Similar to 2022, in an eerie sense of Deja Vu, I’ve been aptly looking to see if my current pick for Film of the Year can be overthrown so here’s one that everyone insists should be up there. The fact that my first ever Paul Thomas Anderson film in theaters just so happens to be “One Battle After Another” meant one of two things were guaranteed to happen based on its reception: I was gonna walk away disappointed or it’ll have me reconsider my list placement for Best Films of 2025.
As much as I want to be a contrarian…..I’m sorta leaning towards the latter.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s directing style here feels like a hybrid mix between his heightened, maximalist chaotic days of old and the more minimalist, observational eyes of now. There’s an equal amount of incense, trepidation and resigned cynicism in his freewheeling, carnivalesque strokes to feel cautiously optimistic and pessimistic at once; brief spurts of anger, polemic righteousness and his trademark indulgent impulses mostly masked by maturity.
Taking a vaguely contemporary setting and lending enough grit and resplendence to ground its realism while embracing stylized flourishes, detailed doesn’t even begin to describe how immaculate Florencia Martin’s construction of a warped yet familiar Americana takes an already fully realized world and make it look effortless. Incorporating specific modernist and retro architectural styles to create a distinct visual identity and expand the movie’s already broadening scope and scale, she helps PTA with contemporizing the timeline based off the books its based on with delicate finesse.
So much of this presentation is very visually loose and retrofitted to be as much of a throwback as possible without drawing attention to itself. Between the VistaVision camera equipment and widescreen 35mm film format, Michael Bauman’s cinematography carries this grunge yet rich symmetry reminiscent of the great thrillers of the ‘70s and ‘90s, making every shot carry the immediacy of a guerrilla documentary. Whenever the movie starts stalling (AND IT WILL), the visuals alone brute-force the film’s momentum towards its singular destination despite its drawbacks (Andy Jurgensen’s editing in particular doesn’t keep the same rhythm but it still flows nicely in conjunction with the camera).
Colleen Atwood is subdued in her costume design, the satire and comedy has enough bite to it, there’s a fierce urgency in the drama and how the thematic heft behind it boils into the tension, and tone is a hexagonal fault line that conjoins so many genres together and yet avoids being sappy or moralizing…..only to constantly collide with pacing that feels nothing less than counterintuitive. Tethered with this ascending-descending escalator trudge but blitheringly chaotic to keep the screwball emulation alive and kicking, it’s that type of balance and precision that barely requires riding a unicycle over a tightrope to master postmodern playfulness meeting somber melancholy.
Jonny Greenwood's driving, minimalist piano and sparse percussion score conveys the downright stressful sensation of an alarm blaring over you yet somehow never overwhelms, the propulsive sound design helps heighten the anxiety and emotional imbalance of the characters, the R-rating pushes the envelope just enough to sell the stakes presented and for as soul-crushingly long this movie ends up being, I can’t pretend it would’ve worked better stripped down.
Yes, at 170 minutes, the damn thing feels drawn out and protracted just for the sake of it but for a project with so many different moving parts attached, shrinking the runtime probably would’ve been the film’s detriment.
To say this is a colorful ensemble would be a bloody understatement. Some characters were outrageously exaggerated, while others felt underdeveloped and the rest aren’t that likable yet their contrasting personalities helps them bounce off and accentuate them from one another, something the oddball acting leans into well enough. As cool as it is seeing Benicio del Toro drifting with swagger and Leonardo DiCaprio manically juggle misplaced valor and scuffed decency at once, newcomer Chase Infiniti’s quiet vulnerability makes her the de facto star of the show and it’s not even a contest.
2025 has already solidified itself as the year where the gloves come off regarding calling out our government for willingly sleepwalking into the vise grip of authoritarianism and not even trying to stop it….but while many movies this year have been subtle, blatant or overly didactic on the subject, this particular narrative really grounds that damning reality beyond its crippling effects and into how the worst of times sometimes really can bring out the best of humanity. With this being PTA’s more accessible work as of now, this is formulaic in a sense that it has more of a black-and-white narrative with copious shades of grey sprinkled in to poke at all three sides of that spectrum and still sustain itself. Tracking nearly every activity with a journalistic eye that can perhaps be a little too all-encompassing, the story reckons with every moment while holding firm with its thematic weight to not feel like a burden.
Having taken and retreated certain elements of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland” while filtering and ciphering the rest from Bryan Burroughs’s Day’s of Rage, all the film’s focus is fixated on a simple battle of survival where every character is stuck fighting their own war, be it societal, personal, or ideological, and getting out of it doesn’t make any of them heroes. The film really sells the restless energy despite shuffling around at Mach 5 and there’s hardly much convoluted over-plotting for the purpose of getting characters to as many locations as possible to artificially jack up the drama. That being said, said drama is incredibly repetitive and every sequence takes twice as long as the action warrants, essentially making the plot almost too straightforward for its own good. Not to mention, there’s a lot of fluff (necessary fluff but still fluff) before getting back to the meat and potatoes.
Perhaps the most prevalent themes to be pulled out of this script can best be summed up in these batch of lyrics from Rise Against’s ‘Survive’: Life for you has been less than kind, so take a number stand in line; we’ve all been sorry, we’ve all been hurt but how we survive is what makes us who we are. Erasure, narcissism, social consciousness, dissent, discontent, the lonely heroism of not fitting in, the extremes of this country’s dual-party paradigm, both sides being bureaucratic nightmares rife with overreach and the little white lies that follow us as we age can all make for interesting discussions and interpretations, especially since they all represent layers on top of layers of exploration for political violence. Good deconstruction of the American political system aside, the message is as simple as love versus hate. The futility of the French 75’s level of resistance and the sheer lack of calling out the violence itself does make ascribing those responsibilities to do better feel like a blatant omission in spades but the battle against the government isn’t the central focus. In the face of a regime and a movement that continues to employ hatred and the stifling of hope as a ruling tactic, finding a family that you fight to hold together is the real revolution; perhaps the most radical thing you can do.
The true way to keep hope alive is to make sure that the next generation has the tools to improve upon the original and on that front, the heart of the story is never lost or sacrificed.
For as flippantly as the word ‘masterpiece’ gets thrown around like a boomerang with reckless abandon, perhaps you can make the argument that it applies towards One Battle After Another….if you can look at it from a different perspective. Me personally, this full-course meal of relentless heart, satire and raw vulnerability that all complement each other feels more human the more I think on it.
