REVIEW: "One Battle After Another" (2025)

(Courtesy movieposters)

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has made one of his most ambitious and brilliant projects to date, with a highly-anticipated genre-bender that combines political thriller with dark satire, as well as alarming cultural relevancy and grounded-if-heightened comedy. It’s really no surprise that One Battle After Another (2025) has already been getting rave reviews and early awards buzz. 

The main plot follows a washed-up ex-revolutionary—once part of a group of extremists, known for freeing immigrants and causing all sorts of explosive mayhem—who comes out of hiding in search of his missing teenage daughter. This was a deeply personal project for Anderson, who had reportedly been working on it for almost two decades, originally to adapt Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland. For one reason or another, Anderson couldn’t crack the story until he decided to loosely based his screenplay off of elements from Pynchon’s book that stood out to him. (He had previously adapted the author’s work for the 2014 film, Inherent Vice.) I did wonder, though, if the story of One Battle After Another was set in the present day. Yet, most of its elements don’t feel dated. Anderson has created a transcendent and complex world that suggests “very little” has changed over the course of almost two decades. 

Following Brady Corbet’s epic period drama The Brutalist last year, One Battle was shot in the VistaVision format, creating an exclusive cinema-going experience reminiscent of the 1970s (which Anderson is clearly influenced by, considering most of his filmography). This is easily one of this year’s most skillfully-made and phenomenally-acted pictures. And with a roster that includes heavyweights like Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and Chase Infiniti (in an impressive film debut), how could it not? Their respective characters are undoubtedly layered and full of surprises, even creating some instantly defining and iconic imagery in contemporary cinema—most notably, a pregnant Taylor at a shooting range. 

As mentioned, the film alternates between intense and harrowing suspense, and quirky and profane/crass comedy. (Steven Spielberg compared it to Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 political satire Dr. Strangelove.) Filled with gripping car chase sequences and long tracking shots, One Battle presents a very unpredictable and unconventional world where anything could go wrong, leading up to a jaw-dropping, Sergio Leone-style climax. That goes just as well for the subversive soundtrack, with a score by Anderson regular Jonny Greenwood, a couple of holiday tracks/covers by Ella Fitzgerald (similar to how Kubrick used music subversively in his films), and excerpts from Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” 

(Courtesy The Film Stage) 

Bob is an unlikely protagonist. Sporting a plaid bathrobe and a handlebar mustache (not to mention being high and paranoid most of the time), he’s been compared to Jeff Bridge’s “Dude” from The Big Lebowski). Plus, he can’t even remember certain passwords over the phone (“What time is it?”); one such conversation gets unhinged.  

I did question the motives of certain characters, particularly Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills and Penn’s antagonistic—and apparently sex-crazed—Colonel Steve Lockjaw. (In the opening sequence, the former holds the latter at gunpoint and makes him get an erection.) This creates not only a questionable love triangle with graphic details/implications, as well as a conflict of (and/or abuse of) power. It also generates a sense of manipulation and betrayal, and one startling revelation. Then there’s the subplot involving a secret organization intent on “racial purification.” Ditto some open-ended and uncertain interrogations, regarding those in hiding, those dead, and others caught and arrested. It does, however, make sense that things change when Bob and Perfidia have a child, and their motives and emotions get conflicting between political causes and parenthood. As a result, Bob loses himself over the years, until he has to find the only family he has left. 

His daughter Willa, on the other hand, matures and progresses remarkably as a very smart and determined, if angst-ridden, young woman. To the film’s credit, certain characters come to regret what they had done wrong, and what they hadn’t/could’ve done. The story also does suggest hope in what the next generation can do (“Maybe you will be the one who puts the world right”). But it’s Del Toro’s Sergio St. Carlos who arguably has the best role in the entire film, maintaining a calm and cool demeanor amidst the chaos happening. “You know what freedom is,” he asks, “No fear.” One Battle After Another is certainly a fearless cinematic effort, as it is a complex and complicated one.