Featuring immigrants, dopers, white supremacists and revolutionaries in a vaudevillian sense, director Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film manages to do the impossible by playing like a vintage adventure film that creates a hyperreal portrait of modern America. Succeeding in not only entertaining the audience with its irony, but also in delivering a powerful message that echoes in the viewers hearts, the movie scares right wingers with a frighteningly recognizable portrayal.

In an America that is a little stranger than fiction, yet still very familiar, Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a washed-up revolutionary surviving off-grid in a perpetual state of stoned paranoia. He lives with his only self-reliant daughter, Willa, in Northern California. Back in the early 2000s, Bob gradually found a common karmic energy with a band of California revolutionaries, fading into one purpose in the name of freedom against the far-right above the megalopolis. Calling themselves the French 75, the far-left revolutionary group committed to freeing detained immigrants from detention centers, and Bob could not help but fall in love with one of the group leaders, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), Willa’s mother. As the French 75 remain devoted to changing the world, commanding officer and white supremacist Steve Lockjaw (Sean Penn) develops not only an obsession with destroying the revolutionary group but also a pathological psychosexual fascination with Perfidia, and does not stop until he reaches his goals. One morning, news reaches Bob that, 16 years after the dismantling of the French 75, his old nemesis Steve Lockjaw has come back to bring the rain of wrath on what remains of his life. Bob must now protect his only daughter at any cost, and finds himself in a quest through a cultureless era in a tyrannical, and xenophobic American underbelly. He is joined by a Mexican immigrant sensei (played by Benicio del Toro) who teaches a Japanese self-defense art, and crosses paths with an order of nuns who grow weed and train future revolutionaries.

An enthralling narrative such as this one mirrors the plot of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. And while Anderson barely lifts a sentence from Vineland to warrant calling it an adaptation, its soul remains present in the entire runtime of the film. As a novel, Vineland tells in a fractalizing nature the story of the remaining sixties’ hippies who survived both the Nixonian Reaction and Reaganomics to take refuge in 1984 in the Northern California town which gives the book its name. Instead of Bob and Willa, we are presented with aging hippie Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie. And instead of Lockjaw storming their quiet life, it is Brock Vond who strikes with the armed justice department. The presence of all these characters echoes along each frame of the film, working together in tandem and creating a few statements on what it means to live in today’s America and world. What both the novel and film do successfully is raise the question of whether it is worth it to stay committed to one’s cause and be ridiculed for it over time, or submit to the governing nature of time. Bob and Zoyd are the embodiment of that commitment to their cause, and while they were not looking, the culture changed, and they stayed the same. Perfidia, on the other hand, is the embodiment of change. However, the film delivers a more tender message on parenthood and emphasizes the act of being a father. Bob and Lockjaw’s characters represent two extremes of fatherhood. The former is too laid back, frying his brain on weed, with his daughter taking care of him all the time, while the latter is too strict to the point of becoming disconnected from his daughter. This message culminates in Bob never meaningfully contributing to Willa’s retrieval as she fights on her own. At the very end, before Lockjaw meets a fate worse than death with his jaw locked, Bob is simply a shoulder to cry on for Willa, which beautifully represents how powerless a father can be, yet still be present as a parent, regardless.

But the most important message which both Pynchon in the 90s tried to alarm readers and that Anderson emphasises with his latest work, is the current war against culture. What do we do with the irony of living in a technologically-led capitalist world that creates the illusion of choice and options? Options of religion, of college majors, of who to marry, altogether to create a startling image of homogeneity and uniformity. How do we move forward in a cultureless time of uniformity and simplicity that guarantees reproduction and compliance through mass media and mass production, which only serve to glorify war and work and take away from the spontaneity of life? How do we save a culture lost in the infinity of hustling in the gig economy, which dictates that you do not just have a job, but demands that you must love your job? How do we make sense of a time where people work hard towards becoming their own bosses, and replace cubicles with coffee shops where they work near other people who are also their own bosses, only for everyone to boss each other around as their own bosses, and make passive income in their free time?

Yet, to stand in defiance of this monopolistic parasitic capital is to stand for liberty. A liberty that Anderson represents in the French 75, and Pynchon in 24fps (a film collective in Vineland that documented governmental abuses in the 60s and 70s). However, that collective defiance never succeeds, because it is constantly undermined by the cultural bomb, a weapon used against it daily. The bomb that annihilates people’s belief in their names, in their language, heritage, unity, and capacity to aspire and form themselves. The bomb that comes in the form of Steve Lockjaws and Brock Vonds to separate us from our past and fall into despair and collective death-wishes; their only goal is to “purify” the world and create an everlasting state of homogeneity that only serves the white race, and eradicates anything that could be considered as the “other.” The result of these actions threatens the fate of the world and its culture as it is constantly divided by big corporations that chase the next dollar in the same way European capitalist powers sat in Berlin in 1884 and divided the fate of the entire African continent. The same lines of freedom are being negotiated around the same tables, but this time more globally in Washington and New York, London and Paris, and beyond, to create wars that are a celebration of markets. And those wars with their real business of buying and selling are not restricted to bullets on the battlefield, but also chalk on the blackboard to inflict psychological violence in the classrooms; the only difference in the violence is that one is brutal while the other is more tender. But if Pynchon, our reigning artist of the paranoid and the absurd, tried to warn us about what we might be living in decades ago in the 1990s by writing a eulogy for his generation's missed opportunities, then PTA is walking in his footsteps, not to warn, but to shake us and make us imagine what reality we could carve out for ourselves.

And it is for this reason that One Battle After Another succeeds in creating a highly stylized and original blockbuster that comments on what it means to live in a moment where the world’s reality seems to have caught up with its fictions. Praise for the film would also not be complete without mentioning the supporting cast. Aside from DiCaprio’s character, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, and Chase Infiniti steal all the spotlight of the film. Penn’s character is full of rage, insecure toxic masculinity, and hatred that is not so different from his prototypes, but still manages to make the viewers despise his Steve Lockjaw even more, making him one of the most interesting villains in cinema of the last few years. Del Toro plays Sensei with subtle gestures and actions that suggest hidden layers of a lead character, making me want to see a movie about him and his backstory alone. And Chase Infiniti announces with her first ever movie role in this that she is a new star rising.

With that said, one cannot help but speculate on the thoughts that may have gone into the making of a film about revolution. And some of these thoughts may leave a lot to be desired in the viewer’s minds. One Battle After Another falls into the trend of a series of films that criticize systems of modern oppression, while being made under big corporate names. So how much can the viewer listen to in a film about rage against the big corporations when it is itself made by Warner Brothers to feed a machine that chases box office profits? How much can the viewer believe in the revolution that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character speaks about, when the actor himself invests in new luxury hotels? Some of these points truly make you doubt the kind of battle the film is trying to communicate with the audience.

It is truly impossible not to think while watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest that we are witnessing a new classic and definitive work of our decade, but it is equally difficult to not get lost in the ambiguity of the film’s conflicted nature in the delivery of the message and the thoughts that went in to the making of it.