of a better world.
The film hinges on its chief protagonist Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), a disgruntled and jaded once-upon-a-time revolutionary, who’s part neanderthal stoner, and part ailing father. Bob's been in hiding for over a decade with his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). But the toll of single fatherhood and habitual drug abuse seem to have addled Bob's brain to a state of permanent malfunction. He parties at night, comes home late, smokes pot, and watches TV all day, so he’s not exactly father-of-the-year material. But for all his sins, he’s a dad nonetheless, so when crisis strikes and Willa's life is endangered, Bob’s forced to jump into action. As he tries to save his daughter, he’s drawn back into a revolutionary world of secret passwords, codes, Karate, and anarchic hijinks.
Leonardo DiCaprio's performance oozes with immeasurable authenticity as a drugged-up deadbeat with a higher calling. He deftly walks a narrow tightrope as he wobbles between destitution and destiny. Anderson complements this shaggy dog of a man with the revolutionary force of Teyana Taylor, and the unyielding tenacity of Chase Infiniti, who lights up the screen with emotional fireworks. The central cast is supported by a rogue's gallery of PTA alumni, including Benicio Del Toro, Alana Haim, and Sean Penn, who all knock it out of the park.
Ultimately, One Battle After Another is another flavour of PTA. It’s a revolutionary punch-up and a cinematic warzone where adolescence and fatherhood are firmly put to the test. It’s a world where the everyday becomes a battlefield, and a sprawling heterogeneous arena of kaleidoscopic familial and political chaos. In the end this is a film that boldly defies expectations in ways that are hard to conceive. But one thing is for sure: this is a uniquely kinetic cinematic adventure, born out of the imagination of an auteur at the peak of his earthly powers.
Viva la Revolution.
One Battle After Another is in cinemas from 26th September 2025.
