One Battle After Another (2025)

Paul Thomas Anderson has always been good at taking ideas that are already known and making them into something completely new. His most recent project One Battle After Another is a political autopsy of the tired father-daughter rescue thriller that makes you wonder if you’re watching an action movie or a very violent sociology class.

Bob is our unwilling hero. He used to be a revolutionary, but now he lives in paranoid exile with his very smart daughter Willa. Colonel Lockjaw, Bob’s old enemy, comes back after sixteen years and ruins their peaceful life off the grid. A group of former revolutionaries comes together to save the daughter of one of their own from a corrupt military officer when their evil enemy comes back after 16 years. What happens is a mix of a rescue mission, a family therapy session, and Anderson’s own brand of controlled chaos.

DiCaprio plays Bob with a twitchy realness that makes it seem like he’s really uncomfortable in his own skin. It’s a performance that shows something important about middle age: the nagging feeling that all of your beliefs from when you were young might have been ways to fool yourself. Sean Penn’s portrayal of Colonel Lockjaw makes for a particularly creepy villain. He delivers threats with a level of bureaucratic accuracy that seems disturbingly real in our time.

The technical parts of the movie help Anderson. Jonny Greenwood’s score doesn’t just go along with the action; it also argues with it, making a musical tension that keeps you off-balance the whole time. The cinematography makes violent fights look more like dance, but I think it’s debatable whether this makes the movie’s political message better or worse.

Anderson has a hard time moving between comedy and seriousness. The dialogue is great for comedy, but it doesn’t work as well when it tries to start a real rebellion. The script sometimes seems to be torn between wanting to teach and wanting to entertain. This makes the politics feel like they were added on instead of being part of the story.

The film’s refusal to give easy moral categories is what works best. Anderson paints his revolutionary characters in shades of grey, showing their naivete and selfishness instead of making them look like heroes. In a time when political stories tend to be operatic, this way of doing things feels refreshingly honest. The movie looks at whether violent resistance can ever be justified, but it doesn’t give easy answers.

But the pacing shows that Anderson sometimes gives in to his own desires. The movie is almost three hours long, and some parts of it make the audience wait. Some parts seem to be there because Anderson thought they were cool, not because they help the story move along. It’s the kind of confidence that directors have that can be both good and bad.

The movie is like a period piece about our own time, which is probably the most interesting thing about it. The political worries it talks about feel important because they are so easy to relate to. It’s too early to tell if this immediacy will help the movie in the long run, but for now, it gives the story a nervous energy that keeps you interested even when the plot gets off track.