One Battle After Another

Prior to One Battle After Another, I'd only seen two movies by director Paul Thomas Anderson. Not that I was intentionally avoiding his movies, but more that his movies didn't appeal much to me on first blush. The two I'd seen, Boogie Nights and The Master, left little impression upon me besides some good acting. Coming into this, I kept hearing how this was PTA's masterpiece, the apogee of his career. After watching it, I'm left wondering if that statement is less complimentary and more damning. I am struggling to understand why this has been so hailed. I came away with the feeling I'd been sold some magic beans. As I lay in bed contemplating OBAA, I was reminded of Ti West's movie X. The praise X received, even from more mainstream critics, was at how it "elevated" the slasher genre. There was more care put into the characters, the themes, the cinematography, all the elements that make critics and Academy members get all squishy. What I love about that is the snobs got taken for suckers; X has that depth they're looking for that supposedly validates a movie's existence, but it's also just a sleazy throwback to 70's exploitation horror. It doesn't force it's "elevated" status onto the movie or onto the viewer. You don't have to appreciate how it interrogates the whole insulting idea of "elevated" horror or where the line is between art and pulp. You can just sit there and ogle the naked pretty ladies and revel in the pitchforkings and alligator murders. You get something extra if you let those themes hit you, but X can be enjoyed either way. OBAA tries to do that, and the key word is "try". It tries to lipstick the hell out of the pig that is boilerplate 80's action movie that is OBAA's core, because that's all OBAA is. "Oh, but you can't do that, you have to judge the movie as-is!", I hear someone saying, and I point you up to the previous paragraph, where I did the same thing to X. It's One Friday The 13th At The Texas Chainsaw Massacre House at its heart. All the fancy camera work and investment in character and themes can't hide that it trades in the same lurid, lizard-brained aspects that the entire slasher and exploitation genre did/still does. So if you strip away the politics and racial aspects (the value of those being HIGHLY debatable) and the fancy cinematography, and you're left with the uncomfortable realization that OBAA has the same basic plot as Commando. Lower body count, sure, and the hero here isn't a chiseled wall of Bavarian muscle, but it's still "guy tries to rescue his kidnapped daughter". All the talk of political revolution and a secret cabal of racist elites and AAA-list actors doesn't change that this is a plot ripped straight out of The Cannon Group's repertoire. The problem is that, unlike X, PTA doesn't seem capable of infusing his characters or themes with any depth. He WANTS to, and seems to make vague gestures in the general direction of depth, but never actually puts in the work to do it. When the movie has to come to a grinding halt for Leonardo DiCaprio to vomit exposition on a phone about how he's dulled himself with booze and drugs over the past 16 years in an effort to forget his past, it exposes that PTA doesn't know how to show, only tell. OBAA (and Boogie Nights and The Master) has paper-thin characters that that float through the events of the movie on vibes, yelling the movie's themes or their emotions at you through a bullhorn, but never letting them actually develop. Father/daughter relationships are supposedly a big part of this movie's second half, but I'll be damned if I can find much of a trace of a relationship between the two, given they share all of four minutes of screen time together. That could've been remedied if this movie wasn't bloated by the self-indulgent first half, in which PTA exhaustively lays so much story foundation that could've been relayed in other, far more concise manners. Foundation, it should be said, that undermines the movie more than it informs, given it contains the most content that has proved to be the most problematic (as a white guy, I am not stepping into that minefield). Beyond that, though, it just keeps going and belaboring the point, more interested in making noise that it thinks is some kind of statement than actually forming that noise into something. And don't even ask about the gaping plot holes in the climax that will kick you right out of the movie, or the rug-pull with the primary antagonist that accomplishes absolutely nothing apart from raising more questions than it answers. I spent the first half of the movie willing OBAA to get on with it, and then spent the second half wondering why I was in a hurry to get to where it was going. The acting and the cinematography are excellent, there's no question there, but it's like making this amazing sauce to drizzle over a microwave dinner. OBAA offers the same bog-standard rescue-the-damsel action movie story you've seen in dozens of direct-to-video movies with Don "The Dragon" Wilson and Chuck Norris. Enlisting a couple Oscar winners and shooting it like a nature documentary and expecting that to do the heavy lifting isn't enough to distract from how hollow the core One Battle After Another really is.