Movie Review: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Action-Packed Blockbuster Captures the Relentless Overstimulation of 2025

Bob wasn’t always so overwhelmed by life, though. He wasn’t always Bob Ferguson, either. When One Battle After Another begins, we’re introduced to him as “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, explosives specialist and promising terrorist. Excitable and uncontainable—yelling cliche phrases like “¡Viva la revolución!”—Pat drags a red wagon of incendiaries to his first mission with the French 75, a band of revolutionaries led by the otherworldly badass Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor).

That first mission, an early morning rescue of immigrants from a border detention facility, proceeds with the hum and tension of an epic crime thriller. Pat is eager and wild-eyed, bursting with urges: to destroy, to revolt, to grope. He’s swiftly entranced by Perfidia, who espouses a radical Black feminist and anarchist ideology that Pat seems to only kinda understand. He hollers about how much he loves Black girls. Together and with their friends, they carve out big changes in the world.

Or at least they believe they do. Complicating Perfidia’s commitment to her cause is Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a walking carbuncular manifestation of American imperialism with whom she shares a foul electric psychosexual connection. He offers her a deal to turn informant, which they consummate with an affair that, as sexual compulsions are typically wont to do, contradicts all taste and reason. Sad hotel rooms are haunted by Lockjaw’s grotesque O-face.

Perfidia, to her credit, seems to believe that she is actually controlling Lockjaw with her sexuality. Taylor is commanding, wielding her body, the physicality of all that Lockjaw hates, to reduce him (and likely some of the audience) to a fleshy pile of contradictory beliefs.

But Lockjaw is America, and the majority of white men in the film express their inner selves as soldiers, murderers, mercenaries, bearded fuckheads, or, like Bob, well-meaning dopes. The many Black women that populate the rest of the film—including Regina Hall as level-headed French 75 member Deanna and Junglepussy (AKA Shayna McHayle) as flamboyant French 75 member Junglepussy—exist in direct contrast to the glut of toxic masculinity.

Anderson has never been an overtly political filmmaker, and One Battle After Another’s politics are a stew of clashing ingredients, especially as Lockjaw’s ties to a secret society of white supremacists, the Christmas Adventurers, lay bare his unmitigated drive to possess Black and brown bodies.

Penn, in what may turn out to be the greatest performance of his career, inhabits Lockjaw as if a younger, freer version of himself—Spicoli, maybe, from Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)—is trying to escape his veiny, upsettingly muscled skin. He is repression, rage, and shame boiled in a saltless pot with stewed tomatoes. A ridiculous, pathetic, and scarily powerful man, he’s a source of humor as much as terror. His words come out like chunks of coal, rattled through the rock tumbler of his calcified esophagus.

Obsessed with both close-ups and California vistas during golden hour, One Battle After Another is as expansive as it is intimate. Filmed in 35 mm in VistaVision with Licorice Pizza cinematographer Michael Bauman, it’s meant to be seen with a crowd in front of a big, overstimulating screen. Running 35 mm stock horizontally through special cameras, VistaVision allows the film to be projected in much higher-resolution formats, like IMAX and 70 mm, without sacrificing 35 mm film’s grain and romance.

With such a vast canvas, Anderson stages car chases, robberies, and shoot-outs as generous, occasionally old-fashioned blockbuster spectacles. Likewise, he sets up undocumented internment camps as immersive environments through which soldiers, and the audience following behind, blithely walk. Seen in a theater, cages reach from the floor to the ceiling.

So, from an opening salvo of hungry energy, highlighting the exploits of the French 75, Anderson’s latest sprawling slice-of-life epic unfolds. Amidst bank bombings and attacks on the electrical grid, Pat and Perfidia fall exuberantly in love. They can’t keep their hands off each other; Perfidia’s soon pregnant.

Unfortunately, the child may not be Pat’s, and Perfidia’s relationship with Lockjaw means the end of both the French 75 and her family. She leaves Pat and their daughter to go into witness protection. Knowing Lockjaw’s keeping tabs, Pat (the infant for whom he is now sole caretaker swaddled next to him in a laundry basket for a carseat) drives to northern California, the town of Baktan Cross. There he transforms into Bob Ferguson, just an aging burnout making a chill life for his daughter Willa via that Humboldt County lifestyle.

Fifteen years pass. Sanded down by decades of drugs and alcohol, his every day pleasantly dulled by the verdant mist of the surrounding coastal forest, Bob’s memory and passion for revolution have become a kind of functional paranoia.

Of course, Lockjaw returns, and the film’s plot continues to unspool, including a monastery of nuns and a benevolent karate instructor Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro, angelic) who calmly shepherds an immigrant underground railroad. When the now teenaged Willa (Chase Infiniti) is kidnapped, Bob’s got to shake himself off the couch, cut through the fog of his past to remember the revolutionary spirit of Ghetto Pat (as well as a few of French 75’s old code words) and save her.

Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, One Battle After Another makes contemporary Pynchon’s reality-bending yarn about ‘60s revolutionaries drying and/or hiding out in the Reagan era. Like in previous Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice (2014), Anderson necessarily cuts out a lot.

Anderson’s always been attracted to big ensemble casts, winding narratives, and grand historical milieus (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood) like his hero Robert Altman, but in the past decade or so, he’s been especially concerned with pursuing the spirit of his other hero Jonathan Demme, holding empathy for all of his characters, however evil or destructive or self-involved (The Master, Phantom Thread). So, Bob’s journey is a farce, family drama, western myth, psychedelic road movie, and ’70s action flick wherein he meets not archetypes, but uniquely drawn personalities and people with weird names.

With all this to balance, One Battle After Another can be an odd tonal hang, the plot’s inertia shifting continuously between genres. Deftly, Anderson anchors the Pynchonian, multicultural glut in a father-daughter relationship, the bond between Bob and Willa.

In turn, DiCaprio and Infiniti are loving and wonderful together. The latest in his string of kinda-shitty white guy roles (see: Killers of the Flower Moon, Don’t Look Up), DiCaprio’s is the kind of exquisite face that must be witnessed large. The purply alcoves of his eye sockets, limned in dry, weather-beaten passages of skin, creased more than speckled by obsoletely styled facial hair, still obviously handsome and well-aged but with eyes now muddy—he has a broadly, deeply, understandably everyguy face. One built for massive movie screens and digitally upscaled details.

In that face—lined, lived in, and as sinewy as the up-and-down roads of northern California, on which One Battle After Another reaches its climax—Anderson captures the distinct anxiety of parenting, or, for that matter, of simply taking care of another person in 2025: knowing that the dangers of the world are real, and they’ll come for the people you love.

Rather than wallow in despair, Anderson magnifies that modern dread into some of the year’s most moving action-adventure. Without a salient message or call to arms, One Battle After Another is instead a spectacularly cinematic panorama of American political violence.