This review spoils parts of the film. Do not let that limit your excitement to watch it.
When he sees a rusted yellow sign rising from the sagebrush scrub with arrows pointing in both directions, Bob Ferguson’s face collapses. The crossroad wrings the wild-eyed determination out, leaving only anguish on his face. Driving a stolen car after an endless day of desperate escape, this sign is a gut-punch, a two-way dead end. He has no lead on where to go, no logic to follow or skidmarks twisting one way or another. His ability to find his daughter, who’s been kidnapped by his nemesis, is tossed to the wind, left to that improbable alchemy of chance and instinct.
This is the moment that will linger longest from Paul Thomas Anderson’s new masterpiece One Battle After Another. The prior forty-odd minutes churn with enough velocity and power—a parkour run across rooftops, an escape from a hospital, a phone finally charged, a car chase, a violent attack on protesters, another car chase, a leap from said car, a third car chase—that your eyes develop involuntary nystagmus and your heart beats like a hummingbird’s. You can’t remember when you last breathed. And at this crossroads, you still don’t. But the reason changes. Ferguson slows down, sees those crossroads, and realizes he might not find his daughter. She might be lost, dead, worse.
Ferguson drives a bit down one path, sees some folks sitting on the roadside, and asks in broken Spanish where the car he’s chasing went. The other way, they say. And the chase begins again. The frame shakes with the car; the theatre hums like it’s inside the engine.
The hype for this movie is real. One Battle After Another is an action movie fit for a cinephile, an arthouse flick for the layman. It is a satire laced with drama, a tragedy that will make you cackle. It’s 162 minutes of excellence. It’s the best movie of the decade.
The film opens with the French 75, a far-left revolutionary organization, raiding a detention center and freeing hundreds of detained migrants. Ferguson—then known as Ghetto Pat, played excellently by Leonardo DiCaprio—and his partner, Perfidia Beverly Hills, go from explosion to explosion, destroying powerlines and banks and government buildings. This first section proceeds with montage-like velocity, dynamite blasts bouncing viewers from battle to battle with rollicking energy.
The remaining two hours hardly slow down. After the French 75 are forced to disband by the passionately-devoted Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (played by a terrific Sean Penn looking and acting as freakish as a more menacing RFK, Jr.), Pat, along with Perfidia’s daughter, flee to the hills and live for 16 years in paranoid quietude until Lockjaw eventually returns with a militia and a vengeance. He arrives in their town maybe forty-five minutes in, precipitating a series of cat-and-mouse chases which last until the film’s final moments. This nearly two-hour stretch covers hardly 24 hours of character-time, immersing the audience in anxiety, fear, and the ever-present threat of death.
But the film’s genius? Written into every instance of such havoc are the tragedies and ecstasies of the characters. Screenwriting manuals dictate that all scenes should either inform character development or push the plot, with the best doing both. In most movies so propelled by action, these are mutually exclusive until the final, pivotal moment, when everything seems dire unless the hero can achieve personal growth and act selflessly. But Anderson’s characters are not self-centered enough to experience their acts of violence as either heroic or moments for personal growth: the drowning man does not ponder the metaphors of water—he just swims for his fucking life. The fight to reclaim his daughter from Lockjaw’s racist hands certainly changes Ferguson, but not in ways he realizes.Anderon’s a shrewd enough director to let his more observant audience-members catch the changes as they come.
Subtlety also rules Anderson’s political angle. Or, more aptly, angles: as one must expect from him, the ideologies beneath his keen critical eye tweak with every passing scene, each the complex web of a kaleidoscope twist. Some are less complicated than others: Lockjaw is undeniably a racist tool, and the Christmas Adventurers clearly reflect society’s truest scourge— that bad stupid people wield excessive power badly and stupidly, face no consequences, and emerge scathed only by satire.
But how Anderson treats his revolutionaries defies dogma. His critical eye trains at times on everyone: on Perfidia’s over-commitment and thus neglect of her family, on Ferguson’s resistance to change, on their daughter Willa’s confused priorities. At one point, as one battle rages outside, Ferguson calls the revolutionary hotline, and is denied knowledge of where his daughter is being taken because he’s high and can’t remember the last in a string of password phrases. The operator is persnickety and chastising, with a pedantry that is the calling card of young Internet leftists. Cut to their headquarters, and this pedant is an old pony-tailed man clearly in it for the righteousness, not the cause. How radicalism shifts over time is on Anderson’s mind, but he shrugs off any tropes of generational contention, and refuses anything pat enough to call a single argument.
These are characters crafted real enough to resist certainties. Characters who reflect the diversity of the revolution—in age, in race, and in commitment to the cause—but never allow themselves to be limited to these identities. Every part of the tightly-wound plot hinges on Willa’s race, but her decision-making, her personal arc is, in many ways, only vaguely related. Her mind is focussed on the individuals of her family, and on survival. The political and personal, like the thrill and the heart, are so entangled they become indistinguishable.
This film drops into the center of a rash of recent speculative political movies—Don’t Look Up, and Civil War—and blasts them all into irrelevance. It will steal your breath and make you wheeze. It will batter you so hard you cry, then, when you dry your eyes, you will be moved to weeping. It is a film for the times, an overwhelm of character and action and theme that flings you every which way before slamming you with the final title card: One Battle After Another. You are exhausted, you have experienced more thrill and pain than a life should ever contain. Still, you know the fight is not over. The rusted yellow sign points only one direction: forward.
An Editor-in-Chief, 2025-2026.
