‘One Battle After Another’ exposes the fury and paranoia of an America in crisis

Em One Battle After Anotherhis newest film, Paul Thomas Anderson (Black Blood) crafts an epic that combines revolution and family drama to capture the political, social, and emotional chaos of contemporary America. Between prisons for immigrants, the rise of white nationalism and the militarization of cities with technological surveillance and heavily armed police forces, the film portrays an America in crisis, marked by the transformation of fear into politics and militarism into spectacle.

By dramatizing this scenario, the film shows how collective paranoia and institutional violence corrode both public life and family ties, making every intimate relationship also a battlefield. In this context, PTA — as the director is called among cinephiles — investigates how parents and children, militants and soldiers, revolutionaries and bureaucrats try to survive, resist and reinvent themselves in the midst of a system that always seems to swallow them and shape them so that they can make America “be great again”.

The new feature lives up to its title: One Battle After Another it is a succession of chain events, in which events follow one another, characters change, new generations emerge and old ideas are exhausted — or renewed. The long duration — almost three hours — maintains a crazy pace, typical of PTAwho has always been interested in dense plots, full of interconnected characters and conflicts, building universes in which each element develops within its own very natural logic.

Despite taking place in contemporary times, with cell phones — you will have fun with the character of DiCaprio trying to carry his —, immigration, social conflicts and current political concerns always evident, One Battle After Another carries a fascination with the 1970s.

The form, the cadence, the adrenaline, the narrative freedom, and the courage to take risks refer to the New Hollywood style, defined by filmmakers who shaped North American cinema in the following decades. This seventies echo appears right at the beginning, when desire and politics cross the relationship between Bob Ferguson of Leonardo DiCaprio (The Return) and the Perfidy Beverly Hills of Teyana Taylor (Until the Last Drop), two revolutionaries whose chemistry transforms each scene into a duel of passion and ideology.

The plot begins with the French 75 revolutionary cell declaring war on the colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, About Boys and Wolves) after releasing immigrants from a detention center. This gesture inaugurates the temporal flow that PTA accompanies: ellipses, physical and emotional changes, children growing up, ideologies transforming and threats resurfacing.

The cast responds to the challenge: DiCaprio balances comic fury and desperate drama; Teyana Taylor radiates power and desire; Sean Penn reaches a peak as a grotesque villain, mixing bravado and insecurity; Chase Infiniti emerges as a symbol of hope and continuity, remembering the discovery of young talents in previous works by PTAlike Alana Haim em Licorice Pizza.

The film’s rhythm and action are vibrant, expanding the narrative horizon without losing intimacy with the characters. Each battle, literal or symbolic, reinforces the material weight of the scene, while PTA keeps comedy and tragedy in balance.

The trail of Jonny Greenwood accompanies this energy, giving strength to moments of tension and delirium and reinforcing the nerve of seventies cinema filtered by contemporary urgency — the final sequence on a winding highway like a roller coaster is an almost cathartic visual and sound delight.

One Battle After Another articulates micro and macro precisely. Placing the fury represented by the colonel experienced by Sean Penn and bureaucrats faced with the paranoia of Bob of DiCaprio, PTA exposes today’s America in its state of permanent tension. The relationship between Bob and his daughter Willa (Infiniti) is part of a macro of coincidences, encounters and disagreements that shape everyone’s destiny, showing that the fight does not need a hero: other forces, such as the “Harriet Tubman latino” of Benicio Del Toro (The Phoenician Scheme), operate in parallel. This is an America where everyone has their own fight, although sometimes it is possible to make the revolution together.

There is an irony in realizing that Bob It doesn’t solve anything alone. He is just one piece in a larger system, but it is through his relationship with Willa that the film finds its heart: everyday resistance, made up of small gestures and intimate courage, proves to be as valuable as any great victory. This look moves the narrative away from the logic of the classic hero and brings it closer to films like The Secret Agentof Kleber Mendonça Filhoin which surviving — even if it is an idea — is already a form of struggle and resistance.

In the end, what Paul Thomas Anderson seems to recover precisely the spirit of the 70s, when North American cinema reflected the distrust towards the State after the Vietnam War and the Watergate Case, the economic crisis that corroded the American dream and the paranoia of a society marked by violence, inequality and surveillance.

If at that time filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather), Alan j. Putting (All the President’s Men) e Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver) created films that reflected the political and emotional instability of a country in turmoil, Paul Thomas Anderson takes up this energy to talk about today’s America — equally permeated by fear, fury and paranoia. His epic shows that, half a century later, the battles continue, only with new faces, new weapons and the same open wounds, without any guarantees of victory.

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