One Battle After Another – Review

“Are you going to put that on your twitter or your instagram?”

Paul Thomas Anderson returns after an “interesting” addition to his filmography with One Battle after Another but is it a true return to form?

Sean Penn delivers a captivating performance as Sgt Lockjaw a man who can only be described as purely evil, his physicality across the film evokes RFK Jr’s style of movement and speech that feels completely alien to the viewer and truly marks him as different from the rest of the cast, Paul Thomas Anderson’s sense of crude dark humor as seen in Punch Drunk Love is shown throughout Penn’s lines as he speaks so passively about his superiority to other races and later describes how he was used by a “Semen demon” (Teanna Taylor) which explains why he has a mixed race child.

He plays an aspiring member of the “Christmas Adventurers Club” a seceret white supremacist group pulling all the strings as a secret cabal drawing comparisons to the Trump administration in America.

In their one of two major scenes they speak in newstalk so passively about wanting to cut Lockjaw’s privates off as he has been tainted it truly shows how little humanity and empathy they have left speaking in effectively a different dialect to anyone else that we see in the film.

They eventually turn on him as he focuses down his hunt for Leonardo Dicaprio’s character’s daughter in the town where the Club holds lots of their business exploiting and hiring illegal immigrants using them for cheap labour and discarding them empowering figures that are harsh on immigration and will deal with immigrants brutally by choice.

Leonardo Dicaprio delivers a reserved yet heartfelt performance that subtextual represents the fact that as the domineering race for most of human history white people are on the outside of the revolution are are able to switch off and attempt to live a normal life like Leo does compared to the constant turmoil and warfare that his contemporaries from ethnic minorities face

The score is masterfully composed by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood with a leitmotif of the piano underscoring almost every element of the film, changing key and pace to mark the start of Willa’s eternal battle against inequality and for the revolution but always bringing a sense of tension to every scene it appears in, such as the road chase towards the latter half as the camera ebbs and flows on a dolly going up and down the roads mimicking the cars we are constantly switching between diegetic and non diegetic audio; nonstop building tension towards the inevitable conflict

The story makes useful comments on religion as Willa is held secretly in a nun’s hideaway far away from the incoming Lockjaw as he remarks “What an affront to god” that they would hold someone he sees as “evil” offering commentary on the white Christian nationalism that is becoming ever so common across the world, with Trumps hard stance on immigration.

Where else to converge the primary storylines than a holy place with nuns where God’s omnibenevolence is supposed to be demonstrated; invaded by an authoritarian government under the guise of “Christ’s Work”.

PTA’s (Paul Thomas Anderson) complete control over shot composition is demonstrated all over the film, as typical in his films there is lots of tracking shots and dutch angles are used beautifully in the nun hideout reflecting how unsafe the characters truly are and how small they are in the face of the government hunting them down, the nun hideout allows PTA to truly experiment with his shots being in a dessert

The Poem “the revolution will not be televised” by Gil scott Heron is referenced constantly in the film and reminds the audience that the battle is constantly in the shadows and is a thankless job “The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb or Francis Scott Keys, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Engelbert Humperdinck, or The Rare Earth The revolution will not be televised”.