“One Battle After Another:”Revolution is not won or lost — it’s sustained.

 There are films that refuse to simply tell a story — they aim to open a wound in the collective conscience. One Battle After Another is one of them. Paul Thomas Anderson returns to the dark heart of America with a film that is at once a political outcry, an elegy for betrayed ideals, and a symphony about memory. His cinema has always been about bodies that resist, but here that resistance becomes explicitly moral: it’s no longer about love or domination, but about remembering — about refusing to be tamed by oblivion.

Anderson has never made the same film twice, yet all his works speak to one another, like stations along a single, restless journey toward truth. From the sprawling chaos of Magnolia to the mystical suffocation of The Master, from the tender disillusionment of Licorice Pizza to the industrial fever of There Will Be Blood, every step in his filmography has been a way to measure how humans collide with their own beliefs. With One Battle After Another, he goes further — into the territory of politics, not to moralize, but to understand morality as a physical experience. Shot in VistaVision with the precision of a surgeon and the soul of a poet, the film breathes like a great American novel filmed as a thriller and a requiem.

The story begins as though we’ve already been living inside it. Bob Ferguson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a quietly devastating performance, was once a revolutionary — a man who believed the world could be changed through conviction and action. Decades later, he lives in self-imposed exile, worn down and almost invisible, until the ghosts of his past force him back into motion. His daughter, Willa (the remarkable newcomer Chase Infiniti), becomes entangled in a web of racial violence and institutional corruption. What begins as a rescue turns into a reckoning: a battle against one’s former self, and against the system that shapes who we become when faith runs dry. Anderson shoots that awakening with intimate restraint, turning action into reflection, and revolution into a personal resurrection.

DiCaprio delivers one of the most mature and internalized performances of his career. Gone are the grand gestures; what remains is fatigue, dignity, and a deep, ferocious decency. His Bob doesn’t seek redemption — only to understand what’s left of him in the world he helped create. Opposite him, Sean Penn gives a performance that justifies an entire career. His Colonel Lockjaw is the face of power — a man who has learned to rule with a smile, to turn repression into aesthetic control. Penn plays him not as a villain, but as a believer. His walk is rigid, his speech precise, his authority absolute. He radiates a sense of menace not through violence, but through conviction. In his scenes with DiCaprio, history itself seems to hang between them: defeated idealism versus triumphant cynicism, the dream fading against the machinery that buries it. Anderson films them as mirrors of one another — two men who once believed in something, now forced to confront the ruins of their own faith.

Benicio del Toro, magnetic and unreadable, plays the intermediary between past and present — the guilty friend, the weary conscience. Regina Hall and Teyana Taylor bring to the film a collective heartbeat: women who hold the memory of the voiceless, the bodies that sustain a story when the heroes are already exhausted. Hall’s quiet strength and Taylor’s fierce tenderness anchor the film in the realm of the real. Alana Haim embodies innocence that refuses to vanish, while Chase Infiniti, in her first major role, becomes the film’s living pulse. Her relationship with DiCaprio isn’t just between a daughter and a father — it’s between two survivors trying to reconcile with history.

The shoot, by all accounts, was as physical as it was spiritual. Anderson filmed across California — from Sacramento to Humboldt and into the Anza-Borrego desert — in exhausting days of sand and heat. Windstorms forced constant retakes, but Anderson insisted on real light, real dust, no digital filters. Jonny Greenwood composed as they filmed, recording the desert’s sounds to weave them into the score. One night, Sean Penn reportedly improvised a brutal monologue about glory and obedience that Anderson filmed without cutting — it remains one of the film’s most haunting scenes. The movie is dedicated to Adam Somner, Anderson’s longtime first assistant director, who died during production — a gesture that adds a quiet layer of mourning to the final cut.

Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, the screenplay is a symphony of density. Anderson translates Pynchon’s paranoia into physical imagery, into atmospheres that breathe suspicion. Black humor appears not as relief but as rebellion — laughter as survival. The film doesn’t teach or explain; it makes you feel the weight of forgetting. At its core, One Battle After Another isn’t about politics, but about memory — about how power erases, rewrites, and domesticates it, and how cinema can reclaim what was stolen.

Michael Bauman’s cinematography is among the most haunting of the year. The dawns bleed like open wounds; interiors breathe in shadow. The camera moves slowly, reverently, as if afraid to disturb the fragile balance of the world it captures. Every frame has texture — dust, sweat, the glow of dying neon. Anderson films air as if it were thought. Props, clothes, archives, even weapons carry the weight of time and moral erosion. Every object feels like it’s been used to exhaustion, as if the past itself were collapsing from overuse.

And above all, there’s Greenwood’s score — the film’s hidden bloodstream. He doesn’t compose melodies, he composes tension. Strings tremble like sirens, tones hover like ghosts. Sometimes the music vanishes completely, and silence becomes the loudest sound in the room. When it returns, it does so like an emotional tide. The fusion of Bauman’s imagery and Greenwood’s sound produces pure cinematic hypnosis — cinema as trance, as embodied memory.

Structurally, Anderson engages in dialogue with a precise tradition: the political thrillers of the 1970s. The Parallax View, Z, All the President’s Men — those films that emerged from the American post-Vietnam disillusionment, where conspiracy was not genre but diagnosis. Like Pakula and Costa-Gavras, Anderson films power from the shadows — corridors, microphones, the quiet spaces where light never enters. Yet, unlike them, he doesn’t try to reveal a secret; he suggests the conspiracy is already visible, absorbed into the air we breathe. Surveillance is no longer a plot — it’s a condition of being.

In parallel, One Battle After Another converses with the modern American thriller — from Traffic to Sicario and Zero Dark Thirty — but subverts their logic. Where those films dealt with the enemy outside, Anderson brings the war home: the violence internalized, the border turned into a mirror. There’s even a faint resonance with Joker, in how social unrest is portrayed not as anomaly but inheritance. Yet Anderson refuses the chaos aesthetic; his apocalypse is quiet, his tension deliberate. The calm before collapse is his truest form of terror.

Within his own filmography, One Battle After Another stands as the bridge between the luminous paranoia of Inherent Vice and the moral ferocity of There Will Be Blood. From the former it inherits confusion — the sense that everything is connected by invisible threads. From the latter, the conviction that power corrupts whatever it touches. If The Master explored spiritual conflict, this one explores ethical collapse. If Phantom Thread concealed violence under beauty, here beauty is made to bruise. Anderson gathers all his obsessions — guilt, faith, control, the longing to belong — into a single film that functions as both confession and x-ray of a nation. It is, in many ways, his great political film, and perhaps his most human.

And it’s impossible not to read the film through a contemporary lens. Though it was shot before the current escalation of racial and political tensions in the United States, it feels as if it were filmed yesterday. The country it portrays — militarized, divided, saturated with fear — is the same America that, in 2025, still wonders what the word “freedom” really means. Anderson didn’t predict; he understood. He understood that modern fascism doesn’t arrive in boots, but in algorithms; that violence no longer screams, it normalizes; that forgetting is the most efficient form of censorship. That’s why One Battle After Another isn’t just a film about the past — it’s a mirror of the present. And watching it today, in an American theater, feels like an act of political defiance.

The film offers no redemption. Its ending is open, austere, almost serene — a man breathing against history, a body against the horizon. Persistence, not victory. That decency, simple and forgotten, is the true moral core of Anderson’s cinema. The final shot — still camera, fragile breath, uncertain light — may be one of the most moving in his career. Not because it resolves, but because it asks: how do we keep living once the world has revealed its lie?

One Battle After Another is not just another film in Paul Thomas Anderson’s career; it’s his temporary testament — the sum of all he’s been and the promise of what’s still to come. A film that reminds us the fight isn’t won or lost — it’s sustained. That true revolution is the act of continuing to look straight ahead. That true cinema, when it dares to confront the world, doesn’t merely entertain — it remembers.

Xabier Garzarain