The Movie Of The Decade?

            Paul Thomas Anderson or PTA has become one of the most beloved and venerated filmmakers over the course of the past few decades. He has released a couple films that people consider to be some of the greatest films ever like There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Magnolia. Each of those films has an all-time great actor in it. In There Will Be Blood, he has Daniel Day Lewis. In The Master, he has Phillip Seymor Hoffman, and in Magnolia he has an incredibly unique Tom Cruise performance. But to me Licorice Pizza is my favorite from his filmography, it is an all-time hang out movie, and each time I watch it, I love it more, but we are not here for that, we are here because PTA just released another banger with One Battle After Another that has come out to wide acclaim as the movie of the decade, but does it deserve this acclaim?  

            Walking out of the movie my dad looked at me and said, “If someone asked me what that movie was about, I would not know what to say.” So my plot synopsis might be overly long, because this movie was a jam packed two hours and forty minutes. The first forty minutes were like a whole prologue. Bob and Perfida are a part of a secret rebellious organization, the French 75 where they help to free migrants that have been detained, and they go after politicians who have differing ideologies from them, and they rob banks to finance their activities. On the first job that they show, Perfidia is a little flirtatious with one of the officers of the encampment, Lockjaw, and he becomes enamored with her. Lockjaw pops up a few times after trying to get with Profidia, but then Profidia gets pregnant, so Bob tries to get her to settle down.

            The problem is, Profidia refuses to settle down, and one bank robbery goes wrong, and Perfidia kills someone setting off an even more intense police chase than usual, and she is the one that is captured. While being held, Lockjaw comes and finds her, and he tells her that she can get a great deal cut, but she must rat on her crew. She does, thus granting her witness protection, and one by one many of her compatriots are taken out by Lockjaw. He thinks that this is an act of love, but when he goes to visit Profidia, she has fled from her protected home, and all of that is just the preamble to set up the next two hours.

            Fast forward 16 years, Bob and his daughter Willa are living in the remote California hills living a relatively normal life. Willa is a high school student, and it seems like Bob is just whittling his life away by smoking endless amounts of weed. Then while Willa is at the school dance, a member of the French 75 comes to get Willa, because Lockjaw is on the way, and despite being a baby when it all went down, Willa knows to trust this person, and when Bob gets the warning, he flees to find his daughter. This turns out to be a much more tumultuous journey than it initially appeared.

            This is where the heart of the movie really takes place, both in the fact that it is the most entertaining part, but it is also a heartfelt journey about a dad doing anything to find his daughter. After Bob gets safely away from his house, he finds Willa’s karate teacher, that he calls Sensi, who is played by Benecio del Toro, and Sensi also has a lot going on during this raid. He has a whole group of Hispanics that he has been harboring at his business, and he must get them all evacuated safely, so they do not get detained, and he has connections everywhere. So at one point, he is trying to help get Bob to a car, but Bob falls off the roof, and he is captured by the police, but Sensi has connections, and he gets Bob snuck out, and Sensi is waiting in a car outside for him, as the chase for Bob’s daughter continues.

            The cool part about the Sensi character was that del Toro came up with his own back story. I listened to The Big Picture podcast, and Sean Fennesy was interviewing PTA and Leo, and PTA said that he had been writing the movie for around 20 years. They waited a few months for del Toro to be available for filming, and when he came, he had a whole back story figured out for his sensi character, and it was amazing and got included into the film, which it is pretty impressive to wow PTA and add to his unique story telling style in such a perfect way.

            Bob, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is a washed up revolutionary. Before the baby, Bob would go and participate in the revolutionary acts, but once they have Willa, he gives up on the revolution. So once he fled from Lockjaw when Profidia ratted, he never got involved with the French 75 again. He became so uninvolved that he forgot the code speak that he needed when Lockjaw resurfaced. This led to some very comedic bits of Leo yelling at people on the phone, because they would not tell him where his daughter was taken because he could not remember the last response to the question. So he was basically yelling at the customer service representative.

            This leads us to Lockjaw, who was played by Sean Penn. As mentioned, Lockjaw was the one doing the hunting, and he sent a whole raid on the city of where Bob and Willa were living just to capture the two of them. When he finally got his hands on Willa, he made her do a genetic test to see if she was his daughter, because of the fling he had with Profidia, and he was in fact her father, not Bob. So he wanted to get rid of her, because he was a part of the Christmas Adventure Club, which is basically a white elitist club, and having a daughter with a non-white woman would make it so that he was not allowed to join.

            This leads to the final chase scene, which was epic. Bob is looking for his daughter, who he thinks is with Lockjaw, but his daughter had escaped and was in her own car, and Lockjaw was chased and killed by a member of the Christmas Adventure Club, and now the member of the club was coming after the daughter. Willa keeps looking in the rearview mirror as the member gets closer, but they are out in the hills in the middle of nowhere, and the hills are rolling perfectly to create blind spots, so when one car crests, the other might be hidden in a valley or vice versa, and the whole time the score is playing, and it is incredible, and the whole scene just makes you perk up on the edge of your seat.

            People are giving this movie insanely high praise, and I think it is largely due to its timeliness. It is extremely relevant now, but as he said, he has been writing this story for 20 years, so its relevance is lasting, not just contemporary. There are many parts that involve immigration and the detaining of noncitizens, and how bad the conditions are. They also have the whole underground railroad of Sensi harboring migrants. Plus, there was also an unreal amount of resources being funneled into these cities to find these immigrants. On top of that, there was the whole fight against protests, where the police sent in a spy to escalate the protest, so that the police had the right to use force to disperses it. Finally, there was the whole white power organization and their gross racial goals.

            So this movie had a lot to say, but it was also just an enthralling ride. The score throughout helped its pace, and after the prologue, it really started to move. Everyone was giving an incredible performance, and this was  only Chase Infinity’s feature debut, her performance was just as good as some all-time greats. I think that Sean Penn gave the most transformative performance, but del Toro as Sensi was my favorite. PTA creates a universe like our own, but it feels like the weird is turned up like two notches, which adds to the comedy, but he does not back away from taking on important subject matter. 4 Stars! So is it the film of the decade? I do not think so, but it is one of the best of the year, and I highly recommend watching it.