This Is What It's Like Now: On "One Battle After Another"

some words re: the defining motion picture of the 2020s

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Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the all-time great America directors. He does not always make great films - in fact, he usually doesn’t. He does not have some uniquely sophisticated sensibility or an unparalleled formal eye. But his films are evidently the work of someone who is a generational talent in his field, and he makes it obvious. The fruits of his labor are never invisible. His movies always look disproportionately expensive to their budget. He wrangles memorable performances out of his actors, no matter how few lines they have. Much of his work is comparable to DJ’ing, in that they are just as invested in highlighting his stable of collaborators as much as his own virtuosity. His films are conspicuously seamless; it is reassuring to watch one of his films in a way, because they work hard to convince the audience they never once made an artistic or financial compromise at any stage of the production.

As works of art, his films are unmistakably his own, despite sharing fewer aesthetic similarities between them than the oeuvres of contemporaries like Wes Anderson or Tarantino. Even the nadir of his output feels like the exact movie PTA dreamed up. Their breathless energy was mistaken early in his career as youthful ambition, a quality to paper over his imprecisions. But as he’s aged and his work has become less eager, it’s clear that the puppy dog enthusiasm is the point. Again and again, he holds on long shots of his characters running. This isn’t a particularly original motif, but the result is infectious. No wonder he inspires so many adolescent wannabe directors; at their best, his movies make you wanna dart up and down the steps in the theater mid-way through. His films venerate a romantic devotion that his young viewers cannot help but parrot.

In retrospect, then, it makes perfect sense that PTA would be able to deliver something like One Battle After Another, which opens tomorrow. A 100mil+ studio tentpole and awards hopeful, the movie is a loose modern retelling of Pynchon’s Vineland as a star-studded action movie. Despite the fact that Anderson has never worked in this scale or genre before, there is perhaps no one better suited for blockbuster filmmaking. Watching something this big, this weird, this spectacle-driven, this extraordinary, it feels impossible. I have no idea how he did it. It goes beyond competency or surprise. It is a singular feat in the medium. It is a messy and imperfect film, but there is nothing else, not in the hundreds of thousands of movies out there, that offers what this one does.

The first reel of One Battle After Another is maybe the greatest thing I have ever seen in my life. That’s probably not true, but it sure feels like it, even a week and half removed. An unbroken twenty-minute montage that careens through time with the exact rhythm of a PTSD flashback, it serves as prelude, overture, and a complete film on its own. The stakes are established within the first minute: Leonardo DiCaprio, aka “Ghetto Pat,” is an explosion specialist for the French 75, an underground group first seen liberating refugees in a detention center. This is where fellow radical Perfidia Jackson (the remarkable Teyana Taylor) catches the eye of Sergeant Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who convinces her to rat out her comrades after Jackson is arrested after a robbery gone wrong. Most of the French 75 is assassinated, except for Pat and the newborn Charlene he fathered with Perfidia, who run away to a small town. If that sounds like a lot, just know I’ve elided about 60% of the details. There are shootouts, bonkers sex scenes, sight gags, and haunting images of a McMansion. The movie careens through a different tonal register every ten seconds, and that is not an exaggeration. The effect is overwhelming.

The time-jump to modern-day, signaled by a close-up of Charlene (Chase Infiniti), now a high schooler under the pseudonym Willa, establishes the movie’s core with devastating clarity. All the urgency has faded into the past-tense, replaced by a time-devouring grief for those who fought for a better future. Pat, now called Bob, spends his days getting high and watching The Battle of Algiers, gripped with paranoia about his daughter’s safety. If Pat was the one looking out for Charlene, it is Willa who now looks out for Bob. The bulk of the film is one extended chase scene, as Lockjaw leads a military siege on the town hunting for Willa. Bob’s antics to save her throughout are amusingly frantic but often tragically inadequate.

Past the opener, the movie gets worse mostly on a technicality. It’s never bad, but there are eventually stretches that feel like the work of mortals, and not like the result of divine providence. Still, PTA’s control of form has never been sharper. Perhaps because he is dealing with less oblique material than usual, his images never once overreach or dip into pretension. The movie is two hours and forty minutes and it does not drag for a second. There are plenty of small, legible, clever choices, and just as many ineffable moments whose power I cannot pinpoint at first blush.

For a big-budget movie from a major auteur, much of the movie actually rests on the capabilities of the actors. DiCaprio is doing the best work of his career. A bumbling, manic genius who long ago stopped being able to be the rock his community needed him to be, Bob is a role that requires a movie star’s bravura and a character actor’s charm, and nobody is more up to the task than middle-aged Leo. In one shot, PTA holds tight on Bob’s face darting around Willa’s classroom during a parent-teacher conference. Here, a man who made a career out of his eyes offers a free-associative insularity that I would have thought out of his range.

Perhaps the biggest shift between Vineland and PTA’s film is the prominence of Black women. The script highlights the inherent contradictions of misogynoir, and I found it quite incisive about how white men are prone to weaponizing their own infatuation with Black women in order to further subjugate them. Anderson does not shy away from implicating the film himself in these biases and systems. I am particularly moved by a moment where Bob off-handedly mutters about Willa, “I don’t even know how to do her hair, man,” a sentence that carries within it his entire life. Nevertheless, the film remains steadfast in its adoration of these women, offering gives them real narrative agency and space for the actresses to elaborate with real psychological complexity. Teyana Taylor, especially, does marvelous work. The entire movie rests on whether or not she can make Perfidia, an often inscrutable figure whose absence hangs over much of the film, into something more than a cipher in only a handful of scenes.

I think this is a really sharp and basically successful approach to incorporating this material without feeling like PTA is moving beyond his grasp. And obviously, there are going to omissions or misattributions or insights that I miss as a white person. But I think there are some unavoidable limitations to the film which highlight how a massive picture like this requires a singular driving artistic voice, even when the material could be improved with greater insight from others. The nunnery in the back-half of the film is a fascinating space, and the interactions between Willa and these women deserved more space than the screenplay gives them. PTA is far more confident when depicting how this space is invaded and dismantled, which is an understandable impulse but leaves the section feeling lopsided. Worse, though, is that Regina Hall is given nothing to do; She is acting her ass off in a role that does not have a tenth of the screen time it should.

In that same vein, I wish Willa was more developed as a character, but Chase Infiniti does plenty to counteract this. It’s difficult to notice at first, but more than any other performance in the film, Infiniti often makes choices that feel motivated by a deeper understanding of the character than anything directly implied by the plot or dialogue. I know I just described “acting,” but like, she’s really good at this whole thing, in a way that goes beyond prodigal talent. She the delivers the kind of work that signals a level of wisdom typically attained from years honing the craft. She is not just a great actress, she is the first female movie star of her generation. In several moments she outplays Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s a miracle.

The film’s only true misstep is a simple one to explain with unilateral consequences. Sean Penn is second-billed in the film as Sergeant Lockjaw. His arc just straight-up takes up about the twice the runtime it should; most of the material isn’t bad, and the secret society subplot is terrifically funny, but it’s really the only time the movie ever spins its wheels, and in such a tight picture, that makes a bigger difference than you’d think. The major issue, though, is that Sean Penn fucking sucks in this movie. I am already seeing buzz debating whether we can separate great work from problematic figures. I am repulsed at such apologia: Nobody should be forgiven, let alone lauded, for turning in a performance like this. It is the kind of performance that’s the first thing you bring up when you leave the theater. You can tell he practiced that stupid walk and stood in front of a mirror twitching his upper lip. You can tell he had a lot of conversations with PTA about how to make Lockjaw pathetic and funny and scary at the same time. You can tell he has some opinions on RFK Jr. None of it works, it’s all hack shit; he’s so focused on making symbolic choices over honest ones, and the trite psychology informing such indulgences is plastered dumbly across his face. He is too wacky to be calibrated next to everything else in the edit and he’s never playing off his co-stars. At first, his presence is fine, but once the movie gives him even an inch to really chew scenery, Penn seems hellbent on devouring all the film’s virtues in the name of his own odd-ball sensibilities. OBAA is moving for all the ways it approaches being outlandish without ever tipping over into being a cartoon. Penn’s performance is not only a caricature, but an embarrassingly inelegant one.

On the other end of the spectrum, I would remiss if I did not take a moment to shout out Benecio del Toro as the perpetually chill Sensei Sergio, Willa’s karate instructor who also runs a massive refugee operation for undocumented immigrants. Del Toro has very quietly become one of the most consistently terrific working actors, and that’s never been clearer than when witnessing him here, in a pair of readers, holding his phone with both hands from the bottom, walking his desk chair without getting up. The film’s best scene comes as he orchestrates the safe evacuation of dozens of people fleeing ICE agents. It’s the zenith of PTA’s managerial chops as a director, staging a multi-story building with an enviable, intimate specificity and clarity of action.

A sentiment I’ve seen repeatedly about OBAA - actually, the only sentiment I’ve seen enough to notice, since the movie that has yet to have its first public screening - is that it is a revolutionary thing. At risk of being The Friend That’s Too Woke, I would like to pose a simple question: What do you think movies are? I can count the number of movies that have led to legislative change anywhere in the world on one hand, and those were typically accompanied by targeted organizing with a lot of prior momentum. Furthermore, American studio films are all compromised products that cannot inherently justify political righteousness. If A24 has an AI division, if MUBI is funded by the same people who are funding the genocide in Palestine, if every movie filmed in the US is subsidized by the government, if Disney is capitulating to fascism, even temporarily, at the expense of billions of dollars, if studios have been operating this exact way since their inception, what would be the rationale for WB to make this if they thought it could be a catalyst for anything? OBAA was never going to be something politically galvanizing, because that’s not what movies are! At least, ones with any dependency on the standard mode of financing and distribution. Movies are overwhelmingly evil and a one featuring the prominent involvement of several Zionists and Sean Penn was never going to be “the good one.” This is not the answer to cries for an engaged and radical medium. Cinephilia is about loving a rotten thing and it is worth being really honest about your own complicity in this instead of jumping through hoops to justify your affection. Counterintuitively, this makes it much easier to imagine a cinema worth fighting for (What that looks like is beyond the scope of this particularly essay). Without that transparency, though, we will only end up replicating the past with self-congratulatory markers of empty progress.

Please do not mistake this for me suggesting that this movie is offensive or conservative. Rather, it is just (“just”) a savvy, topical, perfectly calibrated bit of populist entertainment. There is a lot, sociologically and artistically, to be gleaned from this film’s didactic and atmospheric aims. Perhaps this is naive in its own way, but I believe this movie taps into the fundamental vision of the world that a lot of Americans hold. They think ICE is evil and stupid. They hate white supremacists. They think facial disfigurement is funny. They worry about their children. They think pronouns are annoying but basically inconsequential and only serve to make them feel old. They are stressed out the future. It is very refreshing, in a media ecosystem that is constantly short-circuiting people’s brains trying to convince them of six false realities at once, to encounter something that very directly speaks to general audiences.

PTA knows that Pynchon is not a particularly high-brow artist, despite the intelligence and grace of his books. Pynchon is funny and astute in ways that resonates with basically anyone, and has only grown exponentially more accessible in the half-century since his first published novel. Many of the updates to the material are basically cosmetic, both because Pynchon is prescient, and because the world has stayed the same as much as it has changed.

Repeatedly throughout OBAA, I thought to myself, “This is just what it’s like now.” This is how it feels to live in America in 2025. Compared to, like, Eddington, a movie that technically has things in it that you recognize from real-life, this movie also inhabits and reflects our world on more visceral and holistic terms. It knows that the buildings we live in have only just begun to fall apart, but every new structure is inhospitable and weak. It knows how it feels to hear pop music blare out of a car passing ICE agents patrolling the street. It knows how it feels to watch this happen 50 feet from where you sleep. It knows what it’s like to feel yesterday’s potential wasted, how it feels to be fundamentally unpersuaded by the hope that nevertheless drives every single thing you do. The film’s climax finds three cars continuously losing sight of each other as they crest over a bunch of identical hills. In this moment it feels like time has stopped, even as these characters are vectors inevitably driven towards an unseen but unavoidable collision. There is perhaps no cleaner metaphor for the film or for the nation that birthed it.

One Battle After Another is not the best movie of the year (The Secret Agent) or PTA’s best (Inherent Vice). That means it’s not even the best generation-spanning anti-fascist ticking-clock thriller of the year, or the best Thomas Pynchon adaptation. But it is de facto the best American tentpole release in over 15 years, and I’d wager it will go down as the defining movie of the year, if not the decade.

love ya lots,

helmet girl xx