One Battle After Another – 4K

One Battle After Another
2025 – 1.85:1
Warner Bros. – 4K Blu-ray
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor,
Chase Infiniti, Benicio del Toro
Written by Paul Thomas Anderson
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

You’re in the passenger seat and the driver is treating this winding mountain road like their personal speedway. It’s terrifying— there’s no way to know what’s around the bend—yet it’s thrilling because the man behind the wheel isn’t out of his mind but very much in control. For 162 minutes you’re in a state of exaltation known as One Battle After Another. Paul Thomas Anderson’s high-wire act is a tragicomedy produced in real time as the world collapses around our ears. The film has the kind of see-saw energy that can induce whiplash; at times it feels like The Battle of Algiers’ bastard grandson, at others, a cheeky homage to Dr. Strangelove (a nod to Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke wouldn’t be out of order).

What a shock to see an American city overwhelmed by billowing clouds of gas bombs, flash-bangs, and masked stormtroopers in hyper-real VistaVision and ear-cracking 5.1 DTS. Isn’t this what we’re going to the movies to escape? The film’s immediacy is its power—look out the window right now (if you dare) and in some cities you’ll see the same chaos, just not so lovingly orchestrated. Anderson’s vision is organized pandemonium, conjuring up a widescreen battlefield composed of two lawless gangs: one of them is a ragtag band of insurgents called the French 75. The other is the White House. Pulling strings behind the curtain is a shadowy cabal called the Christmas Adventurers Club, a murderous band of white nationalists who control the upper echelons of the corporate world and therefore the government. They’re also nuts (they pledge allegiance to Saint Nick).

Our semi-hero is “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Spending much of the film in a droopy bathrobe and high as a kite, he has two role models; Jeff Bridges’s The Dude and Thomas Pynchon’s Larry “Doc” Sportello of Anderson’s Inherent Vice (Battle is based loosely on Pynchon’s Vineland). Teyana Taylor plays Perfidia Beverly Hills. She’s not exactly the spaced-out Pat’s soul mate—her engine runs hot. They’re both  members of the French 75 and they flirt with death with every bomb they throw until it’s more than just a flirtation; thanks to Perfidia’s itchy trigger finger, the French 75 are no longer streetwise Robin Hoods but dime-a-dozen fugitives on the run for murder.

Sean Penn is a sandpaper-skinned terminator named Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw. Lockjaw, a reincarnation of Tony Meserve, Penn’s reptilian sergeant in De Palma’s Casualties of War, commandeers the kidnapping and occasional murder of immigrants, protesters, journalists, professors, college students, school kids, and American citizens just out for a walk. He’s an equal opportunity fascist and with his obsession for natural body fluids and racial “purity,” Lockjaw is reminiscent of not only Meserve but Gen. Jack D. Ripper and Strangelove himself (along with several members of the Trump cabinet past and present).

Once Lockjaw has Perfidia in cuffs he allows her the freedom to attend to his more basic needs—they’re far from being in love but they both embrace the apocalypse with equal passion; it turns them on. The erotic games they play are violently cathartic, revealing an approach/avoidance bond that would tantalize Freud (the grizzled soldier and the vampish renegade both regard guns as sex toys). Alarmingly, their unholy union results in a child, a baby named Willa. Pat—ever the dazed and confused layabout—is suddenly a father figure.

17 years pass, Perfidia has fled to Mexico, and a determined Lockjaw has turned his attention to his missing teenager. Miraculously (a little too miraculously) Pat and Willa, played by the solemnly beautiful Chase Infiniti, have kept their new identities secret for all those years. The foot soldiers of the French 75 have been decimated but their network, an air-tight system of secret codes and identities has been impenetrable—until now. Lockjaw gets his talons into his daughter and escapes across a desolate stretch of road called the “River of Hills” (those hills have an amusement park quality that will turn the movie into a regular Tilt a Whirl). Meanwhile Pat, along with Willa’s judo coach (a delightfully zen Benicio del Toro), is in hot pursuit. Bringing up the rear is the Christmas Adventurer’s Club out for revenge.

America’s centuries-old racial animus is the film’s powder keg, and each character is playing with matches, from Perfidia—who is as nihilistic as Lockjaw—to the Christmas Adventurers Club, a dead-eyed fraternity of Stepford husbands. And Pat—the ringmaster of the French 75’s fireworks—has gunpowder on his hands as well—it may be, for the meantime, that Willa is the rebel with the purest heart. The film’s finale suggests a brighter tomorrow for all three, a reconciliation that might, dare I say it, warm your heart—even Frank Capra would approve. One Battle After Another is, above all, a family movie.

Warner Bros.’ glistening new 4K Blu ray does justice to Michael Bauman’s cinematography which shimmers and simmers like the hot, hot colors of a sunbaked desert. Just as impressive is the Dolby Atmos mix which shows off Jonny Greenwood’s elegiac score—part dirge, part action movie, the music is a melancholy, bombastic, jittery masterpiece—our latest Civil War has found its soundtrack. There are no extras on this release and it would be churlish to complain.