A world too vast for small screens: Why 'One Battle After Another' demands the big screen

Paul Thomas Anderson’s 'One Battle After Another' doesn’t ask you to settle in. It yanks you into a world that feels a little like a comic book, a little like a fever dream, and a little like the real world if everything had gone sideways. Bob, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is a washed-up revolutionary, hiding from a past filled with betrayal, blood, and guilt. He fought once, hard, alongside Perfidia in a radical group called French 75, attacking detention centres along the US–Mexico border. That part of his life is over, or at least he tells himself it is, but the past, as it tends to do, doesn’t let go.

His daughter Willa gets caught up in the same mess, and suddenly Bob’s fears, mistakes, and stubborn moral codes are back in sharp relief. It’s not neat. It’s not a tidy story where the good guys win and the bad guys get their comeuppance. There is humour here, yes; dark, biting, ridiculous humour, but also tenderness, a messy, undeniable love between father and daughter that gives the whole chaotic, violent, absurd world a reason to exist.

The cast is electric. DiCaprio’s paranoia makes you lean in, tense and nervous, but there are moments when you laugh at the sheer human awkwardness of it all. Sean Penn as Lockjaw is terrifying, obsessive, and rigid, but sometimes, in his seriousness, almost comical. Chase Infiniti as Willa is a storm of energy; raw, unpredictable, and utterly human. And Benicio del Toro as Sergio is calm, the kind of quiet that makes the chaos around him feel louder, which somehow makes it all feel more real. These people don’t just inhabit their roles; they carry the weight, the absurdity, and the contradictions of this world as if it’s a life they actually live.

Anderson’s craft here is relentless. Jonny Greenwood’s music doesn’t sit politely in the background. It races, it thrums, it twists around car chases, moments of panic, moments of quiet tension. Michael Bauman’s camera moves like it’s chasing the story, long takes, recurring curves, compositions that feel almost like the pulse of the characters themselves. There’s a rhythm to the madness, and you feel it physically when you watch it on a big screen. Small screens can’t contain it.

The world Anderson creates is absurd and sharp, political and playful. Lockjaw’s elite organisation, the Christmas Adventures Club, looks prestigious, untouchable, but it’s ridiculous, oppressive, and hollow underneath. There are layers here: commentary on hierarchy, control, power, the absurd constructs we live inside. But it’s never pedantic. You feel it in the chaos, in the choices the characters make, in the world spinning around them, funny, terrifying, and sometimes heartbreakingly human.

Even when things explode, literally or metaphorically, there is always that tension between absurdity and emotion. Violence and humour, love and despair, paranoia and tenderness—they exist together. Anderson never smooths it out. He lets it breathe, stumble, surprise. You never know what’s coming next, and sometimes that’s terrifying, sometimes hilarious, sometimes both at once.

By the time it ends, it doesn’t feel like closure. The revolutions, betrayals, and absurd hierarchies keep spinning. Bob, Willa, Lockjaw, the world itself they all remain in motion, messy, unpredictable, alive. The film lingers like a pulse in your chest, a rhythm of chaos and humanity that refuses to be tamed, untidy and unforgettable. Watching it on a big screen isn’t just seeing a story it’s feeling it, riding it, stumbling through it, and somehow finding your footing in the middle of it all.