Review by Tim Robins
One Battle After Another has returned to cinemas after winning six Oscars, including three for writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson – best picture, best Director and best adapted Screenplay. The script is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, a satire of American counter-cultural politics from the 1960s to ‘80s.
The film follows the misadventures of a group of counter-cultural terrorists, “The French 75”, in hiding after being betrayed by one of their members, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). When Perfidia starts naming names and enters witness protection, her sometime lover “Getto” Pat Calhoun, played by Leonardo Di Caprio, goes on the run with their baby, Charline. The pair are pursued by the corrupt Colonel Lockwood (Sean Penn), who was seduced by Perfidia and believes he is the father of Charline.
16 years later, Perfidia has disappeared into the shadows while Pat and a teenage Charline (Chase Infiniti) are hiding out off-grid in the woods, under assumed names and supported by members of the underground movement. But Charline’s existence poses a clear and present danger to Lockjaw, particularly in his attempt to join a secret, far-right, white supremacist group, The Christmas Adventurers Club.
With a running time of 162 minutes, One Battle After Another is a long movie. Fortunately, after wanting to just get up and leave within the first twenty minutes, I became involved in the cast of social misfits and their final pursuit across the Californian desert. The film plays like a Tarantino movie – minus the smart alec banter. We do get to meet a bunch of outre characters, including Sergio St Carlos (Benicio del Toro), Charline’s karate sensei, and a convent of weed growing, machine gun toting nuns.
The trouble I had with One Battle After Another at the outset was that none of the central characters are actually likeable. Perfidia and Pat AKA Bob are a murderous couple who think nothing of bombing their perceived adversaries, whilst Lockjaw is a violent pervert who gets sexually turned on by the thought of sex with black women, specifically Perfidia, who, on first meeting, demands that he gets a spontaneous erection.
I also found it difficult to see the film as satire, which relies on exaggeration to achieve its humorous and critical effect. The trouble here is that we are living through such exaggerated times that actions of “The French 75”, violently freeing immigrants from a detention camp and plotting to bomb a pro-life politician, just look like the far-right’s beliefs about the left writ large. Scenes of masked police (ICE?) versus rioters are not even exaggerated, just the way it is in America right now. And in what way have the left earned this film’s derision?
It was the cast’s performances that redeemed the film for me. Di Caprio is wonderful as the former terrorist, now stressed out, drug addled, paranoid and belligerent, particularly to Charline’s young friends. Penn, who won an Oscar for best supporting actor, delivers a sustained portrait of a racist twisted by a combination of lust, fear and miscegenation. Infiniti is a gutsy Charline and a welcome relief from the grizzled cynical characters that surround her. The film won a well deserved Oscar in the newly created category of Best Casting.
Anderson has enjoyed nearly two decades of critically acclaimed movies as a writer/director, including Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999) There Will Be Blood (2007) and, more recently, Licorice Pizza (2021). He adapted Pynchon’s Inherent Vice in 2014 and has had a long standing ambition to adapt the author’s 1990 novel Vineland. One Battle After Another is the impressive result.
Stand out visual moments in the film include a gang of skateboarders leaping across rooftops to escape the army and silhouetted against a backdrop of buildings illuminated by street lights; a car chase across an undulating, desert road – the dips excruciatingly hiding the cars from each other – and a final confrontation played out in the desert’s almost blinding heat haze.
There’s no doubt One Battle After is a serious piece of film making and more sophisticated than Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024). But this is no time for humour. I’d prefer a more direct engagement with current politics, without that, arch, allusionary fayre leaves my interest withering on the vine.
Tim Robins
One Battle After is back in cinemas now, and available on BluRay, DVD and 4K (AmazonUK Affiliate Links)
• Official Warner Bros. Film Website
• Vineland by Thomas Pynchon (AmazonUK Affiliate Link)
Thomas Pynchon’s wretchedly funny dystopian thriller, sending up the end days of the American dream.
Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie’s long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc.
Full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs, movie spoofs, and illicit sex, Vineland is vintage Pynchon.
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
A freelance journalist and Doctor Who fanzine editor since 1978, Tim Robins has written on comics, films, books and TV programmes for a wide range of publications including Starburst, Interzone, Primetime and TV Guide.
His brief flirtation with comics includes ghost inking a 2000AD strip and co-writing a Doctor Who strip with Mike Collins. Since 1990 he worked at the University of Glamorgan where he was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies and the social sciences. Academically, he has published on the animation industry in Wales and approaches to social memory. He claims to be a card carrying member of the Politically Correct, a secret cadre bent on ruling the entire world and all human thought.
Categories: downthetubes News, Features, Film, Other Worlds, Reviews
In Review: Sirât 
In Review: Project Hail Mary 
In Review: All You Need is Kill (2025) 
In Review: Good Luck, Have Fun Don’t Die
Leave a Reply