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One Battle After Another: A Film About Family and Fighting for What Is Right
Paul Thomas Anderson is a famous American director. In 2025, he made a new film called One Battle After Another. It is an action movie, but it is also a story about a father and his daughter. The film is long—almost three hours—and it has many ideas about politics, family, and the past.
In an era when franchise filmmaking and intellectual property dominate the cultural landscape, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another arrives as something of a miracle: a $130 million action-thriller that is simultaneously a philosophical meditation on political violence, a father-daughter drama, and a satirical comedy about American fascism. Released in September 2025 to near-universal critical acclaim—it would go on to win six Academy Awards, including Best Picture—the film represents Anderson’s most ambitious and, paradoxically, most accessible work to date.
Loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, the film transposes its story of faded 1960s radicals to the present day, creating what many critics have called a “defining film of the moment.” Yet to reduce One Battle After Another to mere topicality would be to miss its deeper concerns: the cyclical nature of political struggle, the irreducibility of the personal to the political, and the question of what we owe to the generations that come after us.
From Pynchon to the Present
The film’s journey to the screen was a long one. Anderson had been circling Vineland since the early 2000s, fascinated by its portrait of former revolutionaries navigating the Reagan-era 1980s. As he told Esquire in 2025, “Vineland was always going to be too hard to adapt, so I stole the parts that spoke to me and just started running like a thief.” What emerged is a work that is simultaneously faithful to its source material’s essence and radically transformed for a new century. The novel’s critique of Reaganite reaction becomes, in Anderson’s hands, a confrontation with contemporary forces: white nationalism, militarized policing, and the ever-present threat of fascism cloaked in patriotic nostalgia.
The film’s setting is deliberately ambiguous. It takes place in “an alternate version of California and Texas, sometime in the early 21st century.” This temporal vagueness is itself a political statement. As one critic notes, “We move forward, but our struggles all look similar.” The film’s depiction of immigration raids, paramilitary policing, and a secret society of white nationalists called the Christmas Adventurers Club resonates with contemporary headlines, yet Anderson began filming in early 2024, before many of the events that would make the film seem prescient. This is not prophecy but history repeating itself—a point the film emphasizes through its cyclical structure.
The French 75 and the Allure of Violence
The film opens with the French 75, a leftist revolutionary group whose actions—raiding migrant detention centers, bombing government buildings, robbing banks—place them in a lineage that stretches from the Weather Underground to the Black Liberation Army. The group’s leader, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, in a performance that won her a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress), embodies both the idealism and the self-destructive excesses of revolutionary commitment. She is introduced in a scene of ecstatic violence, firing a machine gun while pregnant, declaring, “Bitch, I felt like Tony Montana.”
This moment, which the film will return to later, encapsulates one of its central tensions: the erotic charge of political violence and its capacity to corrupt even the purest intentions. The French 75 fights for “Free bodies, free borders, free choices,” yet their bank robbery goes disastrously wrong, resulting in the death of a security guard. Perfidia herself will eventually betray her comrades to avoid prison time, escaping to Mexico and leaving her partner Bob to raise their daughter alone. The film refuses to romanticize its revolutionaries, even as it acknowledges the legitimacy of their grievances.
This ambivalence extends to the group’s nominal hero, Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio). When we meet him again sixteen years after the French 75’s collapse, he has devolved into a burnt-out stoner living under an assumed name with his teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). He spends his days getting high, drinking beer, and rewatching Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece The Battle of Algiers—a film about urban guerrilla warfare that becomes both a relic of his past activism and a measure of his current impotence. DiCaprio, playing against his usual charismatic leading-man type, inhabits Bob’s loser energy with comic precision, delivering what one critic called “as funny as anything he’s ever done.”
The Cartoon Villain and the Reality of Fascism
If Bob represents the exhaustion of the left, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) embodies the resurgence of the right. Lockjaw is a military officer desperate to join the Christmas Adventurers Club, a secret society of white nationalists whose members include judges, generals, and politicians. His pursuit of Bob and Willa is driven not by genuine national security concerns but by a desire to conceal his past: during the French 75 period, he had a sexual relationship with Perfidia, and he fears that Willa might be his biological daughter—a fact that would disqualify him from membership in the racist club.
Penn’s performance walks a fine line between menace and absurdity. He has described the character as someone who “brought a humanity to it, as well as an extraordinary and surprising insecurity.” This is not to humanize Lockjaw in any sympathetic sense but to reveal the psychological underpinnings of fascism: the self-loathing, the fear of inadequacy, the need to project strength to mask weakness. As one critic notes, the film makes a point that “so much of white supremacy is based on the fear of black sexuality,” connecting Lockjaw’s racism to his obsessive desire for Perfidia. He is, in this sense, a descendant of the slaveholders who fathered children with the women they enslaved—a legacy that the film suggests continues to shape American political life.
Yet Lockjaw is also a figure of satirical comedy. The Christmas Adventurers Club, with its bizarre worship of Santa Claus and its elaborate rituals, recalls the secret societies that populate Pynchon’s fiction—groups that combine genuine power with absurdist self-parody. The film’s tone oscillates wildly between scenes of genuine horror—extrajudicial torture, paramilitary raids, the rounding up of immigrants—and moments of Looney Tunes-esque escapades. This tonal instability has been a point of contention for some critics, but it is central to the film’s vision of American political life, where the grotesque and the terrifying are often indistinguishable.
The Personal Is Political—But Not How You Think
At its core, One Battle After Another is a film about the relationship between Bob and his daughter Willa. This is, according to Anderson and DiCaprio, the film’s true subject. “If there are any politics in this movie, I think it’s about how some people are still stuck in their ways and others have embraced the future,” DiCaprio told The New York Times. This intergenerational dynamic is given additional resonance by Anderson’s personal life: the director, who is white, has four children with comedian Maya Rudolph, who is Black. The film’s treatment of race, particularly the question of Willa’s biracial identity and her relationship to both her white father and her absent Black mother, reflects Anderson’s own concerns.
The film’s philosophical heart lies in its exploration of the relationship between personal ethics and political commitment. As one analysis puts it, Anderson “casts the personal as inherently political.” Bob’s failures as a father—his inability to understand Willa’s world, his retreat into nostalgic self-indulgence—are inseparable from his failures as a revolutionary. He has become so focused on “the cause” that he has forgotten how to engage with other human beings as individuals. Similarly, Perfidia’s abandonment of her daughter in favor of revolutionary struggle is presented not as heroic sacrifice but as a form of betrayal.
This is not to suggest that the film endorses depoliticization. Willa, the younger generation, embraces the struggle her parents began, but on her own terms. She is not content to replay her mother’s fantasies of violent self-actualization; she is building something new, something that acknowledges both the necessity of resistance and the value of human connection. The film’s final image—Willa heading to a protest in Oakland, having reconciled with her father—is deliberately ambiguous. The revolution continues, but it is tempered by the recognition that, as the old saying goes, hope is a discipline that requires practice in every interaction, not just the grand battles.
The Politics of Ambiguity
One Battle After Another arrived in a political climate primed for controversy. Its release came two weeks after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and critics on the right were quick to condemn it. One Fox columnist compared it to “a movie about World War II in which you are meant to be cheering for lovable Nazis,” while others called it a “reckless ode to radical terrorism.” Left-leaning critics, meanwhile, praised it as a “forthrightly antifascist” work. Anderson himself has demurred from such readings, insisting that the film is “nonpolitical” in any programmatic sense.
This ambiguity is, perhaps, the film’s most honest political stance. Anderson is too sophisticated a filmmaker to offer simple answers to complex questions. His depiction of revolutionary violence is neither endorsement nor condemnation; it is an exploration of its causes, its costs, and its consequences. The French 75’s actions are shown to be both morally complicated and politically counterproductive—their militancy strengthens the very forces they oppose, providing justification for increased repression. Yet the film never suggests that submission to injustice is a viable alternative.
This complexity extends to the film’s treatment of its antagonists. Lockjaw and the Christmas Adventurers Club are undeniably evil, but they are not cartoon villains in the conventional sense. They are frightening precisely because they are recognizable: men with ordinary insecurities and ambitions who have been captured by a destructive ideology. The film’s satire of white nationalism is scathing, but it is grounded in an understanding of how such movements recruit and sustain themselves.
Visual Language and Cinematic Craft
Beyond its thematic ambitions, One Battle After Another is a remarkable achievement in cinematic craft. Anderson shot much of the film using VistaVision, a 1950s technology that produces higher-resolution images and sharper quality than standard film formats. Cinematographer Michael Bauman explained that Anderson chose the format because he wanted a “raw look” for the film, similar to that of the 1971 thriller The French Connection. The result is a film that feels both contemporary and classic, its images possessing a texture and depth that reward theatrical viewing.
The film’s centerpiece is a car chase sequence that has drawn comparisons to the iconic 1968 Bullitt chase. Shot in the undulating desert roads of California, it combines long lenses, precise editing, and Jonny Greenwood’s propulsive score to create what one critic called “a rollercoaster” experience. Greenwood’s music, his sixth collaboration with Anderson, is itself a key element, shaping each sequence with “new timbres, tilted beats and bold attacks.”
At 161 minutes, the film is long by contemporary standards, and some critics have noted that its ramshackle structure occasionally strains to contain its many ideas. Yet this sprawl is also part of its character. One Battle After Another is not a film that can be easily summarized or reduced to a thesis. It demands that its audience sit with its contradictions, its tonal shifts, its moments of comedy and horror existing side by side.
Commercial Failure, Cultural Triumph
For all its critical success—the film holds a 94% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes—One Battle After Another was widely reported as a commercial disappointment. With a budget of $130 million and additional marketing costs, industry analysts estimated that it would need to gross roughly $300 million to break even. Its worldwide total of approximately $200 million, while impressive for a three-hour R-rated film, fell short of that mark.
Yet the narrative of failure obscures a more complicated reality. Warner Bros., which financed the film, had other major successes in 2025, including Sinners and A Minecraft Movie. As one industry analyst noted, “You have a movie from a great contemporary filmmaker that’s got good reviews… you call it a win and decide that your other successes have covered it.” The value of a film like One Battle After Another extends beyond its immediate box office returns: it enhances the studio’s reputation as a home for auteur-driven cinema, attracts top talent, and creates a library title that will generate revenue for decades through streaming, Blu-ray sales, and television licensing.
As Catherine O’Hara’s character observes in Seth Rogen’s series The Studio, “The job makes you stressed, and panicked, and miserable. But when it all comes together and you make a good movie, it’s good forever.” One Battle After Another is likely to be one of those films: a work that will be discovered and rediscovered by future audiences, its relevance undiminished by the passage of time.
Conclusion: The Battle Continues
The film’s title comes from a 1960s Weather Underground handbill, a phrase that captures both the exhaustion of sustained political struggle and the necessity of continuing it. One Battle After Another is a film about that exhaustion—about the ways that idealism curdles into cynicism, that revolution devolves into routine, that the children of activists must decide what to inherit and what to discard. But it is also a film about hope, about the possibility of renewal across generations, about the stubborn persistence of resistance even in the face of overwhelming odds.
Anderson has made a career out of films that resist easy categorization, that combine high art with popular genres, that find the sacred in the profane and the profound in the ridiculous. One Battle After Another may be his most ambitious synthesis yet—a film that is simultaneously an action thriller, a political satire, a father-daughter drama, and a meditation on the meaning of resistance in an age of permanent crisis. It is, as one critic put it, “cinema at its purest—uncompromising, exhilarating, and alive.” In an era when such films are increasingly rare, its existence feels like a small victory—one battle, after another.
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