Culture
‘One Battle After Another’: a tense and timely look at America at war
By: Gordon Briggs
Posted on:
This movie is wild.
Right from its fluid opening sequence, where we see a group of revolutionaries raid a detention center, it’s clear One Battle After Another is going to be an action movie with a pulse.
In adapting Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, director Paul Thomas Anderson and his collaborators have succeeded where others have failed. They have created an entertaining genre film that works as entertainment, while still holding a mirror up to an ideologically divided America to show us a country that seems hell bent on civil war. The credit for the film’s success should go to its performances, technical skill, and timeliness, which seem ripped right from our current headlines.
Here, we follow a group of revolutionaries known as the French 75, who resemble ’60s-’70s radicals like the Weather Underground as they wage a type of urban warfare on the banks and the security state. At first, revolution is sexy. We meet characters like Perfidia Beverly Hills (a very effective Teyana Taylor) who seem genuinely aroused by planting bombs and robbing banks.
However, the question this story asks is, “what happens when the revolution fails and the fascists win?”
As the story unfolds, a frenzied Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob, a former revolutionary turned stoner trying to track down his missing daughter, all while a fascistic pervert (a creepy and cartoonish Sean Penn) is in hot pursuit. That may sound like other movies, but DiCaprio’s soldier is more like the Dude from Big Lebowski than your typical action hero. His twitchy paranoia, combined with the escalating series of break-ins, escapes, and police raids around him, gives this movie an energy and immediacy that other films just don’t have. For example, I loved those scenes where Bob is desperately trying to remember his former group’s secret code language, but can’t.
As impressive as the performances are, I also want to acknowledge the film’s clear technical skill. Anderson is a natural cinematographer. Together with Michael Bauman, who worked on the director’s previous film Licorice Pizza, they give the film a tactile and visceral quality. When designing chaotic action scenes, shots won’t be overly edited. Instead, the camerawork is intended to be enveloping and immersive, creating a visceral experience that overwhelms the viewer without losing focus on the clarity of what a character is doing.
The extended section of the film, where DiCaprio’s character tries to escape the city in the midst of a riot, glides us through hallways, up rooftops, and down dark alleys in a fluid style that echoes the immediacy of documentary filmmaking.
More importantly, the movie feels timely. With its various underground tunnels, warring extremist groups, and hidden bunkers, the movie works as genre entertainment while making some lucid points about how more Americans, right and left, are isolated within their own ideological bunkers. As of now, it’s a standout film of 2025.
Rating: ★★★★