Leonardo DiCaprio steps into Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie One Battle After One other as Bob Ferguson, a burned-out explosives knowledgeable making an attempt to dwell quietly along with his teenage daughter within the redwoods of Northern California. His previous, nonetheless, refuses to remain buried. For him, what begins as a retreat into small-town life quickly turns right into a hunt, with Sean Penn’s Col. Steven Lockjaw decided to settle previous scores.
The movie brings collectively a forged that additionally contains Benicio del Toro, Regina Corridor, Teyana Taylor, and newcomer Chase Infiniti, all shifting by way of a narrative that shifts from paranoia in quiet neighborhoods to large-scale motion sequences that rival any blockbuster spectacle.
The brand new dynamic duo. #OneBattleAfterAnother – NOW PLAYING solely in theaters and IMAX. Get tickets now. https://t.co/mzYB20K6Sq pic.twitter.com/p1UXlAqllo
— One Battle After One other (@onebattlemovie) September 28, 2025
Why One Battle After One other Took 20 Years to Make
The highway to this movie was unusually lengthy. Anderson carried the concept for practically twenty years, shaping it right into a challenge that demanded a finances of 130 million {dollars} and the form of studio endurance few administrators may command.
In contrast to many fashionable epics, he selected to not premiere it at movie festivals, letting the thriller develop till launch. For him, it was an opportunity to mix three obsessions that had been circling his profession, that are elaborate automotive chases, feminine revolutionary figures, and the affect of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland.
And for Anderson that affect is essential. Pynchon’s e-book, set within the Ronald Reagan period, follows Zoyd Wheeler, a washed-up radical elevating his daughter Prairie whereas dodging the wreckage of a failed counterculture. Anderson didn’t adapt it in a strict sense, however he borrowed freely. Bob Ferguson inherits Zoyd’s mixture of exhaustion and survival intuition, whereas Willa displays Prairie’s stressed consciousness of a world slipping away. As a substitute of anchoring the movie in Eighties politics, Anderson threads the story by way of the Nineties and later, invoking migrant detention facilities, abortion clinic standoffs, and authorities surveillance.
typically it’s not about profitable… it’s about surviving lengthy sufficient to struggle the following one.
🎬 One Battle After One other pic.twitter.com/cgLMNSXtaQ
— MEJE ✪ (@callmeMEJE) September 22, 2025
The consequence retains Pynchon’s themes of disillusionment however grounds them in conflicts that also resonate right now.
Why One Battle After One other Issues Now
By taking solely the items of Vineland that matched Anderson’s imaginative and prescient and discarding the remaining, he created one thing that feels each private and common.
The timing of One Battle After One other’s launch additionally sharpens its message. When Vineland got here out in 1990, it struggled with critics who noticed it as too light-weight for Pynchon. Nevertheless, a long time later, the novel’s reflection on failed beliefs and generational drift finds a brand new stage in Anderson’s movie. One Battle After One other positions itself not solely as leisure however as a meditation on what occurs when previous struggles resurface and demand to be fought once more.
Now in theaters, the film carries the load of its two-decade journey whereas talking straight to the current. It’s Anderson’s most formidable collision of satire, motion, and political reminiscence, one which asks how the unfinished battles of the previous develop into the struggles of the longer term.
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