It’s not every day that we hear Steven Spielberg coming out of a theater practically giddy and stunned, but apparently Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘One Battle After Another‘ seems to have done just that. After a private Los Angeles screening, the legendary director admitted he had already watched the nearly three-hour epic three times, and you know what? He is still not over it and keeps on marveling about it.
Spielberg’s reaction wasn’t polite or professional tip-of-the-hat that occasionally filmmakers exchange sometimes. But his reaction for the upcoming film, One Battle After Another was full-blown admiration. “What an insane movie, oh my God,” he said, while stressing that the first hour had more raw momentum than anything Anderson had ever made. To him, this film sits in the rare company of Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ Which, by the way, is not just in its absurdist bite, but in its ability to reflect today’s political and cultural chaos with humor sharp enough to sting everyone. His point was very simple, and states how the movie makes you laugh, but only because the alternative is screaming your lungs out.
Anderson Strips Vineland to Its Core, Letting a Stellar Cast Carry the Emotional Weight
Anderson, meanwhile, was very candid about the adaptation’s messy birth. Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Vineland‘ isn’t the easiest novel to wrangle, and Anderson admitted he had to break his own heart by cutting and reshaping it, because of how the story unfolds. What survived was the father-daughter thread, because it is a story about revolution, regret, and family that struck him even more deeply once he became a parent himself. Layered into that core are the kind of sprawling, eccentric flourishes only PTA can stitch together without the seams showing for obvious reasons.
The cast seems to have pushed Anderson’s vision even further. Leonardo DiCaprio, finally fulfilling his decades-long wish to work with the director, leads the charge as a washed-up radical searching for his missing daughter. Spielberg couldn’t resist poking fun at DiCaprio’s habit of rushing to the playback monitor after takes, as Anderson confirmed with a laugh, as per The Hollywood Reporter. Sean Penn, meanwhile, has delivered what Spielberg openly called his favorite Penn performance ever, which is a very high praise from someone who has seen it all. Benicio del Toro was brought in as a pinch hitter, and apparently showed up pretending to be unprepared and then flooded the set with his ideas.
VistaVision Lives, Pynchon Returns, and Cinema Finds Its Pulse Again
When it comes to the visual representation of the film, Anderson leaned into the old-school VistaVision, refurbishing the old cameras that most directors would leave to gather dust in archives. The choice wasn’t nostalgia, because for its own sake; the grain, scale, and fragility of celluloid matched the story’s messy, unsteady pulse. Spielberg, who is a lifelong defender of film, was clearly thrilled with the outcome.
Something is definitely fitting about One Battle After Another arriving just as Pynchon himself reemerges with his first novel in over a decade. It feels like a rare alignment, where we see Anderson, DiCaprio, Penn, del Toro, Spielberg cheering from the sidelines, and Pynchon himself sending a new book into the world. For film and literary fans, this fall doesn’t just look good for us, it looks pretty historic.
