One Battle After Another

• Written, Directed, and Co-Produced by Paul Thomas Anderson
• September 8, 2025 (TCL Chinese Theatre) / September 26, 2025 (US)
• Based on the 1990 novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

A revolutionary in hiding is forced to take action when he and his daughter are hunted by a corrupt military officer.

One Battle After Another is clearly a message movie. You can’t miss that though you might be a little confused in the first five minutes when French 75 member Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) while breaking into the minimum security Otay Mesa Detention Center makes facility head Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) produce a Woodrow.

The story gets into racism, bodily autonomy, and immigration with the revolutionaries who act more like anarchists that are framed as being on the side of good. If anything these revolutionaries are largely dysfunctional people with drug problems, weird kinks, and perhaps serious personal issues. Then again the other side tends to just lack drug issues. So the baddies have fewer personal flaws?

Despite a title like One Battle After Another it’s an incredibly slow-moving film. Not a great deal happens for long stretches. Paul Thomas Anderson shows you the minutia of everything. Most of what he shows is boring. It has interesting soundtrack but you could’ve cut 45 minutes from this movie and had a much more interesting film that was still trying to say what it was trying to say. The point of the story gets lost in a vast soup of nothing. Makes one think a director known for quirky movies should avoid action like a vampire would an Italian restaurant.

We see extended scenes involving walking to and from. We watch every step along the stairs or across the street or whatever they display. Being pithy in film is a necessity. Not overtly to the point you leave out important things, but you cannot show so much you have diarrhea of the scene.

Some of the character names come off as, well, stupid. I have not read the 1990 novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon upon which this is based so some or all could come from that but great googley moogley are they stupid. Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and Perfidia Beverly Hills aside, we have characters with names like “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun/“Rocketman”/Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), “Mae West” (Alana Haim), “Junglepussy” (Shayna McHayle), and the white supremacist Christmas Adventurers Club.

DiCaprio is the major figure around whom the story revolves though he is an incompetent drug addict causing you to ask yourself how he survived or even gained any adulation. He seems inordinately paired with a hype man (for him) named Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) that teaches Karatedo to DiCaprio’s daughter (Chase Infiniti).

For purposes of satire or social commentary it offers new. There is no real humor. It doesn’t even offer snark. It offers caricatures. Boring caricatures. Jokes never land. The messages it wishes to serve the audience are shoved down your throat like an unwanted prison experience with you feeling only slightly less shame and anger having gone through it.

I believe One Battle After Another is my first Paul Thomas Anderson movie and it could very well be my last. It’s pretentious and full of itself and rubs its messages and points in your face. You need to start with a good story and this has the idea of a good story but decides to put message over story.

I found myself forgetting I was watching the movie while my mind drifted off and created a better movie to shield me from this tripe. These revolutionaries stood for nothing other than to be against whatever the authorities were for. Lockjaw and pals were two dimensional evil people that sought to oppress and control and be hypocrites because  that is what they did.

I wouldn’t call it predictable but it was quite annoying. Not derivative but it felt cliché. Not serious but I wouldn’t call it funny. While not 100% woke, it is a cure for insomnia. I could go on and on about how terrible this movie was, but I decided not to. Just everything wrong with modern movies.

One Battle After Another is perhaps the largest disappointment of the year for me. Dull, boring, and just not worth the 2+ hours I put into it.