Recommendations of the Editorial team
These are curious and dangerous times when we live – times that require courage and perseverance at all levels. It can be tiring, even if you don’t try to overthrow the establishment or gave up the just fight. Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” is a lot. A parable about fathers and daughters, a conspiracy thriller for the ICE age, an ensemble comedy that encourages all stars to show their eccentric side, perhaps the biggest film from 2025, and less a Vistavision adaptation by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland” as rather a summary on the way to your own deep insights.
Resistance as an attitude
Above all, he is an act of resistance – both in a small and large “R” – and indicates that he could have an answer to how we fight against our better angels. But first a lot has to fly into the air.
Fortunately, this tumbling, winding epic has a handful of people on board who are ready for that. They call themselves “French 75”, a loose organized troop of self -proclaimed freedom fighters – more or less – by Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). Your goal: a deportation center in San Diego, which is supposed to mark the start of a revolution. For this they need a “statement”. At this point, “The Rocketman” comes into play: Pat alias “Ghetto Pat” (Leonardo DiCaprio), specialist for weapons, explosive devices and a large tamtam. The group sneaks into the camp under the protection of the night. Pat provides the fireworks, a staging that supports Perfidias Mantra: “Free Borders, Free Bodies, Free Choices and Free From Fuckin ‘Fear!” The sentence also applies to the scene itself, which Anderson choreographed like a miniature spectacle. After ten minutes, the film is already in full gallop.
An opponent enters the stage
In the meantime, Perfidia has to turn off to those responsible: Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). A tough power fanatic – not only in a figurative sense, Lockjaw is in an erect state when we get to know him – who personally takes it personally to be locked up in his own prison. The man with the bad old right haircut is a neo-Nazi, but recognizes an equal fighter in Perfidia. A toxic so -called so -called Lockjaw swears good between hate and desire – and keeps a word. He later forms a triangle with Perfidia and Pat, which ends in a baby, an unsuccessful bank robbery and Perfidia’s stay in witness protection before it disappears without a trace.
This is only the prelude, an appetizer to define the stage and missions. 16 years later – the voice from off says “the world has hardly changed” – Perfidia is still undermerged. Pat now lives as a “bob” in the fictional North California town of Bactan Cross, has withdrawn into the underground and raised his daughter. The baby is now the teenager Willa (Chase Infiniti), who trains combat techniques in Dojo, while Steely Dans “Dirty Work” runs in the background.
Music as a weapon
A short digression on music: Johnny Greenwoods Score is perfectly matched to Anderson’s vision of a torn America and the incessant rhythm of the narrative – sometimes as an orchestral string spheres, sometimes creating maximum tension. Anderson and Greenwood have a creative partnership such as Spielberg/Williams or Hitchcock/Herrmann. And then there is the needle drops: The scene for Steely Dan reminds that this director already masterfully placed “He Needs Me” in “Punch Drunk Love” and played a whole K-Tel compilation of hits in “Boogie Nights”. Nobody understands the use of pop music in the film better.
Lockjaw, on the other hand, tries to climb the “Christmas Adventurers’ Club” to the circles of the elite string pullers who want a world of “racial purity”. But first he has to find Bob and Willa. With soldiers and heavy equipment in the back-partly of militias, partly from the US military-he moves into the fight. Penn plays Lockjaw like a fist, stiff and full of disgust. It is a representation between caricature and painfully realistic disclosure. A late masterpiece and proof that Penn is still one of the largest.
Family gang and state power
The surface of the fabric is hardly scratched: fathers and despotes, secret networks and state power, escape routes and war games. “One Battle After Another” combines DiCaprios feverish representation of a paranoid father with silent support roles by Regina Hall and Benicio del Toro. And again and again Thomas Pynchon’s template flashes, for example in the bizarre-comic nun monastery “Sisters of the Brave Beaver”. Anderson shows its virtuosity, especially in the parallel montages of rivaling camps before an attack or in breathless car persecution. But it is never about effects – always about history.
In this mix of family history and social criticism, there is also a rejection of the idea that cinema is a relic. Anderson tries to tell at most intimate and at the same time epic. “One Battle after another” is the opposite of a gentle fade out-it is an outcry that films are alive and necessary.
Timeless and yet in the now
Anderson has already adapted Pynchon in “Inherent Vice” and captured its absurd humor. Here he uses the template as a springboard to edit his own obsessions: empathy and anger. While Vineland plays in the 1980s, “One Battle After Another” raises the action from the time. The result is a “perpetual present” – an eternal present that is painfully close to America today. Therefore, the first half acts like a call to the uprising, while the second makes the exhaustion of the endless struggle noticeable.
And yet hope remains. In the hills of Northern California, between community and care, the film indicates the answer: you fight with love. This is Anderson’s endgame. This is how you keep dignity and understood, you protect the future and change it. So you live to hit another battle.