It was the summer of 2008, the air in Delhi was dense and muggy, and the idea for a movie club dawned upon some first-year English Literature students.
To set the scene: six of us shoehorned into one of those university flats that had all the charm of an abandoned broom cupboard, the sort you see in bleak BBC docudramas about student life.
The place barely fit us, but it didn’t matter; we had a plan. What we did not have was taste, at least not yet. Someone, among the piles of DVDs and half-drunk cans of beer turned ashtrays, proposed The Big Lebowski, a film I’d never heard of.
Let’s be honest—I didn’t know the Coen brothers, and Jeff Bridges’s name was as unfamiliar as vegan sausage rolls.
My movie knowledge at the time? Best described as Shah Rukh Khan-centric Bollywood, with a heavy dose of melodrama and romance, and precious little else.
The screening started with low expectations and a vague hope for the company. Somewhere in the middle—perhaps just after the “rug” incident—a mate shuffled to the bathroom.
Instantly, he was shushed to submission by the others. Sit down. Watch. No interruptions. It was my first real lesson in cult cinema: The Dude has a way of making converts.
Even as students baffled by the plot, we tried to register for the Religion of Dudeism (look it up, it’s real). There was a wild joy in that mix of irreverence, mystery, and cool—a cocktail that lingered long after we’d dissected every frame.
Fast-forward to now. The setting has changed: a comparatively nicer apartment in London (thank God for actual furniture).
My “Dude” phase is, perhaps, retired—or perhaps not, as Rickety Bathrobe Mode remains alive and well, at least on weekends.
And then, like lightning, drops the trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. I am instantly yanked back to my undergraduate days by the sight of Leonardo DiCaprio slouching onscreen.
The gait, the bathrobe, the unhurried chaos: unmistakable Dude energy, with a side of “life-worn revolutionary.”
What ensues is both homage and reinvention, an Anderson concoction that’s equal parts farce and thriller, brewed for the anxieties of today but fermented in the irreverence of generations before.
Americana reborn: Anderson’s chaotic battlefield
Filmmakers rarely resist their own trademarks, and Anderson is no exception.
With One Battle After Another, he gleefully scrambles the ingredients: modern America is reimagined as a frenzied, media-saturated battleground, where satire and action are stitched together with a thread as thin as hope and as strong as desperation.
The opening sequence is unnerving: the French 75 revolutionary crew, a name that sounds like a cocktail and stings like one, barrels through the border to liberate migrants from a US-Mexico detention facility.
The scene bristles with the Andersonian touch: high-octane absurdity crashing into grim reality, where Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills stands toe-to-toe with Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw—a pairing so unlikely and so electric.
Yet, for all its kinetic energy, One Battle After Another feels on the perpetual verge of collapse, a reflection of a fractured national psyche and the chaos of one too many news alerts.
It’s visually arresting, thanks to Anderson’s decision to use VistaVision, which makes wide shots of helter-skelter chases feel both epic and claustrophobic (yes, there are moments your head might spin a bit).
What resonates most is not the grandeur, but the creeping fatigue; every skirmish feels like the last, every victory short-lived.
DiCaprio’s unlikely evolution
Anderson’s cast is stacked, but it’s Leonardo DiCaprio who anchors the madness.
He plays Bob Ferguson, a faded revolutionary now lost in the fog of single fatherhood, his greatest weapon a terrycloth bathrobe and his most profound moments over breakfast with his daughter.
DiCaprio isn’t high-strung here; instead, we are treated to “slouch mode,” where defeat and cleverness mingle in sleepy conversation.
He’s always just behind—behind the plot, behind on sleep—but never out.
It is this humanity, masked with a veneer of comic disrepair, that makes DiCaprio’s Bob unforgettable.
The heartbreak is real, even when the jokes fly fast. Once a man who changed history, he now just wants to survive the fallout and keep his daughter safe; the day’s ambitions modest and deeply relatable.
Anderson gives us not a hero, but a survivor—the kind of character, like The Dude, we root for because he’s a little bit us, a little bit everyone.
Enter Chase Infiniti as Willa. She’s the emotional pulse of the film, bringing tension and warmth that never stray into cliché. The father-daughter dynamic is drawn with both tenderness and dysfunction, charging the story with stakes that feel immediate.
The film is, at its core, about the legacies we pass on and the battles that refuse to end—even, especially, within families.
A rollicking ensemble
One Battle After Another doesn’t rest on DiCaprio alone. Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw is a revelation: frightening, sometimes pitiable, and thrumming with contradiction. He skirts the edge of cartoon villainy but always pulls back; you want to hate him but can’t quite.
Benicio Del Toro, meanwhile, assumes the role of sardonic sensei, offering comic relief and grounding high-tension scenes like a pinch of salt in a heavy stew. Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia is equal parts stoic, sly, and sharply funny—a leader whose plans veer off-course as quickly as the plot itself.
The secondary cast—revolutionaries, militia thugs, politicos—are never throwaways. Instead, Anderson gives them nuance, fleshing out the absurdities of their beliefs with a wink and a punch.
The result is a delicately sustained chaos: politics rendered as farce, satire without sermonizing, hope amidst the mistakes and missed chances.
Sights and sounds
Technically, Anderson is at the height of his powers. Jonny Greenwood’s score pounds and propels, keeping the pulse urgent even as the narrative sprawls. VistaVision cinematography creates jarring shifts, flipping pastoral calm into urban madness in an eyeblink. The effect isn’t simply visual—it’s visceral, and at times, dreamlike in its eeriness.
Whoever loves action won’t be wanting more. Car chases rip through the highways, close-quarter combat ratchets up the adrenaline, and every frame throbs with anticipation. Yet Anderson never succumbs to empty spectacle; instead, each set piece feels like a lived vignette, accident and intention intertwined.
Above all, it’s the tone—a balancing act so precarious it ought not to work, but does.
The laughter is sharper for the horror lying beneath, the chaos comforting for its absurdity. Anderson slides between genres, refusing any one definition, and creates a film that’s unpredictable, hilarious, grim, and utterly captivating.
Resistance, hope, and everything in-between
Peel off the layers and you find One Battle After Another is, above all, a meditation on resistance. What is it, really, to keep fighting?
The film’s cycles of protest and burnout evoke real activism, and through Bob’s journey, we witness the exhaustion and small victories familiar to anyone who’s tried and stumbled against the status quo.
Fatherhood, found family, and the endless toll of going one more round in the ring—these are Anderson’s real themes. The tangled relationship between Bob and Willa, with Perfidia orbiting as both rival and ally, grounds an otherwise whirlwind plot. In an era of blurred moral boundaries, the film leans on these connections to provide direction and a sense of hope.
Anderson’s boldest gamble
While echoes of Inherent Vice linger, this Anderson outing is more kinetic, more biting, and ultimately more attuned to today’s thrum. It trades the paranoia for movement, nostalgia for resilience, and sentimentality for hard-won humour.
The chaos may tire some viewers, and the rapid tonal pivots might fray nerves—but that’s precisely the point. Anderson wants us awake, not comforted; engaged, not numbed.
The aftershock
One Battle After Another isn’t a film for easy digestion. Its violence is unnerving, often detached, but always urgent.
Comic moments punch through heartbreak, and in the end, what’s offered isn’t a clean resolution but a complicated kinship—an understanding that pressing forward, fighting through one more hour, is itself a small triumph.
Beyond homage, Anderson and DiCaprio have delivered a testament to survival, irreverence, and the wild necessity of hope.
For those tired of comfort food cinema, One Battle After Another is a jolt—a bracing mouthful of absurdity and wisdom.
And for every viewer who ever found themselves shushed during a viewing of The Big Lebowski, it’s a memory of why, sometimes, movies can make reluctant saints and unexpected believers.
(One Battle After Another released in cinemas on September 26 in the UK.)
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