Perhaps the most striking quality of "One Battle After Another"is the precision with which Paul Thomas Anderson controls his narrative—he seems to know instinctively when to push forward and when to pull back, what to expose, and what to let breathe. The film surges into life with Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills, a spark of volatile passion and moral contradiction, and then shifts elsewhere, allowing the fallout from her radical life to echo and evolve through characters like Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), Willa (Chase Infiniti), Lockjaw (Sean Penn), Benicio Del Toro’s sensei, and the institutional monoliths they’re all up against. What Anderson achieves is not just a story, but a compound tension: between idealism and compromise, between violent resistance and its costs, between past revolutions and a future that inherits both their hopes and their failures.
From the moment Perfidia leads an incursion at an immigrant detention centre—liberating detainees, humiliating authority, asserting her values through both rage and defiance—the film sets up a combustible moral ambiguity. Perfidia is instantly magnetic but also unsettling. She is fighting a just cause in many respects, yet the shape that her fight has taken, the radicalism she embodies, has warped something inside her, making her a figure both compelling and uncomfortably unlikable. Anderson gives space to that discomfort. Once her foundation is laid—she is the ideological fulcrum—her presence recedes, leaving in her wake broken alliances, ideological quandaries, and generational demands. Her disappearance from the film’s central focus about halfway allows Bob and others to carry forward the thematic weight she’s established without making her martyr or monolith.
Lockjaw is, in many ways, the dark mirror. Sean Penn plays him as a man consumed by both ideological fervor and grotesque narcissism. Lockjaw is not simply the enemy; he is the embodiment of many of the film’s most corrosive forces: racism institutionalized, power abused, authority untempered by empathy. Yet Anderson doesn’t let us discard him as pure evil. He gives Lockjaw texture: ridiculous, sometimes laughable, even pitiable. His fetishistic obsession with Perfidia, his need for dominance, his bitter, twisted sense of self. He is the character the audience loves to hate—but who forces you, repeatedly, to understand how such a person is produced and maintained—by culture, by war, by the institutional scaffolding of oppression. One of the film’s greatest glories is the way Penn hones the dialogue into something at once scathing, absurd, absurdly funny, and profoundly unsettling. Lockjaw’s killing—twice—is not just narrative spectacle, but a thematic punctuation: when the corrupt and monstrous are given enough rope, they often collapse under the weight of their own contradictions and depravity.
The film’s treatment of revolution is where Anderson makes his boldest statement, and it refuses to settle into simplicity. It is not a story of clear heroes and villains, but of entwined forces that seem almost dependent on one another. Every act of violence from the state fuels the resistance; every escalation from the resistance justifies greater repression. One feeds the other, and the cycle is never broken—it only mutates. The French 75, Bob, Perfidia, Deandra (Regina Hall), Willa, Sensai (Del Toro)—each is caught on that edge. They give voice to resistance, but also embody the danger of perpetuating trauma. Anderson refuses to let the audience indulge in the fantasy that revolution, as it is often imagined, is clean or righteous. Instead, he presents it as a messy, generational inheritance—something that can inspire courage, but also deepen wounds.
Willa’s arc makes this most explicit. Raised lovingly by Bob, she is kept at a distance from the corrosive violence of the struggle. Yet the late revelation that her biological father is Lockjaw ties her bloodline directly to the system of corruption and hate the revolutionaries are fighting against. She becomes the living embodiment of the film’s central paradox: born of both oppressor and resister, she represents both halves of the conflict, and she carries within her the possibility of transcending it. The letter from her mother, Perfidia, cements that possibility, urging her to fight differently, to transform the notion of revolution into something less tethered to rage and retaliation, something capable of safeguarding rather than endangering. Anderson places enormous symbolic weight here: if change is to come, it must come through those who inherit the legacy of both sides and choose to wield it with hope rather than fear.
Sensai’s quieter revolution complements Willa’s journey. He fights for his people, for dignity, and for community, but his resistance is grounded in presence and perseverance rather than spectacle. He embodies the idea that change can be enacted without mirroring the violence one resists. His mantra of “courage” echoes as a thematic counterweight to the brutality elsewhere: courage not to kill, but to endure, to teach, to plant seeds rather than burn bridges. Together, Willa and Sensai suggest a different future—not one that denies revolution, but one that redefines it.
Stylistically and technically, One Battle After Another is Anderson at the peak of his craft. The cinematography flows, thick with movement and geometry: tracking shots that follow Bob—or characters in flight—as they traverse highways, borderlands, safehouses; the landscapes themselves become emotional topography. Scenes such as Bob’s escapes, or the lengthy, dizzying car chases toward the end, are staged with a kinetic energy that doesn’t sacrifice clarity for chaos. The camera finds beauty in moments of respite too, whether in the intimacy of a father-daughter exchange or the fragile solidarity of those banded together against oppression. The pacing keeps itself brisk, action and chaos always lurking, but never overwhelming the human story. Greenwood’s score threads through it all, heightening dread, humour, and longing in equal measure.
What is especially powerful about One Battle After Another is that despite its decidedly critical lens toward power, corruption, state violence, and the ideological purity of revolution, Anderson refuses to deliver propaganda. He critiques power without divesting agency from resistance; he celebrates revolutionary ideals without naive romanticism; he paints oppression without ignoring possibility. Lockjaw’s moral failings are laid bare: his ideology is as fragile as it is monstrous; his hypocrisy as grotesque as his obsession. But the film does not wholly exonerate resistance. It warns that in fighting violence, one must not become enslaved to its rhythms, that each victory, each act of resistance, carries its own cost—and that the next generation inherits this legacy. Bob, though imperfect, is not heroic in a mythic sense—he is flawed, fearful, loving. His struggle is one battle after another, not a final war.
The film works—and will, for many—because Anderson holds both halves of the tension. The ending—that moment when Willa reads Perfidia’s letter, when she confronts both her heritage and her father’s legacy—is maybe the clearest statement of what the film ultimately hopes: that change is not only about what you destroy, but what you build. That new generations may choose paths shaped by but not enslaved to the wars of their parents.
Ultimately, "One Battle After Another" is one of Anderson’s most daring works—not in the sense of spectacle, though those are plentiful, but in the moral and emotional risks it takes. It’s a film about the burdens of past choices, about how power corrupts not only others but oneself; it’s about love that survives, about hope that persists in spite of cynicism. And it’s by far one of the most urgent cinematic statements of these fractious times—a film that understands that the fight is not simply between good and evil, but between versions of ourselves. One battle, after another—but it matters that we choose what we carry forward.
9/10
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