2025--One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson

 2025: One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson

Nominated: Bugonia, F1, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Sinners, Train Dreams

Should Have Won: Frankenstein

Be Sure to see: Naked Gun, Weapons, Wolf Man, Woman in the Yard

"Freedom's a funny thing, isn't it? When you have it, you don't appreciate it and when you miss it it's gone. It's just gone. Poof,"--Pat

The synopses alone for One Battle After Another didn't make it feel like a film I'd enjoy. I anticipated lots of gunfire and DiCaprio just chewing up the screen. I got both of those, true, but it was the relationships and military tactics that steal the show. And it must have among the longest opening sequences before the title appears I've ever seen. I looked it up and know Raising Arizona is 11 minutes, Evil Dead Burn is 16. This movie clocks in at almost 13. Not that this hurts or helps whether someone would enjoy it. 

Pat and Perfidia are lovers in a revolutionary group called the French 75. Not being too familiar with military terminology I had to look up what a revolutionary group is. After Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn in an Oscar winning performance) catches Perfidia planting a bomb, he sexually assaults her in return for letting her go. So right off the bat we know what kind of character we're dealing with there. After Perfidia has a daughter, Willa, there is a subplot on who the child belongs to, Pat or Lockjaw. At first I thought this point would be on the backburner for what I would car about but by the end I got why it was needed. 

Once all of is set up, it becomes an "eliminate all of the wrong doers one by one" picture. One of the best scenes is an interigation where the whereabouts of the French 75 members are. Many of the side characters have interesting things to do like the man who gave Pat his new identity and Benicio Del Toro's character who is Willa's martial arts instructor.  The strangest thing about the movie for me is it had a way to seem to make time lag. After what seemed like an eternity of run time, I checked the counter and found only an hour and seven minutes had passed. I don't know if that is a positive or a negative observation. 

Years have passed and Pat has a new name (Bob) and has gone into hiding with his Willa and Lockjaw's hunt for them becomes the focal point. There are some good action sequences between the long lags of Pat (or Bob, as he's now known) and Willa's relationship. 

As a whole, One Battle After Another didn't make a strong impression me but there were pieces I really enjoyed. Parts that stand out are Pat trying to remember a password, a low-speed three-car chase and how the chase ends, and a very interesting score. The music is just simple stacato piano notes. It's funny when an epic score like, say, Glory or Braveheart, is in the same breath as a few piano notes but sometimes simple is better (Jaws enters the chat). 

Back to that three-car chase, I said it was low speed but it was more like "normal" speed, I suppose. Comparing it to epic chases like in Bulllitt or The French Connection seems irelivant. The outcome of the chase is the high point. Willa makes a decision which shows how smart she's become over the years, being raised by the type of man her Pat is. 

I was nitpicking on some things like a line about fumbling the ball on the 90 yard line, considering there is no 90 yard line. That's the pedantic side of me I suppose because I know what he meant. One Battle After Another is pretty good, I guess, but nothing really knocked my socks off. I guess I was just still sore about Frankenstein losing.