A PTA banger that runs like politically charged fever dream.

PTA’s One Battle After Another is a controlled detonation of every political anxiety we’ve been marinating in for the last decade. The film follows Ghetto Pat, who's a burnt-out explosives savant turned fugitive father as he bounces between radical cells, government crackdowns, and long-rotted personal loyalties. But the plot isn’t really the point. What grounds the film isn't the revolution but the relationship at its core, of a father fighting like hell to stay visible to a daughter who’s already outgrown the mythology he built around himself.

The Premise

The film looks phenomenal. You get sprawling desert chases, neon-lit safe houses, and surveillance rooms that look ripped from PTA's imagination. The cinematography constantly destabilizes the audience, with handheld panic giving way to serene wide shots, then back into claustrophobic steadicam runs that trap the viewer inside Bob’s fried consciousness. The colors shift from vibrancy to dust-blown desaturation, mirroring the emotional collapse of the characters. It’s gorgeous and it’s sloppy on purpose.

Visual Language

DiCaprio plays Bob/Ghetto Pat as a man whose synapses have been humming on the wrong frequency for too long and life has thrown him into a situation where he's struggling to put himself together. He's part savant, part revolutionary, and part single father leftover from a cause that outpaced him. Chase Infiniti is the film’s emotional anchor and she delivers a coming-of-age performance that feels incredibly grounded. Sean Penn, coming out of retirement chews every fiber of his fascist villain persona, Lockjaw, but PTA finds humanity even in his ridiculousness. And Benicio del Toro, as Sensei Sergio, walks away with the movie, calm, funny, enigmatic, the eye of the hurricane PTA builds around him.

Performances

The movie pulses in PTA waves: long stretches of absurd banter, sudden bursts of violence, emotional confessions dropped like grenades, then an unexpected musical moment that resets everything. The pacing is intentionally disorienting. Early scenes whip by, fueled by adrenaline and ideology; the middle slows into paranoia and fractured memory; the final act takes its time. Some people will find the slowdown jarring but it's not for everyone. The ending lands not because it resolves anything but because it finally lets the chaos breathe and simmer.

Pacing and Structure

The action scenes often play with no score at all, leaving room for PTA’s hyper-specific sound design: car tires crunching desert gravel, fluorescent lights buzzing in interrogation rooms, the awful echo of memory scraping through Bob’s brain. And when the music does swell, it feels like a hallucination, perhaps something Bob wants to believe is real even if it isn’t.

Sound Design

Despite its scale, the movie is fundamentally intimate. The generational argument here is that the previous generation of adults broke everything, and now the kids are left to navigate the rubble with better instincts and fewer illusions.  It’s about movements that eat themselves, about the thin line between resistance and recklessness, and about how love and family persists even when the fog of ideology is too thick to see through.

What It's Really About

The film is messy, overwhelming, sometimes unwieldy, but that’s exactly why it works. PTA mirrors the noise, fear, humor, and exhaustion of living through constant crises. The ending leaves you with the echo of everything unresolved,  the personal, the political, the generational. But in the middle of all that noise, there’s one unmistakable truth: PTA still knows how to make a film that feels like life at its most chaotic, ridiculous, and strangely hopeful.

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One Battle After Another

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