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One Battle After Another (2025): Trailer – Paul Thomas Anderson’s Bold New Action Satire Starring Leonardo DiCaprio

26 June 2025

Release Date: September 26, 2025

One Battle After Another: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Explosive Leap into the Cinematic Abyss

If you’d told me five years ago that Paul Thomas Anderson – yes, that Paul Thomas Anderson, would be helming a $140 million action-comedy-satire hybrid in IMAX starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, I’d have assumed you’d overdosed on cinephile pipe dreams and had mistaken your Criterion Collection shelf for a Ouija board. But here we are. And it’s real. It’s called One Battle After Another, and it looks like PTA has decided to punt subtlety into the sun. And I, for one, am absolutely here for it.

This isn’t just a left turn in Anderson’s career. It’s a full Tokyo Drift in an armoured tank covered in Pynchon footnotes. Loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, the film shoves us into the midst of a former revolutionary, Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who’s dragged back into the eternal mess of American idealism gone sour when his daughter is kidnapped by a ghost from his past – namely, the gloriously named Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a man who probably bathes in kerosene and broken dreams.

Let’s unpack this cinematic Trojan horse of violence, heartache and a surprisingly nimble Benicio del Toro. Honestly, I’m still not convinced I didn’t hallucinate this entire premise.

image of leonardo dicaprio on the movie poster for one battle after another 2025 — One Battle After Another (2025) © Warner Bros

Plot (Or: The World According to Pynchon, Lightly Filtered for the Masses)

Bob Ferguson used to believe in something. Then America happened. Now he just wants peace and quiet, which, of course, he’s never going to get. When his daughter vanishes into the orbit of a re-emerging authoritarian spectre, Bob is forced to reunite with his old crew of countercultural misfits. It’s essentially The Wild Bunch if it were rewritten by a disillusioned university professor after three divorces and a bottle of mezcal.

Set in a warped, near-future America that’s equal parts satire and scorched-earth reality, One Battle After Another presents a kaleidoscope of revolutionary failure, weaponised nostalgia, and PTA’s uniquely uncomfortable sense of humour. It’s funny, until it isn’t. Then it’s terrifying. Then funny again. Until it breaks your heart. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll most likely laugh, wince and then feel personally attacked in roughly that order.

The Cast: An Ensemble of Magnificent Emotional Trainwrecks

Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson: Gruff, haunted and emotionally constipated, Leo channels the energy of a man who’s had one too many existential crises but still knows how to handle a flamethrower.
Sean Penn as Col. Lockjaw: Somewhere between Kurtz and every Pentagon-approved psychopath, Penn’s Lockjaw is less a character and more a walking embodiment of state-sanctioned trauma. I got chills just reading the character synopsis.
Benicio del Toro as Sensei Sergio: A martial arts guru who’s either a genius or completely insane—possibly both. Del Toro plays him with a deadpan intensity that screams “this man owns three snakes and a flamenco record collection.”
Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti, Alana Haim, Wood Harris, Shayna McHayle: A richly diverse support squad that isn’t just window dressing. Each of these actors reportedly delivers the kind of performances that make the Oscars seem even more pointless than usual. Frankly, I’m already bitter about the inevitable snubs.

What the Early Buzz Says

While full reviews are still embargoed, some early press screenings and whispers from insiders suggest the film is “unhinged in the best possible way.” One Twitter user described it as “Fear and Loathing with drones,” which either means it’s genius or we all need therapy. Either way, I’m interested.

There’s a lot of talk about DiCaprio giving his most manic performance since The Wolf of Wall Street, only this time with fewer Quaaludes and more flamethrowers. Also, people are already predicting Jonny Greenwood’s score will give listeners emotional vertigo. That’s my kind of chaos.

image of leonardo dicaprio in the upcoming paul thomas anderson movie one battle after another — One Battle After Another (2025)

The Tone: Apocalypse With Punchlines

PTA’s always had a knack for psychological complexity he made There Will Be Blood, a film about capitalism that ends with a bowling pin homicide. But One Battle After Another dials the absurdity up to 11, then asks Jonny Greenwood to write a score that makes your molars vibrate. I’m not sure whether I’ll laugh or cry—or both, simultaneously, like a deranged film studies undergrad.

It’s a tonal blender: one part dark comedy, two parts emotional gut-punch, with a shot of political venom. PTA’s script reportedly oscillates between searing monologues about the futility of revolution and slapstick scenes involving malfunctioning surveillance drones. Somewhere in the middle, it achieves a kind of sublime madness that I didn’t know I needed.

Pynchon for the Popcorn Crowd?

You wouldn’t expect Pynchon’s brand of cerebral, tangled-up-in-itself postmodern paranoia to lend itself to a blockbuster. But PTA’s apparently taken the mad scribbles of Vineland and converted them into a widescreen fever dream that still has enough explosions to keep IMAX execs happy. I personally never thought I’d hear the words “Thomas Pynchon” and “crowd-pleaser” in the same sentence. And yet… here we are.

Shot Like a Fever Dream

Filmed on 35mm VistaVision with select scenes in IMAX, One Battle After Another is Anderson’s most visually ambitious work. The cinematography leans into surrealism—acid-trip flashbacks, widescreen gunfights and intimate, shaky-cam confessionals all co-exist in the same frame. The juxtaposition is jarring, but purposefully so. It’s like watching a Terrence Malick film while someone throws grenades at your feet. I’m both horrified and intrigued.

How This Fits in the PTA Cinematic Universe

There’s a case to be made that One Battle After Another is the long-lost cousin of Inherent Vice—if Vice dropped acid, went to war and got punched in the face by 2025. But it also shares DNA with The Master (charismatic lunatics and broken belief systems), There Will Be Blood (rage and ruin), and Boogie Nights (a tragicomic swirl of rise and collapse). It’s like PTA took all his past themes, threw them in a blender and served it with a Molotov cocktail garnish. I’m not complaining.

The Score: Jonny Greenwood’s Most Paranoid Symphony Yet

Greenwood returns to score his sixth PTA outing and it’s as weird and wonderful as you’d expect. From gut-churning industrial percussion to melancholic string arrangements that sound like they were written by a heartbroken android, it perfectly mirrors the film’s fractured psyche. In other words: it slaps, but existentially. I’m already streaming it on loop in my head.

image from the 2025 movie one battle after another — One Battle After Another

Why It Might Be a Masterpiece (Or a Glorious Mess)

There’s a non-zero chance that One Battle After Another will be PTA’s Southland Tales—a sprawling, incoherent fever dream that gets rediscovered in ten years by pretentious teenagers and declared a misunderstood classic. But more likely, this is Anderson doing what he does best: diving into the broken machinery of American mythology and pulling out something jagged, darkly funny and uncomfortably honest. And frankly, that’s the kind of mess I live for.

With DiCaprio onboard for his first PTA film, expect Oscar bait with a flamethrower twist. With a cast this good, a score this haunting, and visuals that threaten to punch you in the cornea, it might also be the most accidentally timely movie of 2025. I can’t wait to overanalyse every frame.

Oscar Chances: Too Weird to Win?

Let’s be honest—Oscar voters tend to run screaming from anything that requires more than one brain cell to process. But DiCaprio in a PTA film? That’s catnip for the Academy. If One Battle After Another can sneak past the voters’ genre bias and survive the inevitable “it’s too weird” backlash, we could be looking at nods for Best Actor, Best Director, Best Original Score and maybe even Cinematography. I’ll be over here making my bingo card.

Why I’ll Be There Opening Night

Because I want to see DiCaprio have a breakdown while dodging surveillance drones. I want to hear Jonny Greenwood’s score make someone cry in Dolby Atmos. I want to experience whatever the hell PTA is trying to say about America this time, even if it makes me uncomfortable and it probably will. And honestly, I want to be part of that awkward post-screening silence where everyone pretends to understand what they just watched.

My Final Thoughts: A Beautiful Catastrophe on Purpose

One Battle After Another doesn’t look like a film trying to make you feel safe. It looks like a film trying to wake you up with a scream and then apologise with a monologue about failed revolutions and maternal grief. Which, in today’s media landscape of algorithm-generated sludge, is frankly a relief. I need more of this kind of chaos in my cinematic diet.

It’s PTA with a rocket launcher and it might just be his most urgent work yet. Or at least the one that’ll leave me questioning my entire worldview while nervously laughing in a darkened theatre.