Today, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson is revered as a master craftsman. Ever since his debut film, Hard Eight, was released in 1996, the man has delivered nothing but riveting, innovative, and formally exciting work. This includes films such as Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, The Master, Phantom Thread, and most recently, Licorice Pizza. However, early on in his filmmaking journey, Anderson hit an unexpected bump in the form of a disagreement with a professor at his film school.

In the filmmaker’s own words, “I walked into this class, and this teacher said, ‘If anyone is here to write Terminator 2, walk out, just get out of the door.’ And I thought, well, that’s just not a good way to start. What if I do want to write Terminator 2? What if someone sitting next to me wants to write Terminator 2? He was sort of instantly saying, ‘We write serious films here,’ you know. Terminator 2 is a pretty awesome movie.” This ultimately contributed to Anderson’s decision to drop out of film school altogether; he loved Terminator 2 so much that he simply could not abide by such nonsense.

To this end, it is with nothing less than an enormous amount of delight that I tell you that with his new film, One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson has made his Terminator 2, and it is fucking glorious.

TOP FIVE THINGS ABOUT “ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER”

5. The Script

Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland in parts (the same author whose work previously and more directly inspired Anderson’s own Inherent Vice), One Battle After Another takes the core of that story and turns it into something entirely its own. One of my personal favorite PTA films is Phantom Thread, which benefits from the auteur focusing in solely on such a small-scale story and bringing all of his hard-earned craft and meticulous dedication to it. One Battle After Another sees him taking this same approach, but utilizing a much larger canvas for it, and the results are nothing short of astounding.

On the one hand, One Battle After Another feels like the most deliriously unchecked and carte-blanche film that Anderson has made his entire career, careening from one big-budget sequence to the next with infectious glee. On the other hand, it is also so profoundly rooted in the intimate, small-scale but high-stakes story of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character and his daughter, as played by Chase Infiniti. In the years inbetween this film and his prior one, Anderson performed uncredited rewrites on high-profile blockbusters such as Napoleon and Killers of the Flower Moon, and One Battle After Another’s script feels all the more concise and laser-focused because of it.

4. The Performances

This film is positively overflowing with fantastically compelling and engaging performances. Obviously, Leonardo DiCaprio is nothing short of mesmerizing in the lead role, steering all the way into the skid with regard to his character actor capabilities, and delivering a physical performance that feels as if you’re watching him morph into Jack Nicholson in real-time at certain points. Benicio del Toro is equally magnetic, if not more so, as Sensei St. Carlos, whose laid-back and off-kilter performance is yet another notch on the actor’s belt of gonzo performances that feel like they wouldn’t work in anyone else’s hands, but soar in his.

Elsewhere, Regina Hall is incredible and deserves to be recognized for her remarkable timing and delivery, honed by years of comedic excellence but applied in dramatic and moving fashion here. Teyana Taylor threatens to steal the whole film up top, with an unyieldingly charismatic performance that leaves the precise kind of lasting impression the character and script needed in order to work. Sean Penn is unbelievable as the woefully uninformed antagonist of the film, whose physicality alone dissects the child-like qualities of uber-masculine figures in such fascinating ways.

Lastly, Chase Infiniti makes her film debut here as Willa Ferguson, the character around whom the vast majority of the action revolves and who evolves into the protagonist proper by the film’s end. To stick with the Terminator 2 analogy, she is this film’s John Carter, and it is miraculous to watch as the character and actress come into their own before our very eyes.

3. The Editing

Andy Jurgensen has edited the last several Paul Thomas Anderson films, and clearly has established a great rapport with the filmmaker. They work together incredibly well, creating synchronous and harmonic work, and that has never been more on display than it is in One Battle After Another. I can tell you with full sincerity that I have never seen a three-hour-long film that felt shorter than One Battle After Another does. So much so that as the third act was unfolding, I grew increasingly curious about how the story would progress from here, given that there must still be like an hour of runtime left. But then, it was over; it was a three-hour movie that left me absolutely begging for more.

Jurgensen’s editing is sublime the whole way through, but what he is able to pull off in the first act feels utterly unprecedented. Anderon’s script sets up a lot of story elements in the first act, but continues to move at a breakneck pace while doing so. As such, this could have so easily all turned to mush, but between Anderson’s deeply motivated direction, the stellar script, the great performances, and Jurgensen’s phenomenal editing, the first act doesn’t just work; it sings. All of these elements aren’t just communicated, they are felt. The filmmaking craft is so strong that by the end of the first act, you feel as though you’ve been on a full adventure with these characters already, and all the while, the film has been priming you for what is to come. Ingenious stuff on every level.

2. Breathlessly Timely Politics

I adore the fact that, despite the fact that One Battle After Another’s first act takes place sixteen years before the rest of the film, the entire story feels cohesively set within the same kind of time and place. The film literally opens with a revolutionary group’s assault on an immigration detention center, introducing the breathlessly relevant political angle of the film with immediacy and power. When the film cuts to its version of the ‘present day’ later on, it feels as if Anderson is making a very deliberate point about the calcification of these systems and the adults within them.

In the first act, DiCaprio’s character is an active, revolutionary character, but by the latter portions of the story, he has become a burned-out and vindictive old man, angry at the ways in which the culture has shifted around him. Conversely, his daughter Willa is now the far more progressive and liberally minded one, and her beliefs clash up against his own constantly.

The fact that this is PTA’s first present-tense, modern-day film in years also contributes to the larger impact of these themes. Throughout his career, he has routinely extrapolated meaning from the past. Here, to see him return to the present day in such visceral and vulgar fashion is so affecting and well-earned.

1. The Visuals

Shot on VistaVision film, the visual language of One Battle After Another is rich, lush, and mesmeric. Anderson and longtime collaborator, cinematographer Michael Bauman, create a tactile environment that serves to accentuate the characters, themes, and story in palpable ways. Nowhere is this more evident than it is in the action of the film, which is absolutely spectacular.

Where other portions of the filmmaking industry are engaged in a digital effects arms race to see who can make the biggest and loudest action sequences possible, Anderson delivers setpiece after setpiece here that feels visceral, invasive, and impactful through their practicality. Even something like a car crash, which might be treated as a minute or tangential element in a more traditional blockbuster, is instead captured here with such articulation and dexterity that it feels monumental in its effect. The climax is such a staggering and immersive accomplishment of motivated action cinema, that I can’t help but compare it to one of the all-time greats in a highly favorable way: it felt like seeing Peter Yates’ Bullitt for the first time all over again.

RGM GRADE

(A)

One Battle After Another is astonishing. Ludicrously entertaining, fantastically funny, deeply moving, and just miraculously constructed, this is what movie theaters were made for. Paul Thomas Anderson has made his Terminator 2 and it is bona fide grade-A shit.

Will Jones