One Battle After Another is terrifying. That's why it's great

The most frightening thing about One Battle After Another are the parallels.

Those would not be the parallels to the Thomas Pynchon book that director Paul Thomas Anderson's newest film is loosely based on. Rather, the Leonardo DiCaprio-led movie treats that absurdist novel about the fading waves of the 1960s and 70s counterculture movement as more an inspiration than a blueprint.

Instead, it would be the parallels to real life: more to our present day than the bloody "days of rage" Vineland drew from. The book followed an estranged couple of ex-radicals and their teen daughter in the mid-1980s — years after the heyday of organized leftwing political violence. One Battle After Another moves us firmly to the present.

Now, instead of Ronald Reagan, the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement, we're dealing with Trump, immigration raids and the coronavirus. We follow Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), a Big Lebowski Dude-type living in the quiet obscurity of fictional hamlet Baktan Cross.

Except he's not Pat. Instead, he goes by Bob Ferguson. It's a moniker (and social security number) adopted after a disastrously failed bank robbery led to the arrest of his girlfriend, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). That also led to the systematic dismantling of the "French 75" — infamous agitators responsible for raiding migrant detention centres, bombing government buildings, and yes, robbing banks.

That put them squarely in the crosshairs of Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Given his intense desire to join the Christmas Adventurers Club — a farcical but fearsome group of white nationalists who both pull the strings of government and worship jolly old Saint Nick — Lockjaw has an extra incentive to track down Pat.

Without spoiling the surprise, it has to do with Perfidia's now-teenage daughter, Willa Ferguson (Chase Infiniti), whose character is also living under an assumed identity. It also has to do with a web of betrayal, more than a little PG-13 content and a karate master's army of skateboard warriors.

All that may sound confusing. And it is.

As in Pynchon's book, One Battle After Another's lodestar is seemingly the worship of dependent clauses. Everything is expressed through a complicated web of interrelated, cascading backstories, tangential anecdotes and zany misadventures — while emotionally ping-ponging between dramatic No Country For Old Men-style chases and Looney Tunes-esque escapades.

That makes Anderson's film an adequately manic interpretation of Pynchon's vibe, if not the story. Elsewhere, Teyana Taylor surely delivers the most convincing and impressive performance of the film — no surprise, given the chops already displayed in the confoundingly beautiful A Thousand And One. Chase Infiniti carries the rest with a desperately believable performance as Willa.

But it is Anderson's interpretation of Pynchon's famously scattershot, seemingly unadaptable style that makes it all work.

While Pynchon's absurdist puns and subplots about jumping through plate-glass windows to procure mental-disability benefits are notably absent, Anderson makes sure to suffuse the story with an ironic rat-a-tat humour in between all the violence.

For example: as anyone who's watched the trailer knows, One Battle After Another gives us an eminently meme-worthy, sunglasses-wearing DiCaprio yelling "Thank you, sensei!" at a fist-raising Benicio del Toro. What they don't know is how neatly sandwiched between the murder of law enforcement agents, or extrajudicial torture of political dissidents, it is.

Hilarious, right?

Again, this all offers parallels to both the past and present. There was the Black Liberation Army's bank robberies and active war against the police; it is difficult to ignore the connection between Teyana Taylor's character and Assata Shakur, who murdered a U.S. state trooper in 1973 before escaping to Cuba.

There is also the Front de libération du Québec's and Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña's wars with their respective governments. As resident munitions expert Pat (Rocketman) Calhoun sets up a bomb in a courthouse, it is hard to disentangle him from those groups' bombing campaigns.

Then there were the actions of the infamous Weather Underground — a far-left militant group bent on overthrowing the U.S. government. Co-founders and long-time fugitives Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers raised two children while agitating: ex-San Fransisco DA Chesa Boudin, abandoned after his parents were imprisoned for a bank robbery, and their son Zayd Ayers Dohrn. There, comparisons to Pat and Willa are easy to make.

That is all terrifyingly cast against a current-day spate of political violence threatening to undo the fabric of multiple governments.

But criticizing any one group or offering a level-headed call for peace does not seem to be Anderson's game. To be fair, One Battle After Another — like Ari Aster's Eddington, or The Order led by Jude Law — does remind us how quickly and totally groups can shift focus from the ballot box to the Armalite.

And the film does offer criticism of the structures of power. The Christmas Adventurers Club's bizarre worshipping of Christmas does seem to be follow-up to what Stephen Prothero argued in his American Jesus — that Americans have largely reinterpreted and reshaped their idea of Christianity in order to worship their country. Meanwhile, Lockjaw's amoral rage is anything but an endorsement for the military.

More importantly, there are no heroes here. Virtually every character with a name is brought down by either poor planning, betrayal or simply the uncaring and mindless grindings of an unfathomably large political machine — regardless of their position on a political spectrum.

Sure, there is a message about the individual loyalties we owe one another beyond political organizing. But larger than that seems to be the darkly comic finding of how inescapable it is for us to rail against the system — to be caught up in an all-consuming explosion of violence, only to be beaten back or killed, miles from any real change.

Hilarious, right?