One Battle After Another

 I grew up with movies made by the studios in the late fifties and early sixties.  These films were plot-driven but with the narrative designed to climax in a showy battle scene or gunfight.  Usually, action movies stirred in a little romance to keep female audience members attentive.  As a boy, I yearned for these plot elements to be streamlined, minimized, or, even, eliminated if possible -- after all, the plot was transparently only a device for justifying a violent climax.  Similarly, I didn't like the "mushy stuff" -- that is, the romance elements obviously thrown in as a sop to the women  in the theater.  I thought it would be a wonderful thing is a film could be composed of only the violent action during its last half hour -- what if a movie were all action with no plot at all or all battle without any character development or exposition or romance.  Now, sixty years later, I have got my wish and, of course,  there's only one thing worse than an unfulfilled wish and that's a wish come true.  Starting with Cy Enfield's Zulu (1964), war movies gravitated to pictures that were nothing but combat -- Sergei Bondarchuk's picture Waterloo (1970) is another example.  Movies like the John Wick franchise and the first half of Kill Bill are nothing but extended action scenes, unremitting duels and gun battles.  The title of Paul Thomas Anderson's recent film, One Battle after the Other, show that it is, in large part, a continuation and, indeed, perfection of this trend.  This long film (about 2 hours and forty minutes) is nothing more than an extended chase sequence, or, more accurately, one chase after another, a relentless series of car chases, foot races, double and triple chases with the pursuers themselves pursued by other adversaries.  It's a film that is physically exhausting, You walk out of the theater breathless as if you've run a marathon.

One Battle After Another, which justifies its perpetual motion by combat between revolutionary terrorists and ICE paramilitaries, is a bete noir with the Right.  For instance, The National Review has published harangues suggesting that the movie is a particularly bestial form of propaganda and that it is akin to treason to admire the picture.  In fact, the movie "inspired by Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland" is essentially apolitical -- this is signaled in an early sequence in which the hero is seen watching Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, a movie with an ostensible political subject but one that is primarily famous for its suspense thriller sequences and its triumphant action movie-climax. The politics of One Battle After Another are those of Wile E. Coyote versus the Roadrunner -- the coyote chases, the roadrunner runs and that's about it.  The film that the picture most resembles is another wide-screen epic 1963's, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, a movie that, after some creaky introductory scenes, consists of nothing more than one chase after another, all the characters in wild pursuit of one another throughout the entire lengthy picture.  

The premise of One Battle After Another is that a group of urban terrorists called The French 75 stage a raid on an ICE detention facility.  There are some chases and a villain (the coyote) named Captain Lockjaw (played in monster-movie fashion by a grizzled Sean Penn) pursues the terrorists.  The terrorists are led by a fierce woman-warrior named Perfidia Beverly Hills -- the names come out of Pynchon.  She is as determined and ruthless as her opposite number, Colonel Lockjaw.  It's personal between Lockjaw and Perfidia -- she took him hostage and sexually humiliated him.  But it's the kind of humiliation that Lockjaw likes and, so, he's obsessively attracted to her.  Their liaisons which are like scorpions mating result in Perfidia becoming pregnant.  (In one indelible scene, she blazes away with a machine gun pressed up against her naked pregnant belly.)  Perfidia attributes the child to her boyfriend, Bob Ferguson, called Rocket Man, so-called because he is an explosives expert.  (Bob is played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a continuous haze of marijuana smoke and with a look of anguished bemusement constantly on his face.)  After some more chases, Lockjaw manages to capture Perfidia.  She rats out the members of French 75 who are exterminated in a series of violent scenes -- it's like the demise of the SLA in Berkeley when they were hunted down and wiped-out after kidnaping Patty Hearst.  Perfidia goes into witness protection but bored by civilian life escapes into Mexico.  Sixteen years later, Perfidia's  child Willa is living with Bob somewhere in California.  True to her genes, Perfidia and Lockjaw's child is ferocious herself -- we first see her studying karate with a Hispanic sensei.  Colonel Lockjaw has been invited to join the Christmas Adventurer's Club, a cabal of sinister, White Supremicist, millionaires and industrialists.  Lockjaw has to establish that he is 100% Aryan to join the Club.  Their investigation has revealed that Lockjaw may be the father of a "mixed race" child.  In order to advance his admission to the White Supremicist cabal, Lockjaw leading ICE paramilitary cracks down on immigrants in the sanctuary city in California, hoping that, in this way, he can lure Willa and her father, Bob, into the open.  Lockjaw's plan is to subject Willa to genetic testing -- if she turns out not to be his child, he will simply release her.  If she is his child, Lockjaw decides that he has no choice but to make her disappear thereby eliminating any obstacle to his admission to the Christmas Adventurer's Club.  

Lockjaw conducts a raid on the high school where Willa with friends is attending a school dance.  Willa is escorted out of the school by another Black revolutionary, a woman, who drives her up into the hills where there is a convent of marijuana-growing nuns -- that is, a kind of safe house.  Lockjaw and his minions pursue both Willa and Bob.  Bob tries to flee the government forces by escaping over the Barrio roof tops with a group of Hispanic skateboarders -- but he falls into an alley and gets stunned and, then, captured.  (A network of Hispanic nurses in the hospital help him to escape from custody.)  Bob is trying to activate the sleeper cell of radical terrorists but the dope has addled his brain and he can't recall the password necessary to get those people engaged.  (Ultimately, he asks to speak to his interlocutor Comrade Josh's boss and breaks through on the basis of his fame as the bomb specialist "Rocket Man.")  The ICE commandos, now supported by some kind of neo-Nazi paramilitary, capture Willa.  Colonel Lockjaw tests Willa and determines that she is, in fact, his daughter.  He, then, tenders the girl to a Bounty Hunter named Avanti and tells him to get rid of her.  Avanti is troubled by this assignment and ends up killing most of the paramilitary that are holding Willa, allowing her to escape.  She flees in a car pursued by ICE agents who are, in turn, pursued by an assassin working for the Christmas Adventurer's Club with instructions to murder both Willa and Bob and, possibly, Colonel Lockjaw since they are  convinced that he is the father of a half-black girl.  This sets up the final set piece, an elaborate chase scene that takes place on an empty highway passing through badlands that make the road rise and fall precipitously like a roller coaster.  At various times, various characters are pursuing one another.  Lockjaw who was grievously wounded when Avanti massacred the paramilitary is also humping his way along the road, his face partly shot off, and trotting along the highway in his characteristic stiff and ramrod straight gait.  It suffices to say that Willa escapes.  Later, she reads a letter from Perfidia urging her to join the revolution.  Bob continues to smoke dope.  Colonel Lockjaw, who admires both his daughter and Perfidia for their ferocity, is eliminated by the Christmas Adventurers.  Word reaches Willa that there is an ICE raid planned for San Francisco and, so, she hurries away to help the immigrants evade federal officers.  

I have simplified the convoluted plot.  The movie uses characters invented by Thomas Pynchon in Vineland, but otherwise doesn't have a whole lot to do with the book.  Pynchon's influence is most apparent in the names of the characters and some jokes about the passwords used by the terrorists -- they have an elaborate Q and A procedure for identifying themselves more than a little like Bud Abbot and Lou Costello's "Who's on First" routine.  Anderson pushes his camera close to the characters and films most scenes in tight close-ups.  The camera is seldom still, restlessly following the action often in a hand-held format.  The film is shot in 35 millimeter format known as VistaVision.  In a lot of shots, characters are dimly lit or half-hidden in shadow.  The action scenes are immaculate, set pieces involving an urban car chase down alleys, the ICE raid on the sanctuary town in which a federal provocateur throws a Molotov cocktail and precipitates a riot, people running and hiding in the barrio, then, a series of car chases in barren territory culminating in the final up-and-down sequence on the desert road -- the road dips so suddenly and steeply that the audience feels the downgrade in their bellies (the camera seems mounted on the front of the moving car).  The climactic scenes with the cars lunging over the hills are similar to the final minutes of Spielberg's Sugarland Express, also an extended chase scene in which half-wrecked cars bounce over desert dunes in a sort of exhausted ballet.  The movie's mise-en-scene is masterful and the film is smoothly efficient -- there are very few memorable shots; rather, it's the editing and mobile camerawork that carries the burden of meaning.  One Battle After Another is extremely thrilling -- the picture feels far shorter than its almost three hours running length. The acting is good if rudimentary -- there are very few speeches of any consequence, mostly the characters are just running for their lives.  In fact, there's very little in the way of memorable dialogue -- the characters speak in slogans and acronyms, using military jargon and code.  Anderson is not afraid to use ugly-looking footage when it suits his purpose -- the camera work which is all close-ups isn't eloquent but it has a punch and keeps everything moving.  Although teasers for the movie show Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Bob, running around with a big long gun on his shoulder, a neo-Western image, as far as I can recall DiCaprio never fires a shot in the movie.

If this film had been released in October a year ago, most critics, I think, would dismiss the plot as a febrile fantasy, a wildly implausible conspiracy picture.  But that was then.  This is now.  People in masks and unmarked cars have been "disappearing" people off American streets.  Sanctuary cities have been raided and churches, hospitals, and schools invaded.  Elon Musk with Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, all of them billionaires and White, were prominently displayed behind Trump at his inauguration.  Trump has unconditionally pardoned more than a thousand violent rioters who tried to overthrow the election of Joe Biden.  The levers of government are being pulled to weaponize the Department of Justice.  Contrary to the National Review's criticism, this film feels far more prescient as to our current dilemma that it would have been in October of 2024 when most of the mayhem visible in Vistavision on the big screen was merely a twinkle in President Trump's eye.