One Battle After Another

One Battle After Another

A film that feels like a cinematic reflection of what we read and watch in the media today, One Battle After Another unfolds as a crime–drama–thriller rooted in the uneasy realities of contemporary America. The story moves between the believable and the unbelievable—yet everything feels disturbingly close to what is already happening on the ground.

Spanish-speaking revolutionaries assist illegal migration and engage in terror activities aimed at destabilizing the nation, while officers—some driven by white-supremacist ideologies—counter them in the name of protecting the country. These larger conflicts are told through deeply personal lives: an ex-revolutionary (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his mixed-heritage daughter (Chase Infinity, in a striking debut), bound together by survival, memory, and flight.

An officer obsessed with “cleansing” the country (Sean Penn) resurfaces from the past, haunting the father and daughter and forcing them into a desperate escape. Surprisingly, help comes from an old revolutionary network long believed to be dormant. Their journey takes us through an illegal immigrant camp run by a legal immigrant (Benicio Del Toro), while the officer seeks to destroy the only evidence of his own moral collapse—his illicit desire for those he is duty-bound to kill.

The narrative is gripping and layered with suspense, brought vividly to the screen by Licorice Pizza writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. Cinematographer Michael Bauman shoots the film in VistaVision, recreating the rough, muscular nostalgia of 1970s cinema—raw, uneasy, and forceful.

An adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, the film shows Anderson at his best, inspiring both cast and crew to deliver performances that resonate in every frame. DiCaprio deliberately restrains his performance, perfectly fitting the weary ex-revolutionary, while Sean Penn explodes with unsettling energy as an officer who commits terrible acts in the name of order.

Believable and unbelievable at once, the film ultimately offers international audiences a visceral sense of life along the borderlands of present-day America—messy, dangerous, and morally fractured.

PS:

Not an expert review, but a personal reflection of an ordinary person who likes to stay informed and attentive to the world one lives in...