One Battle After Another - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Sixteen years ago, Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills, members of the French 75–a fictional far-left revolutionary unit that is well-organized and militaristic and speaks in incomprehensible code–free detained immigrants from a detention center. Perfidia meets the psychotic, unhinged Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, and they have a bizarre, sexual connection. They see something in each other that they both loathe, and it manifests itself into carnal attraction. She, a Black radical, and he, a proud racist, begin a torrid, secret affair that results in a pregnancy.

Pat raises the child, Charlene, as his own. Perfidia, on the other hand, becomes detached. Even during her pregnancy, she refuses to accept the reality of the situation, that she’s going to give birth to a child born of an affair with someone who will stop at nothing to destroy their organization. And so he does. Lockjaw orchestrates arrests and murders for the leaders in the group and Pat and Perfidia, along with little Charlene, must go into hiding. But Perfidia vanishes in the wind, leaving Pat and Charlene alone to face this world together.

Flash forward to today, and Charlene (Chase Infiniti) is now a teenager, under the name of Willa. Pat now goes by Bob Ferguson. Bob’s days as a revolutionary are far behind him. These days, he’s a burnout, with a penchant for weed, alcohol, and an admitted lover of drugs across the board. He keeps himself medicated to deal with the pain of his lost love, and to have his best days gone, like a distant memory. Willa is a great student and a confident young woman, and sometimes acts more like a mother for Bob than his daughter, constantly having to check him when he admits to driving home drunk after a night of too many beers with friends.

Lockjaw is invited into an elite group of white supremacists, called the Christmas Adventurers Club, which has powerful members and can circumvent certain rules in order to yield results. To admit him, however, a background check must be performed, and Lockjaw becomes terrified that they will find his secret, that he fathered a mixed-race child with a radical, Black revolutionary. He assembles a team to kill Bob and kidnap Willa. When the action starts, Bob is lounging on a couch, smoking weed, watching a favorite movie, and mouthing along with his favorite lines. He must spend the rest of the film in a stunned state, still wearing the clothes he’d had on when he was in a lounging state of mind, replete with sweat pants and a bathrobe.

Once One Battle After Another starts, it doesn’t let up. The prologue to the action is delicate, informative, and precise. When writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson assembles the pieces and allows them to fall into chaos, it becomes a fascinating, hilarious, and delirious piece of cinema. It feels like a lovechild between Terminator 2, Set It Off, and The Big Lebowski. Frequently hilarious, always inventive, and over-the-top in all the right ways, this is the first time in a long time that Anderson has made a mainstream work, and it checks all those boxes that a crowd-pleaser should, without devolving into a watered-down version of itself. For everything it attempts to accomplish, it has a self-assured confidence and knows precisely how to achieve its lavish goals.

That One Battle After Another was considered so controversial is more of a statement on our current, divided times than on the film itself. One Battle After Another manages to mock both sides of the political aisle, without becoming a toothless “both-sides are wrong” anti-satire like Eddington, which often felt like one of the lazier episodes of South Park. Paul Thomas Anderson has made a time capsule of 2025, in all the good, all the bad, all the wicked, and all the sanctimonious, and has wrapped it up in an action-packed, hilarious film that defies any sense of easy categorization. The screenplay was inspired by Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. Years from now, One Battle After Another is going to be used as an example of how to successfully lampoon modern political turmoil without sacrificing story. It would work just as well as a film in any other era, but that it’s so applicable today is just the cherry on top.

Vital Disc Stats: The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
One Battle After Another enjoys a few small beers on 4K UHD Blu-ray, arriving in a single-disc release, housed in a standard case. The case artwork is identical to its theatrical poster artwork, with an image of Willa clutching a gun, and an image of Bob’s face above the horizon. Inside the case is a code that can be used for digital redemption.

One Battle After Another feels inspired by the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, but visually, aesthetically, it looks very much like a western, so it’s appropriate that it was shot on 35mm film, utilizing VistaVision, the format of choice for classics like The Searchers (and, more recently, The Brutalist). The film’s colors lean into the reds, yellows, and browns of a modern neo-western, while cinematographer Michael Bauman favors naturalistic, simple lighting that shows the world in all its imperfections and blemishes. Like Jack Horner in Anderson’s Boogie Nights says, “There’s shadows in life, baby.” Fine details are visible in the set design, which takes on a similarly naturalistic ethos, like the terrible painting of a tiger that looks like a yard sale purchase.

Presented in 2160p resolution and graded in Dolby Vision HDR, it’s immaculately sharp and brilliantly realized across the board. Nighttime sequences, cloaked in a shroud of velvety black, illuminated by the fiery glow of a protest that’s gone out of control, look like a hellish nightmare. Grain levels are slight, but consistent, throughout the presentation.

On the audio front, we are treated to an amazing Dolby Atmos mix. This isn’t the most in-your-face mix, but it is endlessly clever in its implementation. Paul Thomas Anderson movies are, historically, front-heavy on the soundstage, although we will get occasional bombastic effects through the rear speakers like the dull thud of a slug impacting the ground during a shootout. We also get great use out of height channels when helicopters are flying overhead, or through a flare shot into the sky. In terms of how sound rolls out and engages the entirety of the soundstage, Johnny Greenwood’s discordant score gets the best usage. Slight, moody music to set the scene will be relegated to the front channels, then as it builds in intensity, it works its way up to the heights, almost like it can’t be contained to just those speakers. But when an emotional crescendo reaches its full climax, it explodes through the rears, enveloping the listener in a dome of sound during these moments.

But perhaps the most fun aspect of the sound design is during the famous car chase finale, in which three cars are involved, each making their own unique sound for the sequence: The low rumble of a souped-up Dodge Challenger growling through the subwoofer, the Ford Mustang’s ferocious engine echoing through the rears, and Bob’s stolen 1991 Nissan nasally screaming with its pedal to the metal.

Unfortunately, there no special features included in this release. There is a SteelBook slated for release later this year, which is said to include a bonus disc… a cynical release strategy, that I’m sure, is going to piss off a lot of consumers.

One Battle After Another is a hell of a film. It wears a lot of hats and tries its hand at a lot of things with aplomb. It’s an action-comedy, but it’s not just an action-comedy. It’s a satire, but it’s not a lazy, hamfisted work that ka-bonks its audience over the head with moralizing messages again and again. It’s a family drama, Shakespearean in the tangled web woven through the decades, but it’s not soap operatic in how these dynamics are portrayed. Presented in Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, it looks and sounds incredible. With this score average, on any other disc, this would be a MUST OWN release. However...

Our main gripe with this disc is the lack of special features. While not necessarily a problem in itself, later this year Warner Bros. will offer another release of One Battle After Another as a 4K SteelBook that will reportedly include a full slate of extra bonus content. Because we know a bigger and arguably better release is coming, that kind of double-dip activity is aggravating, and it's the reason we're knocking this release back a half-star. If all you're interested in is the film and the excellent A/V presentation, go for it, this is a great disc for that purpose. But if you’re in need of supplements, I’d probably advise waiting until you can get your hands on the SteelBook, which hasn't gone back up for pre-order since they made the announcement of this later release (we're keeping our eyes open for it and an official release date) - Highly Recommended.