When their evil enemy resurfaces after 16 years, a group of ex-revolutionaries reunites to rescue one of their own's daughter.
The Garden Cinema View:
Paul Thomas Anderson seizes his moment. With a reported budget around £100 million, he has made an epic and absurd sprawling action comedy which retains his idiosyncratic style, and contains themes and political gestures which feel personal to him.
Loosely working from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, One Battle After Another is (thankfully) less inscrutable than its source, but faithfully evokes the novel’s bizarre vision of a USA contorted with conspiracy, failed revolution, and a burnt out counterculture. Pynchon allows Anderson to work in broad stereotypes and cartoonish cameos, while still honing a political edge – neo-fascism being the butt of the jokes here. It’s a thrilling, bewildering, often very funny, and occasionally quite sweet, viewing experience.
Very few ‘auteur’ filmmakers are able to operate in this budget/major studio space (possibly only Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan) successfully. To shoot your shot with an adaptation of such an inscrutable piece of American postmodernism is truly bold, and looks like it will pay off for PTA.
