Adventures in Moviegoing: One Battle After Another (By Ciaran Duff)

This review contains spoilers for One Battle After Another.

TL;DR: I highly recommend it.

At the midpoint of Paul Thomas Anderson’s nearly three-hour, sprawling epic neo-western One Battle After Another, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson exasperatedly apologizes to Benicio del Toro’s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos for all of the trouble he has brought to his door.  Suddenly, a militant police force begins to break through the apartment complex turned “Latino Harriet Tubman situation” they are posted in. Sergio, nonchalant and composed, replies, “We’ve been laid siege for hundreds of years. You did nothing wrong. Don’t get selfish, Bob!”

After a beat, Bob responds. “Life, man. Life!”

It’s one of a few choice moments where the characters in One Battle address the string of seemingly endless catastrophes coming their way. Early in the film, Bob’s voiceover lays out the plan of the revolutionary group, the French 75, concluding with the declaration of the film’s title. Even Sean Penn’s villainous Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, in a moment of frustrated candor, declares, “If it’s not one thing, it’s fuckin’ another.” Outside of these brief asides, Paul Thomas Anderson immerses us in a world that has no time to process the atrocities it faces. The pace is relentless. The battles keep coming. This world is not hard to buy into as an audience, because it feels the same as our own.

The city of Batkan Cross, where the majority of the film takes place, acts as Anderson’s microcosm of America today. It is a community “laid siege,” struggling to free itself from an oppressive police state that detains immigrants in a sanctuary city as a smokescreen for more sinister motives—namely, the capture of Bob and his daughter Willa (played by the phenomenal Chase Infiniti). Yet, we see this community time and time again protect one another and protest the regime cracking down on their neighbors.  Anderson treats this as a baseline human instinct. In this world, solidarity is the default. Batkan Cross never gets selfish.

Sixteen years earlier, the radical French 75 shared that same sense of solidarity. Known then as Ghetto Pat, Bob was part of a collective that carried out bold and often violent political actions (for instance, the opening scene of the release of an ICE concentration camp). However, as the influence of the group grows, the admirable political intent and action of the French 75 begin to be outweighed by personal vendettas and interpersonal ego preservation; in short, getting selfish. Their downfall arrives in the form of an overconfident, botched bank robbery that leads to the death of a security guard and the arrest of Teyana Taylor’s Perfida Beverly Hills, resulting in the dismantling and dispersion of the group for the safety of their families and children. This includes Perfida and Pat’s newborn daughter, Charlene (soon to be Willa), who is thrust into this situation against her will. The tragedy is that no one truly gets out unscathed. And yet, Anderson asks us to empathize with even the most compromised characters. Perfida’s final scenes are hauntingly tender: she is not a villain, but a woman forced into a corner, where selfishness becomes survival.

As many of these characters disappear from the film after the time jump, our story hones in on an intimate, smaller scope character dynamic: that of now deadbeat dad Bob and burgeoning adolescent Willa. The remainder of the film hinges on the tension and love of their relationship, and seeing as the rest of the film varies wildly in scale as a big IMAX blockbuster, having this emotional anchor for the remainder of the narrative gives the rollicking plot some real weight. Bob’s growing desperation becomes a vessel for our own anxieties, which is then tempered and counterbalanced by del Toro’s portrayal of Sensei Sergio. Beyond bringing levity to the film’s most stressful moments, Sensei acts as Anderson’s philosophical backbone for the interminability of the human spirit, pummeling through battle after battle for his community in a cool, calm, and all but altruistic manner.

All of this narrative complexity is wrapped in a spectacular package of craft. The film ends up playing as an apex of the dozens of auteurs that worked on it, most obviously with Paul Thomas Anderson as a writer-director, but also in many other technical aspects. Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead has done the impossible task of creating a score idiosyncratic and daring that perfectly encapsulates the tone of the film (the titular track and “Trust Device” being my favorites), with an insane sonic soundscape that mixes analog and digital elements seamlessly. Continuing the format revival that started with 2024’s The Brutalist, Anderson and cinematographer Michael Bauman chose to shoot over 70 percent of the film on Vistavision — a huge 35mm film format popularized in the 50’s and dead by the 60’s — to bring a sense of awe to the intimate images onscreen. I was lucky enough to get to see an IMAX 70mm print of the film at Universal Cinema Citywalk on their 80-foot-tall IMAX screen, where the Vistavision film aspect ratio filled the whole screen for the entire runtime. This is a movie made to be seen in theaters, and made to be seen on film — doing anything less is a disservice to it.

It’s no secret why One Battle After Another resonated with so many people in the US today. It may be a “comedy” or a “farce” in the eyes of an average moviegoer, but it reflects the central cultural feelings of 2025: the absurdity of fascism, the perils of unchecked individualism, and the ways in which we are asked, over and over again, to choose between collective action and personal comfort. Amid all the chaos, Anderson offers a glimmer of hope: a belief in community, in resilience, in holding fast to kindness when it is inconvenient to do so. One Battle After Another calls us to recognize the battles we’re fighting every day. And more importantly, to remember who we’re fighting them for.