One Battle After Another (2025)

Rated R for a lot of vulgar stuff coupled with some pretty intense violence at times.  This is one of those movies where the implication of horrible discussion is sometimes worse than actually seeing some stuff. I'm not saying you don't see anything.  You see stuff.  But those scenes are oddly less horrifying than the dialogue that accompaines those upsetting moments.  Add to that a lot of swearing, sexual assault, and general all around misery, the R-rating is more than earned.

DIRECTOR:  Paul Thomas Anderson

I don't know if I have another blog in me.  I have yet another blog to write after this one and I actually have a little bit of time to knock this one out.  But also...I don't want to?  Like, I could.  There's almost nothing really stopping me except for dinner being ready in about eleven minutes.  But seriously, I'm tired and I never want to write another blog.  I also feel like I'm going to whine about this movie than I want to.

I did the thing.  Again.  I once again got caught up in everyone telling me how amazing this movie was.  Once again, my brain says "This is a good movie."  But my heart?  My heart didn't bond with the film.  It's going on a date where everything is fine and you acknowledge that the person across the table from you is a very lovel--you know what?  That never happened to me.  It either clicked or it was terrible and now I'm happily married and have five+ kids.  The intellectual part of me wants that metaphor to work because that's what it feels like.  Like, I really dug it.  I laughed throughout.  I found it fascinating and it was unique.  But do you know what else it was?  Or more like, wasn't?  It wasn't There Will Be Blood.  Because nothing ever is There Will Be Blood.  I don't care if it was made by Paul Thomas Anderson.  

Maybe I'm being too hard on myself.  I mean, I lost my mind over Licorice Pizza and that was also PTA.  (I just did the PTA thing.  Yeah, I'm one of those guys.)  It's just that everyone seemed to be losing their minds over this movie.  I mean, it's still very early, but people are talking about Best Picture at the Oscars.  The Golden Globes seem mildly obsessed with this movie.  I had to see it. I mean, I had to see it...not enough to go to the theaters.  But, you know, it's on HBO Max and it's the first week that it was on HBO Max.  That's kind of commitment.  And it did the job.  It's a three hour film that is funny and has something to say and has an amazing cast.  

It just didn't resonate with me.  I'm going to try to talk positively about it because I acknowledge that there's something here.  If I stray into some negative talk, that might be a bit of a blessing because that means I can figure out where my heart and my brain aren't talking properly.

Can I talk, at the most surface level, about what I loved?  I mean, it's my blog, so I can do whatever I want.  I just want to talk about the part that absolutely hit.  And it's a literal part.  Benecio del Toro absolutely crushes in this.  (By the way, the entire time, I thought, "If you can make it through One Battle After Another, you should totally watch The Phoenician Scheme.") I'm going to try to piece together what makes del Toro the most engaging part of this movie.  The world of the film is meant to be both alien and universal.  It's really weird that this movie slightly demonizes resistance fighters to fascism.  It's one of those things that people on the left scream, "There is no formal organization like Antifa" and then we see stuff like the French 75.  Of course there are organizations like the French 75 out there.  They don't look like that.  This is a fictionalized version played for laughs and for pushing the story.  But as messed up as the world of the French 75 looks, this is a story about regular folks in insane situations.  There's something so grounded about how insane this plot gets and no one performs that message better than Benecio del Toro.  Sensei Sergio St. Carlos shouldn't even be in this story.  He starts the film as simply Willa's martial arts instructor and then we find out that he's a captain of a sanctuary city who is trained in anti-government raids.  I love it. 

But where del Toro thrives is that, as things escalate, he maintains the same level of nonchalance against whatever he faces.  That's a Wes Anderson thing he learned, isn't it?  I mean, that's what I love.  Bob is all about spiraling.  In realistic ways, sure.  But Sensei never spirals, does he?  He gets arrested at the end of the movie for a drunk driving charge and the joke is that it is the most anticlimactic way for that character's arc to end.  I love it.  Everything else builds to a climax.  These two yahoos could have gotten to the convent unscathed had Sensei not brought beers.  Instead, these guys shoot themselves in the foot and complicate and already insane plot to a new level for no reason and I adore that.

I had to read a little bit about the movie.  Not too much. I never want to be overly influenced by what other people are saying about a film.  Still, I did read about the names.  The names were getting me.  I don't think I totally understand every bit of this because, despite owning a Thomas Pynchon novel, I haven't read it.  (I promise to get around to it.)  The absurdity is odd because it's almost like swearing in church.  You have these characters like Perfidia Beverly Hills and Colonel Lockjaw, clearly meant to be commentaries on the characters.  But these commentaries aren't subtle in a way other characters can be.  (I mean, Fr. Jud Duplenticy...?  Thanks, Wake Up Dead Man.)  The weird part is that the movie is actively silly at times.  There's a moment where Bob jumps off a roof, crashes into every tree limb on the way down and gets immediately tazed.  It's funny.  But the entire shtick is almost as somber as a heart attack.

(I would like to apologize if my tone shifts here.  I'm finishing this blog the next day and I'm in a drastically more annoyed mood.) There's a reason that they got Sean Penn to play Lockjaw.  I mean, Penn has infamously been characterized as one of the more vocal liberals in Hollywood.  Having him play the most evil conservative fascist I've seen on screen is something that I'm sure that he was itching to do.  There's nothing sympathetic about Lockjaw.  Penn, being able to play a guy whose motivation is to get into the Illuminati --named the Christmas Adventure Club (?) --is this feast of opportunity.  The guy doesn't even walk normally.  I'm sure that Penn built the character with a literal stick up his butt, explaining why he walks that way.  Still, fascinating stuff.

The funny thing is that this movie is about immigration and race while simultaneously having no clear stance on it.  I mean, we sympathize with Bob because he's our protagonist.  But Bob, who was at one point a left-wing terrorist war hero who liberated immigration facilities, turns into this kind of gross dude.  His daughter with Perfidia (let's just leave it at that) defines herself as Black and that's so much of her characterization.  After all, it's why Lockjaw is hunting her down, in an attempt to cover up his attraction to strong Black women.  Bob, however, despite being that deep into the cause, makes racist comments and reductive references to gender.  I have to believe that PTA is making a commentary that the extremists on both sides have weirdly more in common than either one of them would care to believe.

But I also hate that read.  If I had a chance to rename this blog, I would consider something to do with "Daddy Issues."  I'm going to always comment on the role of fatherhood when presented in movies.  Yes, Bob has lots of crappy baggage that I see inside Lockjaw.  And, despite Bob's vices, he's fundamentally a good person (who might be willing to kill...) while Lockjaw is unadulterated evil.  It's unclear whether or not Bob knows that Lockjaw is Willa's biological father.  I really think that he knows.  But beyond that, he doesn't seem to care.  I always like when storytelling does this.  For all of someone's faults, they love beyond reason.  Yeah, it doesn't forgive the crap that he does.  But it does make him a sympathetic and lovable character in the story, especially juxtaposed to Lockjaw, whose commentary is a perversion of what fatherhood is supposed to be.  I'm talking about stuff like accusing Willa of disrespect to her parents, despite the fact that he's actively trying to have her killed.  That kind of stuff.

Like, I know the movie is good.  I also know that if I keep pulling at strings, I would discover a lot more complexity than I've broken down here.  But sometimes the music just doesn't move me as much as I would have liked it to.