One Battle After Another Review: The Battle That Hit Too Close To Home
- Suria Rai
- Oct 8
- 3 min read
Is One Battle After Another the next chapter in Paul Thomas Anderson’s ongoing portrait of the American psyche? Our Film & TV Writer, Suria, attended the premiere screening. Here are her thoughts:
When the credits rolled, I remained seated for a moment longer, still catching my breath. I felt like I’d just come out of a storm – soaked, a little disoriented, and weirdly alive. It’s no secret that Paul Thomas Anderson has always made films that pulled his audience in two directions at once. Toward the chaos of the world he’s building and toward the quiet human pulse underneath.
Until his commemorative new release, the filmmaker had set only one narrative feature film in the 21st century. Punch-Drunk Love (2002) felt more like a timeless oddity than a reflection of its era. What came after was There Will Be Blood (2007), a feverish origin myth of the birth of American capitalism. Inherent Vice (2014), a woozy elegy for the faded utopias of ‘60s counterculture, and Licorice Pizza (2021), a sun-drenched bittersweet love story that unfolds against the backdrop of the 1973 oil crisis. Together, these films trace Anderson's enduring fixation with the undercurrents of America — its greed and yearning, its nostalgia and delusion, and the cults of personality that continue to shape its collective consciousness.
Enter: One Battle After Another. Anderson’s most explicit political statement yet. Loosely drawn from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1984), the film lands with the force of both a fiery rebuttal and a disarmingly sincere acknowledgement of its critiques. Played with weary intensity by Leonardo DiCaprio, Bob Ferguson embodies this repetition. He’s a man who once believed in revolution, who once fought to tear down cages, and who now finds himself years later wanting to carve out a fragile sense of normalcy for his daughter. He wants to put his past away. But the past, however, refuses to stay buried. His battles return, re-embodied in new forms, fresh leaders, recycled policies that echo the old ones. Watching Ferguson flinch at the resurgence of Colonel Lockjaw’s militarized campaign felt less like fiction and more like déjà vu from present day’s headlines: harsher crackdowns, shrill political theater, and the drumbeat of walls and mass deportation dressed up as new solutions.
On the other hand, Sean Penn’s portrayal of Colonel Lockjaw is brilliant. He’s grotesque. He’s absurd. He’s a tyrant obsessed with rewriting history to serve his own myth. But maybe we can agree that absurdity is the point because Anderson seems to be asking: what happens when political theater stops being laughable and starts being law? In Lockjaw, I saw shades of the strongmen and demagogues that dominate headlines — figures who thrive on spectacle, who turn cruelty into entertainment, and who exploit fear of “the other” to consolidate power. To many, he might seem like a character who is too absurd to be real – you might laugh at him, then shudder, then laugh again – until you realize he embodies exactly the kind of myth-making and power-lust the film wants us to be wary of.
Visually, Anderson works in contrast. His camera glides through scenes in long, hypnotic sweeps before collapsing into sweaty close-ups followed by moments of stillness punctured by blasts of chaos as Jonny Greenwood’s score threads through it all, more pulse than soundtrack. It is a reminder that tension can hum as much as it can roar. As admirable as this film is, I won’t pretend it is flawless. It’s long, uneven, sometimes deliberately messy, and there are stretches where its pacing stumbles, where satire and melodrama bleed together in ways that left me wondering what tone Anderson was reaching for. But the rough edges felt, in a way, like part of the experience.
One Battle After Another isn’t just a movie about fighting. It’s a nudge that the battles over borders, belonging, and humanity are ongoing; that each generation will have to decide whether to inherit the fight or surrender it. At last, I believe the question that Anderson leaves us with is the one we most want to avoid: how many more battles will it take before something actually changes?''
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