ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER - Review

I walked into the theater like a man stumbling into the wrong war, and already suspicious of the promise that Paul Thomas Anderson had finally delivered his “big one.” Three hours later I stumbled out, ears ringing, heart pounding, like I’d just been sucker-punched by a marching band, a riot police phalanx, and a gospel choir all at once.

This isn’t a movie. It’s a fever. A delirium dream stitched together from the scraps of every broken American ideal. The screen doesn’t so much tell a story as it grabs you by the throat, slams your head against the wall, and whispers, “Look at the wreckage, you bastard, look at it.”

Leonardo DiCaprio, God bless his strange old face, doesn’t play a character so much as he oozes into one. His Bob Ferguson is a man who used to believe in something before the wheels came off, before his daughter showed up like a mirror he never wanted to look into. Every line out of his mouth drips with the sweat of lost revolutions and bad whiskey. It’s messy. It’s raw. It’s real enough to smell.

Chase Infiniti embodies Willa with a dangerous quiet. She anchors the thing, though “anchor” is the wrong word. She’s more like a tuning fork. The world around her rattles and shrieks, but she hums in a register that makes the madness feel almost holy. Their scenes together cut through the chaos like a shard of glass through flesh: painful, but you can’t look away.

PTA shoots it like a man possessed. Half the time it feels like you’re watching cinema. The other half, it feels like you’ve hacked into God’s home movies. One minute you’re laughing at the absurdity of a political speech turned bloodsport, the next you’re gagging on the acrid smoke of a city burning down in its own contradictions. He has weaponized tonal whiplash.

But here’s the thing: it’s too long. It drags. You can feel the seams, the stretches of indulgence where Anderson just couldn’t kill his darlings. You forgive him though...because when the movie sings, it sings like a choir of the damned,

but you feel it. The indulgence. The bloat. Like every war story told at a bar that goes one anecdote too far.

One Battle After Another does have an elephant in its room: the politics of it all. They don’t play coy. They don’t flirt. They don’t “leave space for interpretation.” Painted across the screen in crude graffiti: fascism, revolution, the heavy burden of the past. They come roaring out of the screen with the blunt force of a Molotov cocktail lobbed through the stained-glass window of a cathedral. PTA isn’t just showing us a family saga or a revolution in miniature—he’s showing us America as it is: a cracked funhouse mirror where every face is distorted by ideology, rage, and the sickly glow of late-stage capitalism.

Ferguson isn’t just a burned-out radical, he’s the ghost of every failed movement that thought it could change the system from within. He’s the 1960s idealist beaten down into a middle-aged cynic, dragging his daughter through the wreckage of promises never kept. Watching him stumble through the film is like watching the American left itself; gasping, coughing, full of slogans but short on oxygen.

And then there’s the other side: the smirking bureaucrats, the strongmen in expensive suits, the police lines drawn like jagged teeth across the streets. Anderson doesn’t name names, but you don’t have to squint too hard to see a certain someone's coiffed shadow in the boardroom, a governor's sneer behind the podium, and a thousand lesser goons with badges, gavels, and guns making sure the whole carnival keeps its gates opened.

But here’s the trick: PTA doesn’t make it simple. The revolutionaries aren’t clean heroes, the fascists aren’t cartoon villains. Everyone’s compromised. Everyone’s bloody. It’s not good versus evil, it’s rot versus rot, fighting for who gets to wear the crown when the kingdom finally collapses. That’s the real horror: you don’t walk away with answers, you walk away realizing you’re trapped inside the same meat grinder, just waiting your turn.

By the end, you don’t know if you’ve watched a film or survived an ambush. You’re exhausted, exhilarated, maybe even a little sick. But isn’t that what great art is supposed to do?