One Battle After Another: Dystopia as a Masterpiece of Resistance
A still from the film One Battle After Another (Image X.com)
With Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Chase Infiniti leading a blistering ensemble, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film transforms Pynchon’s chaos into a cinematic manifesto against tyranny.
By S JHA
MUMBAI, September 29, 2025 — Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another isn’t just a movie—it’s a Molotov cocktail lobbed into America’s cultural bloodstream. At 162 minutes, this volatile adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland fuses gonzo satire, family drama, and insurgent action into an epic that’s both exhilarating entertainment and furious protest.
Leonardo DiCaprio, in one of his funniest and most vulnerable performances, plays Bob Ferguson, a washed-up radical whose life implodes when his daughter Willa (a revelatory Chase Infiniti) is kidnapped by his nemesis, Sean Penn’s grotesquely magnetic Colonel Lockjaw. Their pursuit through the anarchic borderland of Baktan Cross fuels a wild carnival of raids, betrayals, and philosophical firefights.
Anderson conducts the chaos with masterful precision. His film channels The Battle of Algiers and Dr. Strangelove, yet hums with a modern urgency—completed before the US elections but vibrating with prophetic dread about authoritarianism’s creep. It’s a satire that never forgets the human pulse, anchored in the tender father-daughter bond at its core.
The supporting ensemble—Teyana Taylor’s indomitable Perfidia, Benicio del Toro’s martial-arts sage, Regina Hall’s steady hand—fire on all cylinders, while Jonny Greenwood’s percussive score gives the movie its relentless heartbeat.
Critics are unanimous: this is Anderson at the peak of his powers. Spielberg calls it “incredible.” Rolling Stone deems it “an act of resistance.” DiscussingFilm hails it as “the most radical movie released by a Hollywood studio in years.”
One Battle After Another is more than a film. It’s a rallying cry. And in an age of creeping conformity, it feels like cinema’s loudest act of defiance.
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