One Battle After Another : Paul Thomas Anderson's Fiery Antifascist Epic Lights a Fuse Under 2025In an election year that's felt like a slow-motion car crash into autocracy, Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another detonates like a Molotov cocktail at a MAGA rally—provocative, exhilarating, and impossible to ignore. This 2025 action thriller, loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon's labyrinthine Vineland, marks Anderson's boldest swing yet: a three-hour adrenaline rush that transplants '60s counterculture paranoia into a near-future America teetering on the brink. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a stoner ex-radical, Sean Penn as his nightmarish nemesis, and a killer ensemble including Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Benicio del Toro, and newcomer Chase Infiniti, the film has already grossed $80 million worldwide since its September 26 premiere, with critics hailing it as a frontrunner for Best Picture. At 175 minutes, it's a sprawling beast of a movie, blending screwball comedy, heart-stopping set pieces, and unflinching political rage. Anderson, ever the formal innovator, shot in VistaVision for IMAX, turning every frame into a panoramic gut-punch. Is it his masterpiece? Close enough to make you sweat.
The plot kicks off in a hazy, off-grid California hideout where Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio), a washed-up bomb-maker from the French 75 collective—a ragtag band of Black Panthers-inspired militants—nurses his joints and grudges. Sixteen years after their botched revolution against corporate overlords, Bob's living the slacker dream with his whip-smart teen daughter, Willa (Infiniti), who's equal parts hacker prodigy and eye-rolling cynic. Their fragile peace shatters when Colonel Steven J. Quaritch (Penn), Bob's resurrected fascist foe—think a grizzled QAnon colonel with a vendetta—kidnaps Willa to lure out the old guard. Cue the frantic reunion: Bob ropes in ex-flame Perfidia (Taylor), the glamorous sharpshooter whose pregnant silhouette in fatigues becomes an iconic emblem of defiant motherhood; stoic strategist Doc (del Toro), nursing war wounds and wry one-liners; and no-nonsense medic Lila (Hall), whose quiet fury anchors the chaos.
What ensues is a cross-country odyssey of bank heists, ICE camp liberations, and sniper duels, all scored to Jonny Greenwood's propulsive, dissonant strings that evoke both There Will Be Blood's dread and Boogie Nights' groove. Anderson weaves Pynchonian threads—conspiracy webs, hallucinatory detours, even a cameo from a rapper alias Junglepussy—into a narrative that's as unpredictable as it is urgent. The script, penned solo by Anderson, crackles with dialogue that's equal parts profane poetry and agitprop: "This ain't 'Nam, Bob—it's now, and now's worse," Perfidia snaps during a rainy ambush. Yet for all its kinetic fury, the film pulses with PTA's signature intimacy, zeroing in on fractured bonds. Bob's bumbling dad-failures—fumbling a Molotov while lecturing on dialectics—mirror Leo's Inherent Vice haze, but here they're laced with real stakes: Willa's radicalization, forcing her to confront her inheritance of trauma and hope.
DiCaprio, reteaming with Anderson for the third time, delivers a career-best turn as the ultimate flawed everyman—a Big Lebowski with C4 residue on his fingers. His Bob is a monument to arrested development, eyes bloodshot with regret, yet DiCaprio infuses him with a desperate, lived-in charisma that sells every pratfall and panic attack. Penn, unrecognizable under prosthetics and a buzzcut, chews the scenery as the villainous colonel, his weird, loping gait alone earning Oscar whispers. It's a tour de force of malevolence: part Mystic River menace, part Dead Man Walking zealot, with monologues that indict modern fascism so viscerally they border on documentary. Taylor explodes as Perfidia, her machine-gun-toting mama bear a revelation—fierce, funny, and unapologetically Black, owning scenes with a ferocity that outshines her A Thousand and One breakout. Hall's Lila provides grounded gravitas, her subtle heartbreak in quiet moments cutting deeper than any explosion, while del Toro's Doc adds brooding ballast, his Oscar pedigree shining in tactical standoffs. Infiniti, as Willa, is the spark: a Gen-Z firebrand who hacks drones and drops truth bombs, her arc a poignant bridge between hippie idealism and TikTok activism.
Visually, One Battle After Another is a feast. Anderson's VistaVision lensing—reviving the widescreen format for the first time since the '50s—turns America's rust-belt sprawl into a character: rain-slicked freeways glinting like veins, fascist compounds looming like dystopian mirages, and one vertigo-inducing POV chase through a burning warehouse that demands IMAX. Greenwood's score, his sixth with PTA, marries industrial clangs to folk laments, swelling during the film's brutal climax—a Dallas ICE siege that's equal parts Sicario tension and The Battle of Algiers righteousness. The action is polished yet raw: no shaky-cam slop here, but balletic ballets of violence where every bullet sings. It's Anderson's most commercial joint, echoing Licorice Pizza's warmth amid the Phantom Thread precision, but dialed up to operatic extremes.
Thematically, this is cinema as Molotov—antifascist agitprop disguised as crowd-pleaser. Drawing from Vineland's tapestry of lost radicals, Anderson skewers white-nationalist goons as buffoonish thugs, their rallies devolving into slapstick sieges of incompetence. It's a defiant riposte to our fascist moment, portraying ex-revolutionaries not as terrorists but as flawed heroes reclaiming agency, their bank jobs funding sanctuary networks in a nod to real-world abolitionism. Yet it's no sermon; humor leavens the horror, from Bob's psychedelic weed-fueled visions to Perfidia's quips about "pregnant Rambo realness." The film grapples with inheritance—how boomer baggage burdens zoomers—ending on a note of evolutionary hope: "The fight never ends; it evolves." In a polarized fall, it's sparked backlash, with right-wing rants decrying it as "pro-terror propaganda," while lefty forums crown it the zeitgeist gut-punch we need. Box office splits along blue-red lines underscore its cultural Molotov, thriving in urban enclaves while sputtering in heartland heartlands.
Flaws? The runtime sags in the second act's conspiracy detours, Pynchon's influence occasionally knotting the plot into pretzel logic. Some relationships feel sketched—Bob and Willa's bond builds late, relying on tell-over-show. And while diverse, the militants' nobility risks noble-savage tropes, though Taylor and Hall subvert them with sharp edges.Still, One Battle After Another is a towering triumph, Anderson's most vital since There Will Be Blood, a slacker epic for doomer times that laughs in fascism's face. It's the rare film that dominates the discourse, forcing reckonings over popcorn. In theaters—IMAX, if you can—it's a communal thunderbolt, proving movies can still rally the resistance. Bob's final toast? "To the next battle." Raise a glass; we're in it.
The plot kicks off in a hazy, off-grid California hideout where Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio), a washed-up bomb-maker from the French 75 collective—a ragtag band of Black Panthers-inspired militants—nurses his joints and grudges. Sixteen years after their botched revolution against corporate overlords, Bob's living the slacker dream with his whip-smart teen daughter, Willa (Infiniti), who's equal parts hacker prodigy and eye-rolling cynic. Their fragile peace shatters when Colonel Steven J. Quaritch (Penn), Bob's resurrected fascist foe—think a grizzled QAnon colonel with a vendetta—kidnaps Willa to lure out the old guard. Cue the frantic reunion: Bob ropes in ex-flame Perfidia (Taylor), the glamorous sharpshooter whose pregnant silhouette in fatigues becomes an iconic emblem of defiant motherhood; stoic strategist Doc (del Toro), nursing war wounds and wry one-liners; and no-nonsense medic Lila (Hall), whose quiet fury anchors the chaos.
What ensues is a cross-country odyssey of bank heists, ICE camp liberations, and sniper duels, all scored to Jonny Greenwood's propulsive, dissonant strings that evoke both There Will Be Blood's dread and Boogie Nights' groove. Anderson weaves Pynchonian threads—conspiracy webs, hallucinatory detours, even a cameo from a rapper alias Junglepussy—into a narrative that's as unpredictable as it is urgent. The script, penned solo by Anderson, crackles with dialogue that's equal parts profane poetry and agitprop: "This ain't 'Nam, Bob—it's now, and now's worse," Perfidia snaps during a rainy ambush. Yet for all its kinetic fury, the film pulses with PTA's signature intimacy, zeroing in on fractured bonds. Bob's bumbling dad-failures—fumbling a Molotov while lecturing on dialectics—mirror Leo's Inherent Vice haze, but here they're laced with real stakes: Willa's radicalization, forcing her to confront her inheritance of trauma and hope.
DiCaprio, reteaming with Anderson for the third time, delivers a career-best turn as the ultimate flawed everyman—a Big Lebowski with C4 residue on his fingers. His Bob is a monument to arrested development, eyes bloodshot with regret, yet DiCaprio infuses him with a desperate, lived-in charisma that sells every pratfall and panic attack. Penn, unrecognizable under prosthetics and a buzzcut, chews the scenery as the villainous colonel, his weird, loping gait alone earning Oscar whispers. It's a tour de force of malevolence: part Mystic River menace, part Dead Man Walking zealot, with monologues that indict modern fascism so viscerally they border on documentary. Taylor explodes as Perfidia, her machine-gun-toting mama bear a revelation—fierce, funny, and unapologetically Black, owning scenes with a ferocity that outshines her A Thousand and One breakout. Hall's Lila provides grounded gravitas, her subtle heartbreak in quiet moments cutting deeper than any explosion, while del Toro's Doc adds brooding ballast, his Oscar pedigree shining in tactical standoffs. Infiniti, as Willa, is the spark: a Gen-Z firebrand who hacks drones and drops truth bombs, her arc a poignant bridge between hippie idealism and TikTok activism.
Visually, One Battle After Another is a feast. Anderson's VistaVision lensing—reviving the widescreen format for the first time since the '50s—turns America's rust-belt sprawl into a character: rain-slicked freeways glinting like veins, fascist compounds looming like dystopian mirages, and one vertigo-inducing POV chase through a burning warehouse that demands IMAX. Greenwood's score, his sixth with PTA, marries industrial clangs to folk laments, swelling during the film's brutal climax—a Dallas ICE siege that's equal parts Sicario tension and The Battle of Algiers righteousness. The action is polished yet raw: no shaky-cam slop here, but balletic ballets of violence where every bullet sings. It's Anderson's most commercial joint, echoing Licorice Pizza's warmth amid the Phantom Thread precision, but dialed up to operatic extremes.
Thematically, this is cinema as Molotov—antifascist agitprop disguised as crowd-pleaser. Drawing from Vineland's tapestry of lost radicals, Anderson skewers white-nationalist goons as buffoonish thugs, their rallies devolving into slapstick sieges of incompetence. It's a defiant riposte to our fascist moment, portraying ex-revolutionaries not as terrorists but as flawed heroes reclaiming agency, their bank jobs funding sanctuary networks in a nod to real-world abolitionism. Yet it's no sermon; humor leavens the horror, from Bob's psychedelic weed-fueled visions to Perfidia's quips about "pregnant Rambo realness." The film grapples with inheritance—how boomer baggage burdens zoomers—ending on a note of evolutionary hope: "The fight never ends; it evolves." In a polarized fall, it's sparked backlash, with right-wing rants decrying it as "pro-terror propaganda," while lefty forums crown it the zeitgeist gut-punch we need. Box office splits along blue-red lines underscore its cultural Molotov, thriving in urban enclaves while sputtering in heartland heartlands.
Flaws? The runtime sags in the second act's conspiracy detours, Pynchon's influence occasionally knotting the plot into pretzel logic. Some relationships feel sketched—Bob and Willa's bond builds late, relying on tell-over-show. And while diverse, the militants' nobility risks noble-savage tropes, though Taylor and Hall subvert them with sharp edges.Still, One Battle After Another is a towering triumph, Anderson's most vital since There Will Be Blood, a slacker epic for doomer times that laughs in fascism's face. It's the rare film that dominates the discourse, forcing reckonings over popcorn. In theaters—IMAX, if you can—it's a communal thunderbolt, proving movies can still rally the resistance. Bob's final toast? "To the next battle." Raise a glass; we're in it.