Washed-up revolutionary Bob exists in a state of stoned paranoia, surviving off-grid with his spirited, self-reliant daughter, Willa. When his evil nemesis resurfaces after 16 years and she goes missing, the former radical scrambles to find her, father and daughter both battling the consequences of his past.
The heroes of One Battle After Another are revolutionaries who communicate in code. Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), though, has been out of the game so long that he’s forgotten how to speak the language.In this way, it is the most explicitly political movie of Paul Thomas Anderson’s career by a desert-highway mile. It’s also, as indicated by its down-the-middle promotional materials and Fortnite crossover, an all-out action flick, overlaying its ideological intrigue and literary pedigree on a gleaming, gunmetal endoskeleton.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” is an exciting, goofy and deadly serious big-screen no — a no to complacency, to oppression, to tyranny.“One Battle After Another” was inspired by “Vineland,” Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, which Anderson has liberally borrowed from to his singular ends. The novel opens in 1984, the year that Ronald Reagan won his second term as president and in the wake of “the Nixonian Repression.”
