"One Battle After Another" Review
The latest from Paul Thomas Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio is probably the best film of the 2020s.
Thanks for subscribing to SatPost.
I wasn’t planning on writing a newsletter this week but watched Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another on Monday…and it slapped so hard, that I felt compelled to share (non-spoiler) thoughts.
I’m writing this on Tuesday and included some other solid links on:
EA’s $55B Private Takeover
OpenAI’s Sora 2 Video Model
The 50th Anniversary of “Thrilla In Manila”
…and them wild posts (the most random $30k job ever)
PS. No newsletter next week (Saturday 10/11).
One Battle After Another is Paul Thomas Anderson’s 10th feature film.
I watched it on Monday.
And since I suffer from a chronic case of recency bias — eg. every time I eat a breakfast burrito, I say “wow, this is the best breakfast burrito I’ve ever had” — my instant reaction to One Battle After Another is that it’s the best film of the 2020s and PTA’s second best film after There Will Be Blood (which still gives me goosebumps just thinking about Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview).
This was a true passion project for PTA. He spent two decades working on the idea, which he adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland (PTA had previously adapted Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice).
One Battle After Another is also PTA’s highest budget film. Warner Bros. gave him $140m to make a film about a revolutionaries for the “French 75” resistance (Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor) being pursued by a relentless military leader (Sean Penn) for over 16 years (Chase Infiniti plays Leo’s teenage daughter when the film jumps ahead in time).
Despite reaching a budget usually reserved for super-hero and IP sequels, One Battle After Another kind of fell off my radar. I’m fairly on top of my Hollywood stuff but I totally forgot the film was coming out this Fall.
My wake-up call was when Leo and Benicio went on the New Heights podcast. There were a bunch of viral clips of Leo telling the Kelce brothers that his first agent wanted him to have a less ethnic name “Lenny Williams”. Hilariously, Del Toro said he was asked by an agent to make his stage name “Benny Del”.
Also, the two trailers that came out in the lead-up to the film’s release were pretty meh. They did not convey the film’s appeal well (it was a comparable offence to someone trying to rename “Leonardo DiCaprio” to “Lenny Williams”).
But the hype built up over the weekend as reviews came in and some people I trust started saying that this film was an instant classic.
So, I booked a ticket on Monday at lunch time.
I went to the theatre by myself and got a crispy chicken sandwich combo — probably the best crispy chicken sandwich I’ve ever had — then rolled into a 2/3rd full showing, which was a pleasant surprise for that time block.
It was action-packed, tense, funny, sentimental and very relevant.
A highly worthy addition to the 55-year old director’s masterful body of work:
1996: Hard Eight
1997: Boogie Nights
1999: Magnolia
2002: Punch-Drunk Love
2007: There Will Be Blood
2012: The Master
2014: Inherent Vice
2017: Phantom Thread
2021: Licorice Pizza
2025: One Battle After Another
In honour of PTA’s first film Hard Eight, let me share 8 thoughts on his newest film:
Paul Thomas Anderson made his Terminator 2
How Quentin Tarantino and PTA push each other
A great use of smartphones
Will PTA finally get his Oscar?
Is this actually the best film of the 2020s?
How does this rank for Leo?
How does this rank for Penn?
Do you have memes?
Paul Thomas Anderson made his Terminator 2
The iconic (and oft told) story of PTA’s origin is that he dropped out of NYU Film School after two days.
One such telling was during his promotional tour for Boogie Nights in 1997. He went on Charlie Rose’s show and unloaded on film schools.
Specifically, he talks about his first day of school when a screenwriting professor told the class “if you’re here to write Terminator 2, just leave now.”
PTA was turned off by the pretentiousness:
“I thought ‘that’s terrible’. There could be a kid in the corner [of the classroom] that wants to write Terminator 2. That’s his vision, that’s his movie. Let him do it.”
Agreed, James Cameron’s 1991 film is arguably the greatest action flick ever (for me, the other one in the running is 1986’s Aliens, also by James Cameron and also a sequel; Ridley Scott did the original and — true story — when Cameron went to close the deal for the sequel, he handed the studio a script and wrote the film name with a dollar sign at the end, Alien$…sold).
PTA says his film education was “watching other movies” (and spending a lot of time listening to the director’s commentary).
Now, many people will scoff at PTA’s story by pointing out that he grew up in Hollywood and his parents were veterans of the industry. Fair enough. But let’s enjoy the myth-making because: 1) he’s probably 100% correct about film school; and 2) a lot of people grew up in Hollywood but how many have reached PTA’s heights?
NOT MANY!!!!
Why am I giving you this background? Because One Battle After Another is basically PTA’s version of Terminator 2 (T2).
There are so many parallels:
Non-stop action: Literally, it doesn’t stop (you could almost say it’s one battle after another)
Parent-child dynamic drives the story: In T2, the key relationship is the mom-son duo of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and John Connor (Eddie Furlong). She’s the hardened revolutionary with a precocious future leader of a resistance. In One Battle After Another, it’s a dad-daughter dynamic between a revolutionary vet Ghetto Pat aka Bob (Leo) and a steely martial arts-trained teenager Willa (Chase Infiniti).
A second parent figure hangs over the main relationship: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s t T-100 in T2 and Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills in One Battle After Another (also Regina Hall as another mother-type figure)
Very strong female leads: Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor — including her absolutely jacked deltoids — is up there with Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley in Aliens as the most badass film heroines ever. Both James Cameron films! Anyway, Perfidia Beverly Hills is in a similar mold.
Unforgettable villain: Robert Patrick’s T-1000 in T2 and Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (backed up by the might of the US Military) in One Battle After Another. Penn is insanely good in this film. The last name is so good. His hair and walking gait are outrageous. S-Tier villain. Think Joker in The Dark Night or Fletcher in Whiplash or Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds or Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men.
Secret societies: The resistance in T2 is very ragtag. But there is this idea of a small group working against impossible odds. The French 75 are also a secret society but, interestingly, the driving motivation for Steven J. Lockjaw also involves a secret society. NO SPOILERS FROM ME!
The pacing is incredible: The hunter vs. hunted dynamic of both films — which constantly change locations and have people on the move — also reminded me of The Fugitive (the scores felt very similar) and No Country For Old Men (side note: the Coen Brothers filmed No Country For Old Men in Marfa, West Texas at the exact same time PTA was filming There Will Be Blood; Coen Brothers had to pause production because smoke from one of the oil explosions in PTA’s film).
Massive car chases: Both T2 and One Battle After Another have legendary car chases in Act I and Act III. Leo also takes a 40-foot fall and gets tased like a pro.
Myth-building and time jumps: Since T2 was a sequel, the backstory is known. So, PTA spends a lot of time in Act I setting up Perfidia and Ghetto Pat’s history before jumping forward in time to the main action. T1 and T2 are 11 years apart while the action in One Battle After Another covers 16 years of time. This helps explain why T2 is 2h17m while One Battle After Another is 2h45m.
In his chat with Charlie Rose, PTA says that people should learn film by watching what they like then “trace the heritage” back to find a director’s influences.
I’m probably reaching a bit with the Terminator 2 comparison. Cameron’s film is about the human race taking on a future AI robot enemy. PTA’s film is about left-wing revolutionaries taking on a militarized fascist government (with many contemporary political storylines, primarily involving race and immigration).
One Battle After Another is also much funnier. Leo as a stoner dad has bars, especially during his exchanges with Willa’s karate teacher Sergio (Benny Del Benicio Del Toro).
I’ve heard John Ford / John Wayne’s The Searchers Martin Best / Robert De Niro’s Midnight Run as thematic influences (while Leo has made comparisons to Star Wars).
But it’s obvious that Cameron’s film influenced PTA…and how could it not? T2 is literally the best action movie ever. Or as PTA once said, “Terminator 2 was a pretty awesome movie”.
***
How Quentin Tarantino and PTA push each other
Speaking of director origin lore, I recently wrote about the day that Quentin Tarantino decided to become a filmmaker.
How is this relevant to One Battle After Another?
I am a huge fan of creative rivalries and PTA vs. Tarantino is among the best in Hollywood over the past 30 years.
Tarantino thinks so too and this is what he said after seeing There Will Be Blood:
I have to say the relationship I enjoy with with Paul is probably my most cherished relationship that I have with another filmmaker.
We are very friendly combatants. The way we look at it is we have a Marlon Brando / Montgomery Clift like relationship.
I feel I’m Marlon Brando and Paul is Montgomery Clift. The reality is Brando was better because Montgomery Clift existed and Montgomery Clift was better because Brando existed.
Nothing makes me happier than for Paul to come out with a masterpiece like There Will Be Blood. I couldn’t be more pleased for him or proud of him. Nothing inspires me more to do better.
So, I can actually say while there is no thematic link to my new movie Inglourious Basterds with There Will Be Blood…if I reach high points with Inglourious Basterds it is partly because Paul came out with There Will Be Blood a couple years ago and I realized I had to bring up my game.
This is the same dynamic that famously pushed The Beatles and The Beach Boys in the mid-1960s. The same dynamic that pushed Nadal, Federer and Djokovic.
Chick-fil-A vs. Raising Cane’s vs. the chicken sandwich I had while watching One Battle After Another.
Pick your favourite rivalry.
As the saying goes, “iron sharpens iron”.
Tarantino gave Leo one of his best performances ever in 2019’s Once Upon In Hollywood and I fully believe PTA took that example to give Leo another insane role for One Battle After Another six years later.
***
A great use of smartphones
A few years ago, director Steven Soderbergh had this exchange with Variety:
Variety: There’s a moment in “Full Circle” that hinges on a character’s cellphone battery dying. It made me wonder if having smartphones and this ability to look things up instantly and be reachable at all times, makes creating dramatic tension so much harder? Because so much of what makes a thriller thrilling revolves around not being able to find someone or not knowing something.
Soderbergh: Cellphones are the worst thing that’s ever happened to movies. It’s awful. Last week, I told Ed that I’m going to build a timeline of every insert that’s in the show, just one after another of all the phones and screens in our show, just so you can have them in one place. One of the pleasures of doing “The Knick” or “No Sudden Move” was that this shit didn’t exist. I think you could talk to a hundred storytellers and they would all tell you the same thing. It’s so hard to manufacture drama when everybody can get a hold of everybody all the time. It’s just not as fun as in the old days when the phone would ring and you didn’t know who was calling. I remember that fondly.
Here’s an incredible cartoon from Jen Lewis that illustrates Soderbergh’s point.
I’d say that 3/4ths of One Battle After Another is set in 2020s America.
So, how does PTA keep the chase suspenseful even with the existence of smartphones? From their training with the French 75 rebellion, Ghetto Pat and Willa aren’t allowed to use smartphones because they know that the government can monitor the devices.
They use other OG tracking devices and a running plot point is Ghetto Pat keeps forgetting secret phone codes he’s supposed to have memorized (Leo’s stoned character says its because he spent too many years partying).
Another smartphone theme that PTA pulls on is the difference in tech savviness between young and old. Ghetto Pat’s analog lifestyle also reflects how he doesn’t understand much about his daughter’s Gen-Z life and interests.
Chase Infiniti crushes the role as Willa btw. It's her first feature film and she goes toe-to-toe with two guys (Leo, Penn) that have 12 Best Actor nominations and 3 Best Actor Wins between them.
Also, Leo — the 21st century’s most famous bachelor — is such a good actor that he is very very convincing as father of a teenage girl (PTA is married to Maya Rudolph and has two daughters, so there’s probably some autobiographical vibes).
***
Will Paul Thomas Anderson Finally Get His Oscar?
Yes.
As mentioned, I’m a sucker for recency bias. But I think One Battle After Another is about to sweep the Oscar’s.
The leader in the Oscar’s race so far is Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan’s Sinners.
Coogler is still young and the Academy voters must know they have to eventually crown PTA.
While Daniel Day-Lewis won Best Actor for There Will Be Blood, that absolute classic film lost Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture to the Coen Brothers and No Country For Old Men…which…
…is fair enough.
Those were two absolute juggernaut films in the same year (and a little revenge for the Coen brothers for all that smoke they had to deal with in Marfa, Texas).
PTA has also taken Oscar Ls on:
Boogie Nights (1997): Best Original Screenplay
Magnolia (1999): Best Original Screenplay
Inherent Vice (2014): Best Adapted Screenplay
Phantom Thread (2017): Best Picture, Best Director
Licorice Pizza (2021): Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay
The same way the academy hooked Christopher Nolan up for Oppenheimer a few years ago, I think PTA will get his due.
Mostly, because the director and cast earned it with a truly great film.
My guess is that One Battle After Another will pull: 1) Best Picture (PTA); 2) Best Director (PTA); 3) Best Adapted Screenplay (PTA); 4) Best Actor (Leo); 5) Best Supporting Actor (Penn); 6) Best Supporting Actress (Taylor or Infiniti); and Best Original Score (Jonny Greenwood).
That will certainly make Warner Bros. huge investment worth it.
Because the box office doesn’t look great: while $48m for an opening weekend is respectable, it’s far off the $140m budget and among Leo’s worst starts.
If we include the cost of marketing, the film will probably need reach $300m to breakeven. Unless the word-of-mouth really picks up — I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU GO WATCH IT — it’ll probably lose money.
Sinners (also Warner Bros.) was in a similar bucket but that film’s budget was $90m and it ended up picking up steam in following weeks to hit $367m.
An Oscar’s sweep for One Battle After Another will certainly soften the blow.
Also, thank you to Warner Bros. film heads (Michael De Luca, Pamela Abdy) for greenlighting both these original film ideas. We need more of that original juice.
***
Is this actually the best film of the 2020s?
🚨Recency Bias Alert🚨 It is for me.
Granted, my film viewing isn’t what it used to be but I’ve seen many of the consensus favourites over the past 5 years.
The current main contenders for “Best Film of 2020s” are Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) and Oppenheimer (2023).
Then you have Nomadland (2020), Top Gun: Maverick (2022), Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), Sinners (2025), Tár (2022), Dune (2023), Dune: Part 2 (2024), The Wild Robot (2024), Happy Gilmore 2 (2025) and The Brutalist (2024).
***
Is this Leo’s best work?
A+ but the 50-year old actor has wayyyyyyyyyyyy tooooooooo many including Titanic (1997), Gangs of New York (2002), Catch Me If You Can (2002), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006), Shutter Island (2010), Inception (2010), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Revenant (2015) and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019) among others.
Leo won Best Actor for The Revenant.
The Academy legit made Leo sleep inside of a bear to get his W.
SMH.
***
Is this Penn’s best work?
A+ but the 65-year old actor has wayyyyyyyyyyyy tooooooooo many including Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Carlito’s Way (1993), Dead Man Walking (1995), The Game (1997), The Thin Red Line (1998), Sweet and Lowdown (2000), I Am Sam (2002), Mystic River (2003), Milk (2008) and The Tree of Life (2011) among others.
Penn won Best Actor for Mystic River and Milk.
PTA loved Penn as Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. We def all did.
***
Do you have memes?
Of course.
For real, though, definitely worth a theatre watch. I was so pleased with the experience that I bought 2 Dasani Waters and a package of Sour Patch Kids to kick the theatre some more of that 95% margin money.
After you watch it, listen to The Big Picture podcast breakdown including a conversation with PTA and Leo.
This issue of SatPost is brought to you by Bearly AI
Are you looking for a no-logging, encrypted and anonymized AI chat tool?
Then try the Bearly AI research app, which provides an easy-to-use UX for leading models from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, DeepSeek, Gemini and more.
While some AI providers keep chat logs indefinitely even after a user deletes them...Bearly AI has a default no-logging policy and user chats are encrypted while requests to LLM providers are completely anonymized.
If you’re looking for AI chat privacy, get access to leading LLMs and try one month FREE of the Pro Plan using the code BEARLY1.
Links and Memes
OpenAI has joined the AI video slop wars…with its release of (an admittedly very impressive) Sora app. Investor Justine Moore has a nuanced take:
“OpenAI is building a social network (like the OG Instagram) and not a content network (like TikTok). They’re letting users generate video memes starring themselves, their friends, and their pets. And it sounds like your feed will be heavily weighted to show content from friends. This feels like a more promising approach — you’re not competing against the other video gen players because you’re allowing people to create a new type of content. And the videos are inherently more interesting / funny / engaging because they star people you know.”
***
AI isn’t replacing radiologists: In 2016, AI Godfather Geoffrey Hinton famously said “people should stop training radiologists now” due to the expected pace of improvements in machine vision. Radiology positions have since risen. Works In Progress explains why. Former Head of AI Andrej Karpathy highlights key reasons:
the benchmarks are nowhere near broad enough to reflect actual, real scenarios.
the job is a lot more multifaceted than just image recognition.
deployment realities: regulatory, insurance and liability, diffusion and institutional inertia.
Jevons paradox: if radiologists are sped up via AI as a tool, a lot more demand shows up.
***
Electronic Arts (EA) is going private in a $55B deal…led by Silver Lake, Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fun Public Investment Fund (PIF).
It’ll be ~$35B cash and $20B cash (via JP Morgan debt).
Investor Joost van Dreunen walks through the numbers. It’s the largest take private deal ever. The largest acquisition in gaming after Microsoft’s $69B deal for Activision Blizzard. It’s also a significant premium and expensive on traditional multiples.
The deal only makes sense when you consider: 1) PIF is putting most of the equity (it already owns ~10% of EA); 2) Saudi Arabia has ~$1T to spend and wants to diversify its economy away from oil; and 3) Saudi already has major investments in gaming (Scopely, Niantic, Nintendo, Take-Two) and sports (think Liv Golf, Newcastle and Ronaldo getting infinite dollars do not do very much).
Related to the third point — and the idea of sports-washing — nearly 70% of EA’s revenue is in its sporting franchises including Madden, FIFA and NHL. FIFA — which was renamed to FC last year because EA didn’t want to pay FIFA crazy licensing fees — is the top asset. Since launching in 1993, the FIFA/FC franchise has sold 325m+ copies and made $20B+ (most successful sports gaming franchise ever).
There’s already controversy over Saudi Arabia taking over such a key cultural vector. Kushner’s involvement probably means this will get past any antitrust or foreign investment roadblocks, though.
***
50 Years After “Thrilla In Manila”: On October 1st, 1975, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier had what is widely considered the greatest boxing match ever. Ali said it was the closest he ever felt to dying while Frazier walked in with one blind eye and left with his other eye nearly completely shut.
The Atlantic has a fantastic long read on the fight’s legacy including how Ali and Frazier’s friendship imploded and Ali’s scathing (and very low blow) insults.
We mentioned sports-washing earlier. Ali promoted two massive fights that happened with the assistance of authoritarian leaders: Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko for “The Rumble In The Jungle” (I think this fight was better and here is an amazing breakdown of Ali Rope-A-Doping George Foreman) and the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos for “Thrilla In Manila”.
Here was one wow excerpt from The Atlantic’s piece:
Ali’s arrival was more of a spectacle. His team had delayed the plane’s departure from Honolulu so that instead of getting to Manila before dawn, Ali would arrive just after 6 a.m., which provided enough light for television cameras—and also coincided with the news hour back in the States. Hundreds of people crowded the runway to greet Ali, pushing against a cordon of soldiers armed with truncheons.
As Ali stopped to address the crowd and the cameras, a disturbance broke out between the jostling spectators and the soldiers. “I don’t want any fighting here,” Ali said. He praised Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, the president and first lady of the country, and bantered with the crowd, then launched into a poem he’d workshopped back home: “It will be a killa’, chilla’, thrilla’ / when I get that gorilla in Manila.” The rapturous arrival struck a chord with President Marcos, who aspired to build his own cult of personality in the Philippines. “I’d have to kill him,” he allegedly later said about Ali, “if he was a Filipino.” It was a joke, but only halfway.
….and them wild posts (including this genius move to capitalize on the OpenAI announcement that its allowing ChatGPT users to make Etsy and Shopify purchases directly within the chat platform):
