One Battle After Another

In the early 2000s American filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson began putting together ideas for an “action car-chase movie.” He had three sources of inspiration. First, he wanted to write a script for “a kind of action-adventure film in the desert with a car chase.” Second, he wanted to adapt Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland, a story about former 1960s radicals (in the vein of the Weather Underground) who have become countercultural relics in the Reagan-era ’80s. And third, he wanted his film to feature a woman revolutionary. The result, two decades in the making, is One Battle After Another, a dark comedy-thriller film released in 2025. Centering on a burned-out ex-radical activist living under an assumed name, his biracial daughter, and the racist military official who goes to extremes to hunt them down, the movie was one of the most acclaimed films of the year, garnering many awards and accolades. It notably won six Academy Awards, including best picture.

Plot summary and characters

This section contains spoilers.

The story is set in an alternate version of California and Texas, sometime in the early 21st century (the film is vague about exact dates). “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and the woman he loves, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), are members of the French 75, a leftist revolutionary group that carries out militant acts such as blowing up power grids and raiding a federal detention center at the U.S.-Mexico border to rescue migrants being held there.

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During the latter action, Perfidia holds the center’s commanding officer, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), at gunpoint and sexually humiliates him. Later, he stalks Perfidia, having become obsessed with her. Telling her that he will look the other way regarding her revolutionary activities, he manipulates her into a sexual encounter.

Perfidia becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter named Charlene. Pat embraces his new role as a father, but Perfidia carries on her life as a revolutionary. After a bank robbery gone wrong, she is arrested and gives up information on the French 75 to avoid prison time. With Lockjaw’s intervention, Perfidia enters the witness protection program, but she escapes to Mexico. Some French 75 members are executed or arrested, while others go into hiding, including Pat and baby Charlene.

Sixteen years later the father and daughter are living off the grid as Bob and Willa Ferguson in a fictional sanctuary city called Baktan Cross. Bob spends most of his time getting stoned, drinking alcohol, and reliving his glory days by sitting on his couch and watching the 1966 war film The Battle of Algiers. Willa has been led to believe that her mother died a hero of the resistance. Meanwhile, Lockjaw has applied to join a white supremacist secret society called the Christmas Adventurers Club, which requires a thorough background check of potential members. Among the club’s reasons for rejecting a candidate is engaging in interracial relationships. Concerned that Willa might be his biological daughter, Lockjaw uses his military position to have the pair hunted down under the pretense of a raid in Baktan Cross to find undocumented immigrants.

Bob and Willa escape but are separated from each other. Willa flees with Deandra (Regina Hall), a French 75 member, while Bob seeks aid from Willa’s karate instructor, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro). As Baktan Cross erupts into a violent clash between protesters, the police, and the military, Bob struggles to find out where Deandra has taken Willa. At the same time, Sensei rounds up a group of immigrants and shuttles them to safety in an underground operation that he calls a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation.”

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Ultimately, Lockjaw and his troops track Willa and Deandra down at Sisters of the Brave Beaver, a convent of Black revolutionary nuns located in the hills of the California desert. Taking Willa hostage, Lockjaw uses a DNA kit to confirm that she is his daughter, then hands her over to the bounty hunter Avanti (Eric Schweig) to have her killed. Avanti lets her go, however, and she eventually reunites with her father after a gripping car chase. Meanwhile, the Christmas Adventurers Club, which has learned about Lockjaw’s past and about Willa, has dispatched an assassin to kill Lockjaw. Back at home in Baktan Cross, Bob gives Willa a letter that her mother wrote to her a few years earlier. After reading it, Willa leaves for a protest in Oakland, California.

Production and use of VistaVision

One Battle After Another is not the first of Anderson’s movies to be adapted from Pynchon’s oeuvre. His 2014 film, Inherent Vice, is based on the author’s 2009 novel of the same name. Anderson’s relationship with the notoriously reclusive novelist was a factor in the author giving his blessing to the Vineland adaptation. Anderson has noted that in writing the script, he took many liberties with the source material. “Vineland was always going to be too hard to adapt,” he told Esquire in 2025, “so I stole the parts that spoke to me and just started running like a thief.”

Production of the film was delayed by several years as Anderson and his casting director, Cassandra Kulukundis, waited to find the right person to play Willa. (The director made several other films in the meantime.) Anderson was impressed by newcomer Chase Infiniti’s audition tape, but it took several months’ worth of evaluation before giving her the part.

Anderson shot much of the film using VistaVision, a filmmaking technology that was invented in the 1950s and results in a higher-resolution image and sharper quality. (The movie was also projected in VistaVision in the small number of U.S. theaters that feature the technology.) In an interview with The New York Times, the film’s cinematographer, Michael Bauman, said that Anderson chose VistaVision because he wanted a “raw look” for the film, similar to that of the 1971 thriller The French Connection. Bauman also said, “In a world where everyone’s all about streaming, this is like, OK, here’s a reason to go back to the cinema, because this is an experience you’re just not going to get on your amazing 52-inch TV.”

Reception, political themes, and awards

Critics widely praised One Battle After Another, including the acting, action sequences, and film score. There was less consensus about whether the film has a political message—and if so, what that is. Much of the confusion centered on when the film is supposed to take place—as in, during which political administrations. Many critics and viewers interpreted the movie’s themes as an endorsement of liberal or radical convictions, and some think its plot addresses contemporary debates about the policies of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Others have claimed the film encourages left-wing violence. Yet another view is that it satirizes the contemporary American political milieu or revolutionary groups and ideals.

Anderson and DiCaprio have described the film as nonpolitical and more of a story about generational differences and a father-daughter relationship. “If there are any politics in this movie, I think it’s about how some people are still stuck in their ways and others have embraced the future,” DiCaprio told The New York Times. Notably, there are echoes of Anderson’s personal life in the film’s portrayal of Bob and Willa’s relationship: Anderson, who is white, has four children (including three daughters) with comedian Maya Rudolph, who is Black. Racial politics are also touched upon in such details as the resistance fighters’ passwords (essentially, the words of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 spoken-word recording “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”) and the film’s title, which is taken from the text of a 1960s-era Weather Underground handbill.

The movie’s estimated budget was $130 million with an additional $70 million spent on marketing. On its opening weekend in September 2025, it made about $22 million domestically, leading to reports that the film was a commercial flop. By early 2026 it had made more than $71 million domestically and some $200 million worldwide. However, many critics ranked One Battle After Another among the best movies of 2025. The film won four Golden Globe Awards: best motion picture musical or comedy, best director, best screenplay, and best supporting actress in a motion picture (Teyana Taylor). At the BAFTA Awards, the movie notched six wins, including best film, best director, best adapted screenplay, best cinematography, best editing, and best supporting actor (Sean Penn). It also garnered 13 Academy Award nominations and won for best picture, director, adapted screenplay, supporting actor, film editing, and casting.

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