One Battle After Another is the must-see film of 2025: just ask pretty much anyone who’s seen it. The film – a kinetic, startlingly funny blockbuster adapted loosely from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland – may well be the best-reviewed film of the decade. Five-star reviews abound, as do utterances of the word “masterpiece”. For Paul Thomas Anderson, the man already responsible for a handful of this century’s very best films – There Will Be Blood (2007), The Master (2012) and Phantom Thread (2017), among them – One Battle constitutes an emphatic fulfilment of the promise he first showed as a precocious 26-year-old directing 1997’s Boogie Nights.
Made on a reported budget of at least $130m, One Battle sees Leonardo DiCaprio play a ground-down ex-revolutionary, living in hiding under the name “Bob Ferguson” while raising his teenage daughter Willa (Hollywood newcomer Chase Infiniti). Into the picture comes old adversary Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a warped, brittle army colonel with a white nationalist fanaticism and a sexual obsession with Willa’s in-the-wind Black mother (Teyona Taylor). In a year when a number of prominent movies, from Sinners to Eddington through Superman, have sought to explore the fractious political climate in the US – with varying degrees of sophistication and with varying success – One Battle stands apart in the starkness and potency of its messaging. It is somehow a dozen things at once: a raucous comic satire; a drum-tight action thriller; a tender father-daughter drama. That the reviews have been so unanimously effusive is a testament to how well it melds these seemingly disparate sensibilities. Just one question remains: is anyone actually going to see it?
For much of the past several months, there has been widespread scepticism as to whether One Battle will be able to recoup its blockbuster budget. Anderson has always inspired a devoted, borderline fanatical, fanbase, but never the mainstream following of a Nolan or a Tarantino. (There Will Be Blood, his biggest film to date, made just over $76m.) DiCaprio’s involvement in One Battle is undoubtedly a selling point, but just how much remains unclear. Since winning his Oscar in 2016, the Revenant star has acted in just three features: one hit (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood), one commercial flop (Killers of the Flower Moon) and one for Netflix (Don’t Look Up).
A popular take has been that the studio behind One Battle, Warner Bros, simply does not know how to market this peculiar tonal gumbo of a film. To be fair, it wasn’t an easy task: the movie is too funny and offbeat to be framed as a down-the-line thriller, too dark and weighty to be billed as a comedy. Even in its broadest, goofiest moments, the humour demands, on some level, to be taken seriously. (Take, for instance, the film’s white nationalist cult being called the “Christmas Adventurers’ Club” – patently ridiculous, yes, but pointedly evoking the euphemistic silliness of real fascist terminologies, from the KKK’s Grand Dragons, to modern far-right groups such as the Proud Boys, a name tortuously derived from Disney’s Aladdin.)
This is also, crucially, a film aimed at adults. In its biggest promotional misstep, Warner Bros struck a deal with the popular video game Fortnite, allowing players – a huge chunk of whom are children and teenagers – to use characters from One Battle as avatars. The unexpected tie-in was widely mocked, but exposed, perhaps, just how bewildered the studio was by its own property. What it wasn’t expecting – few were – was that the reviews would be so overpoweringly positive.
To some extent, it doesn’t matter whether or not One Battle ends up making money: the film got made, without artistic compromise. It exists, and that in itself is a win. If it goes on to sweep the Oscars, as some are now predicting – Penn in particular is being talked up as a Best Supporting Actor frontrunner – then studio executives might be inclined to consider it money well spent, box office notwithstanding. The successes of recent films such as Ryan Coogler’s vampiric period thriller Sinners, or Zach Cregger’s sprawling horror Weapons, have provided buoying evidence of the viability of original studio filmmaking; One Battle will not be the be-all and end-all for movies of this sort.
Whether it sinks or swims will be significant in one regard, however. It has to do with the purpose of film criticism, at a time when traditional criticism is in choppy cultural straits. The critical establishment hasn’t thrown its support behind a new film with such united gusto as this in years: what does it mean if audiences are still unwilling to trust them? If they are unwilling to try an expensive, action-packed blockbuster fronted by a hugely popular star, despite insistent and unequivocal raves? At best, it could be taken as a humbling moment. At worst, a sign that we have passed some point of no return.
Even taking into account the internet’s fondness for hyperbole and the requisite grain of salt usually needed when a film is as belligerently recommended as this, One Battle After Another is ultimately a film that deserves to be seen – and on a big screen, by as many people as possible. Whether it will be is another matter.
‘One Battle After Another’ is in cinemas from 26 September
