‘One battle after another’ exposes the fury and paranoia of one America in crisis

In One battle after anotheryour newest movie, Paul Thomas Anderson (Black blood) builds an epic that combines family revolution and drama to capture the political, social and emotional chaos of contemporary United States. Between arrests for immigrants, the rise of white nationalism and the militarization of cities with technological surveillance and strongly armed police forces, the feature portrays a crisis America, marked by the transformation of fear into politics and militarism into a show.

By dramatizing this scenario, the film shows how collective paranoia and institutional violence corrode both public life and family ties, making every intimate relationship also a battlefield. In this context, Pta -As the director is called among the movie buffs-investigates as parents and children, militants, revolutionaries and bureaucrats try to survive, resist and reinvent themselves in the midst of a system that always seems to swallow them and shape them so that they make America make them “Be big again”.

The news is entitled to its title: One battle after another It is a succession of chain events, where events follow each other, characters change, new generations emerge, and old ideas run out – or renew themselves. The long term – almost three hours – maintains a hallucinated pace, typical of Ptawho has always been interested in dense plots, full of characters and interconnected conflicts, building universes in which each element develops within a very natural and own logic.

Despite going on in contemporary times, with cell phones – you will have fun with the character of Dicaprio trying to carry his – immigration, social conflicts and current political concerns always evident, One battle after another carries a fascination with the 1970s.

The form, the cadence, the adrenaline, the narrative freedom, and the courage to risk refer to the style of the new Hollywood, defined by filmmakers who shaped American cinema in the following decades. This seventy echo appears early on, when desire and politics cross the relationship of Bob Ferguson of Leonardo DiCaprio (The return) and from Perfidia Beverly Hills of Teyana Taylor (Until the last drop), two revolutionaries whose chemistry turns each scene into a duel of passion and ideology.

The plot begins with the revolutionary cell French 75 declaring war to the colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, About boys and wolves) After freeing immigrants from a detention center. This gesture inaugurates the temporal flow that Pta Accompanies: ellipses, physical and emotional changes, growing children, ideologies transforming, and resurgence threats.

The cast responds to the challenge: Dicaprio balance comic fury and desperate drama; Teyana Taylor radiates power and desire; Sean Penn reaches an peak as a grotesque villain, mixing bravata and insecurity; Chase Infiniti It appears as a symbol of hope and continuity, remembering the discovery of young talents in previous works of Ptahow Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza.

The rhythm and action of the film are vibrant, expanding the narrative horizon without losing intimacy with the characters. Each battle, literal or symbolic, reinforces the material weight of the scene, while Pta maintains comedy and tragedy in balance.

The trail of Jonny Greenwood It follows this energy, giving strength to moments of tension and delirium and reinforcing the nerve of seventy cinema filtered by contemporary urgency-the final sequence on a winding highway like a roller coaster is of an almost cathartic visual and sound delight.

One battle after another It articulates micro and macro accurately. Putting the fury represented by the colonel lived by Sean Penn and the bureaucrats before the paranoia of Bob of Dicaprio, Pta exposes current America in its state of permanent tension. The relationship between Bob and your daughter Willa (Infinite) is inserted into a macro of coincidences, meetings and mismatches that shape everyone’s fate, showing that the fight does not need a hero: other forces, such as the “Harriet Tubman Latin” of Benicio Del Toro (The Phoenician Scheme), act in parallel. This is a America where each one has his own fight, although sometimes it is possible to make the revolution together.

There is an irony in realizing that Bob It doesn’t solve anything alone. It is just a piece in a larger system, but it is through its relationship with Willa That the film finds its heart: the daily resistance, made of small gestures and intimate courage, proves as valuable as any great victory. This look shifts the narrative of the logic of the classic hero and brings it closer to films like The secret agentfrom Kleber Mendonça Filhowhere it survives – even if an idea – is already a form of struggle and resistance.

In the end, what Paul Thomas Anderson It seems to recover is precisely the spirit of the 1970s, when US cinema translated distrust of the state after the Vietnam War and the Watergate Case, the economic crisis that eroded the American dream and the paranoia of a society marked by violence, inequality and vigilance.

If at that time filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola (The Powerful Boss), Alan J. Pakula (All men of the president) and Martin Scorsese (Driver) created films that reflected the political and emotional instability of a country in seizure, Paul Thomas Anderson It takes up this energy to talk about America today – also crossed by fear, fury and paranoia. Its epic shows that, half a century later, battles continue, only with new faces, new weapons and the same open wounds, without any guarantees of victory.

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• Benicio Del Toro

• Chase Infinity

• criticism

• Leonardo DiCaprio

• Paul Thomas Anderson

• pta

• Sean Penn

• Teyana Taylor

• One battle after another