One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, September 26, 2025) Movie • Page 27

Paul Scheer did a deep dive

One Reference After Another

edit. Updated today (10/1)

 

Going to see this in IMAX tonight, should I be super stoked? I never go to the theaters anymore.

 

100%

 

Wow that was Jim Downey?? incredible.

 

the financier himself

 

I’m already dropping “this pussy don’t pop for you” with close friends that have seen it as a replacement for a simple “no thanks”. It’s gone over well.

 

Jeff Epstein? The Christmas Adventurer?

 

Well this lived up to the hype and then some.

 

God fucking damn what an experience

 

Sean Penn is basically a roided out Tim Robinson character in this and it completely works.

 

The fact that he’s maybe walking like Vince McMahon really tickles me

 

im older than that

 

I’ll plan your funeral

 

open bar except for @GrantCloud and @phaynes12 they have to pay

 

i’m busy that day

 

Man

 

Mark Cira is, IMO, the best writer on Letterboxd and his very long One Battle After Another review is essential reading post-viewing.

Just so many banger observations:

As a car guy (embarrassing I know), that scene homages some of the greatest vehicles ever put to screen:

1. The white Dodge Charger - Introduced in 1966, immortalized two years later when the hitmen in Bullitt drove it chasing Steve McQueen through San Francisco. Pure American muscle, the villain's car.

2. The blue Ford Mustang - McQueen's ride in Bullitt, the earlier fastback model. American-born and bred, the hero's weapon.

3. The purple Nissan Tsuru - Iconic in Mexico, where it reigned as the most popular car for decades and became the default taxi of Mexico City. A working-class standard, beloved and utilitarian, that barely registered north of the border.

For Anderson to stage this chase with two icons of American cinema mythology - the Charger and Mustang, locked in their eternal Bullitt dance - against the Tsuru is to encode the entire geopolitical subtext. The American muscle cars carry Hollywood's fantasy of rebellion: beautiful, loud, built for the chase scene. The Tsuru carries actual revolution: a Mexican guerrilla in a car designed for survival, not spectacle. It's the French 75 paradox in automotive form. American radicalism as performance art versus the real thing crossing the border in a taxi.

....

Bob's exasperation with Josh mirrors the criticism lobbed at Anderson himself: that his films are beautiful but “he ain’t that guy.” But the self-awareness becomes the argument. By letting Bob fumble through these confrontations, by making him the butt of the joke rather than its teller, Anderson admits what his critics have always suspected: that he might not have all the answers, that he “doesn’t know what time it is.” It’s at this moment when Bob has to go above ranks to get some recognition.

Here, like other moments, you see Anderson create these disturbing mirrors between the military rank and file and the revolutionary rank and file. When Bob calls for his “superior,” the Grayhawk 10, it’s ultimately the joke at the expense of Bob, but also at the expense of the Leftist navel-gazing revolutionaries. These kids who scorn authority structures have simply rebuilt them with different titles. It's Anderson's sharpest observation: that every movement, no matter how radical its rhetoric, eventually reproduces the systems it claims to oppose. The irony isn't lost on Bob, or on Anderson. Both are asking permission from people who theoretically don't believe in permission. Both are navigating bureaucracies that insist they aren't bureaucracies. And both are discovering that the New World looks suspiciously like the old one.

 

That’s an incredible review

 

Every time I read one of his reviews I come away with a ton of "eureka" realizations and this one has more than any I've read. Of course it only has 103 likes while every dumb one sentence Letterboxd review gets like 30,000. So it goes.

 

Thanks for sharing gave him a follow

 

Just leaving this, incredible, epic, so fucking loud, this movie definitely brought up some car crash trauma.

 

And the score wow

 

Saw it a third time