Vague Visages’ One Battle After Another review contains minor spoilers. Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2025 movie features Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Few directors wear their influences on their sleeves as openly as Paul Thomas Anderson; only his friend Quentin Tarantino even comes up in the conversation when discussing major auteurs whose distinctive styles are built entirely from overt homage. But whereas Tarantino’s philosophies and quirks can often be heard pouring out of the mouths of his characters in each fast-paced dialogue exchange, you’d be hard pressed to find any similar example of Anderson placing himself in the shoes of genre movie protagonists he grew up idolizing. He’s a San Fernando Valley native who, up until this point, appears to have suggested that the film with the closest personal correlation to his life is the London-set Phantom Thread (2017), which he’s characterized as a romantic comedy loosely inspired by the time his wife (the actress Maya Rudolph) looked after him when he came down with the flu. It’s a period drama set in the 1950s fashion world in which the uptight protagonist’s partner poisons him with mushrooms so he won’t take her caring for granted. Unsurprisingly, a direct autobiography is something Anderson’s work has frequently proved he couldn’t be less interested in.

With One Battle After Another, Anderson uses the skeleton of Thomas Pynchon’s satirical 1990 novel Vineland — an expansive tale about a group of 1960s American idealists being targeted in a sting operation — to tell what appears to be his most nakedly personal tale to date. Updating the novel’s setting to a California that could either be a post-Donald Trump dystopia or a snapshot of any period following the paranoid outbreak of George W. Bush’s War on Terror, the rallying cries of its leftist revolutionary protagonists are less impactful than the family drama it’s all grounded within. The reason many have been quick to embrace a film with very purposefully divisive politics is the overriding sentiment of a father (Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson, in another stellar performance likely to be underrated) reckoning with his daughter’s safety in an authoritarian world he wasn’t powerful enough to stop coming into being. That this is a white father with a biracial daughter whose life experiences will be more difficult than he can immediately comprehend suggests that, even if Bob is far from a director surrogate, he’s a fleshed-out personification of Anderson’s own parental anxieties as a father of mixed-race children. The director may often hide his emotions under the veil of homage; however, with One Battle After Mother, he’s never been more openly sentimental, at least since his 1999 film Magnolia.

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One Battle After Another’s extensive opening prologue focuses on Ghetto Pat (the former alias of DiCaprio’s character) and his partner Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), who lead the revolutionary group French ‘75. Introduced freeing masses of immigrants from a detention center near the Mexican border, the group crosses paths with Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), an openly racist and high-ranking figure who nevertheless fetishizes Black women (his first introduction to Perfidia at gunpoint immediately ignites a sexual obsession). It’s something of a victory for media literacy that the framing of these sequences hasn’t yet led to accusations that Anderson plays into the very behavior he’s satirizes, with one POV shot from Lockjaw’s perspective lingering on Taylor’s posterior like the heroine of a Michael Bay Transformers movie. Lockjaw’s racism clouds that he’s a misogynist too, and witnessing the strong women of the French ‘75 turns him on — not through the idea of them domineering him, but through the idea that he’d be the one able to control them. And seeing Pat embrace Perfidia seconds later throws hot water on that fantasy.

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Pat and Perfidia have a daughter, but as the latest in a long family line of revolutionaries, Taylor’s character doesn’t want to settle down and be a parent. A failed heist leads to her capture by Lockjaw, her safety only guaranteed by ratting on her group members (who are subsequently executed one by one) before fleeing to Mexico, where she’s never heard of again. Pat is given a new identity for himself and his daughter before he can be killed. Suddenly, Anderson picks up 16 years when the now teenage Willa (Chase Infiniti) is being hunted down by Lockjaw and a justice department looking to tie up some loose ends, which include finally tracking down the revolutionary now known as Bob.

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Pynchon’s source novel is labyrinthine, a series of richly detailed and intersecting anecdotes surrounding a revolutionary group which doesn’t have ramifications in its present day until the very last chapters. One Battle After Another doesn’t devote time to character backstories, as exposition only appears within propulsive action sequences, but the film does share Pynchon’s fascination with the secret societies formed in the crevices of this dystopia. In Vineland, much ink was spilled building out various government initiatives, leading up to expansive side plots centered around creations like College of the Surf, an institution designed to lure society’s idealists and transform them into Nixonian government stooges. Anderson, on the other hand, is a far more lowbrow storyteller, which I say as a compliment. He waters down the elaborate, period-specific satire for broader gags, like a white supremacist society known as the Christmas Adventurers Club, which Lockjaw is desperate to become a member of.

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Anderson’s simplifying of denser satirical ideas is, of course, a likely byproduct of having a $130 million studio budget, but more crucially, it’s because the kind of right-wing authoritarianism being parodied has grown even less sophisticated since the 1990 publication of Pynchon’s novel. Refreshingly, there is no overt Trump parallel in One Battle After Another (Mickey 17, this is thankfully not), nor are there references to the MAGA movement, with Lockjaw and his deep-state networks all representing the kind of ridiculousness within contemporary fascism that has made many disarmed to the evil of the politics they represent. Penn’s character is written as the same kind of macho alpha male as a Vladimir Putin or a Jair Bolsonaro, yet he’s styled as something far more flamboyant, with a penchant for wearing tight t-shirts which occasionally bring his sexuality into question. Colonel Lockjaw immediately looks immediately, and Penn leans into this with a silent comedy physicality to his every movement. And yet this laughable exterior does little to hide the insidiousness of the character’s politics. Even if viewers might laugh at Colonel Lockjaw, Anderson is keen to remind audiences that viewing fascist figures in this way, divorced from their beliefs, does nothing to stop their abhorrent worldviews from becoming normalized.

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DiCaprio’s Bob is also a laughable figure, the personification of the long-standing observation that left-wing movements are always derailed by the lack of basic organization skills from everybody involved in them. But even as he’s also a hot-tempered man out of time — at one point yelling at his daughter’s boyfriend in a doorway like Martin Lawrence’s Marcus Burnett in the 2003 film Bad Boys II, because, yes, there are numerous parallels to Michael Bay’s oeuvre here — Anderson has no interest in taking the toothless mentality of many a political satire and suggesting both sides are as bad as each other. Bob is unsuited to the rescue operation he’s entrusted with, but his return to the world of underground revolutionaries — which, now as a crotchety middle-aged man, he’s frequently irritated by — isn’t pitched as a joke at the expense of such movements. Instead, through the eyes of a man who grew disillusioned with the revolutionary life, Anderson allows audiences to view the stakes from a father’s perspective, rather than a wannabe Che Guevara’s. The personal and the political are always entwined in One Battle After Another, but there’s an elegance in how the writer/director manages to re-contextualize a heightened war between rivaling factions as straightforwardly humanist without watering down any of the characters’ world views. Even as the film is nakedly about a father’s struggle to save his daughter, Anderson wants viewers to meet the protagonist on his political terms, which –even as he’s grown older and grumpier — are still further to the left than most of the likely audience.

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Is it a surprise that a movie which feels like such a powder keg in the current moment has become universally embraced? Undoubtedly. And a critical anomaly like Anderson’s 2025 film couldn’t be more welcome, as there’s an appetite for cinema that isn’t afraid to address the divisions of the modern era without hiding behind an allegory. In One Battle After Another, the political is inextricable from the personal, in a way that transcends a mere commentary on Trump’s America. If we woke up tomorrow in a utopia, Anderson’s father/daughter tale would resonate just as strongly as it does right now.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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