One Battle After Another Review: There Will Be Revolution

Paul Thomas Anderson spent years wrestling with adapting Thomas Pynchon‘s Vineland before abandoning a direct adaptation to create something more personal and immediate. The result is One Battle After Another, a $175 million Warner Bros. production filmed in VistaVision that transforms revolutionary themes into Anderson’s most kinetic and accessible work. There’s a moment when a character frantically searches for a forgotten password—a throwaway joke that somehow distills the entire vibe of Anderson’s most politically charged film to date. It’s Anderson in revolution mode, but channeling the propulsive energy of edge of your seat entertainment like Terminator 2: fueled by paranoia, sharp with satire, and always in motion.

Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street) lives off-grid in paranoid isolation, raising teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti, Presumed Innocent) while trying to forget his violent past with revolutionary group French 75. When his nemesis Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn, Daddio) resurfaces after sixteen years, this former explosives expert gets dragged back into a world of militias and underground networks. What follows is relentless forward momentum as Bob scrambles to rescue his daughter while confronting the bloody consequences of choices made decades earlier.

Unsurprisingly for a PTA film, the casting proves inspired across the board. DiCaprio delivers his most physically comedic performance in years, wobbling around in a plaid robe as a burnt-out revolutionary too stoned to change channels yet too terrified to ignore what The Battle of Algiers teaches about legacy. He’s hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time, a man sprinting from a past he helped build while maintaining fierce paternal love that anchors the entire narrative.

The real discovery is Infiniti, commanding the screen in her debut as Willa. She holds her own against seasoned veterans, sharing familial warmth with DiCaprio that makes their eventual separation devastating. Penn proves unrecognizable as the cartoonishly awful Lockjaw, a military creep whose racist obsession with revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills (a fascinatingly complex Teyana Taylor, A Thousand and One) drives the narrative’s psychological horror. Benicio del Toro (Reptile) has visible fun as martial arts instructor Sergio St. Carlos, while Taylor blazes through her scenes as the brilliant Perfidia, though the script frustratingly limits her screen time. Regina Hall (Girls Trip) peels back layers as underground operative Deandra, but her character feels somewhat underwritten compared to the care lavished elsewhere.

Cinematographer Michael Bauman, returning from Licorice Pizza, captures both intimate domestic moments and large-scale action with remarkable skill. The desert car chase sequence in the finale becomes a masterclass in nail-biting filmmaking, transforming winding roads into landscapes of pure velocity and danger. Florencia Martin‘s production design creates believable worlds ranging from Bob’s cluttered hideout to sterile immigration facilities, grounding political themes in tactile reality.

Yet Jonny Greenwood‘s score proves genuinely problematic. His repetitive piano motifs, mixed at conversation levels, create constant audio competition that exhausts viewers trying to parse dialogue. Whether this represents poor sound editing or misguided composition remains unclear, but the effect significantly undermines otherwise excellent technical craft. It’s the film’s most glaring flaw in an otherwise sterling production.

Anderson demonstrates remarkable control over complex narrative threads, weaving together family drama, political thriller, and dark comedy without losing focus. The 162-minute runtime flies by thanks to genuine unpredictability and emotional investment in character outcomes. Unlike some of Anderson’s more cerebral earlier works, this film grabs audiences immediately and maintains its grip through increasingly high stakes.

The political dimensions feel urgent without becoming preachy. Anderson explores how power structures manipulate historical truth while ordinary people struggle against institutional violence. The revolutionary characters occupy moral gray areas—technically criminals, but fighting systems designed to crush the powerless. It’s oddly liberating to be sitting in a theater in late 2025 watching revolutionaries challenge systems designed to benefit only the powerful. These questions about resistance versus complicity resonate particularly strongly given current global tensions around immigration, authoritarianism, and grassroots organizing. Anderson imagines active resistance over passive acceptance, with a Black woman leading the charge, raising bold questions that demand serious consideration.

One Battle After Another represents Anderson’s most complete achievement, balancing artistic ambition with emotional accessibility. The film succeeds as both visceral entertainment and serious political statement, refusing easy answers while demanding audience engagement with difficult questions. It’s undoubtedly his most urgently necessary work, one that feels essential to our historical moment while transcending specific political movements.

This is filmmaking that matters. It feels like a punch you can’t stop throwing, and one you’ll be glad you landed. As we rationalize information control, sanitized history, and state-sponsored erasure, this movie argues that revolution might just begin with remembering. With refusing to forget. And with realizing that maybe, just maybe, the so-called “bad guys” are the ones rewriting the rules.