One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)

[mfunk9786]

[Zot!]

No, it's been rare for a long time now for a film to even have a cut negative at all let alone to produce prints from one. As alluded to above with Joker, movies shot on film (and this even goes for Tarantino, excepting The Hateful Eight) are simply scanned in 2K or 4K and all editing and grading is done digitally. Once you have the finished intermediate, in effect a digital cut negative, you can film-out so as to screen prints.

True that it's vanishingly rare, but the IMAX prints of Dunkirk, Tenet and Oppenheimer were all struck directly from the 70mm negative. There were also a handful of The Dark Knight prints struck this way for "prestigious locations". The BFI IMAX got one.

Yeah, but what EddieLarkin and I are getting at is that OBAA (and apparently Licorice Pizza and There Will Be Blood, and probably all the rest) is unique because the workflow front-to-back is 95%-100% film, never touching any digital scans. The films you indicated are effects laden and even if they bothered to use Contact Printing for the few scenes that would allow it, it would be a drop in the bucket. So, I'm not going to investigate, but I can say with near certainty those would fall into the Film->Digital Intermediate->Film Out bucket. That's not a criticism, it just makes the PTA production unique among todays productions.

From that IndieWire article:


The only lingering question for me is considering the below being made explicit, does that mean that the IMAX 15perf/70mm is NOT from the negative? Also we now have clarity that there is no such thing as 2.20:1....there is a pillarboxed 1.85:1.

The 70mm (5-perf) version is an optical blow-up from the VistaVision-cut negative. It has slightly more grain and contrast, and its 1.85:1 aspect ratio matches the non-IMAX DCP presentations.

[bearcuborg]

One format after another…am I right?!

[The Narrator Returns]

If I can briefly steer the convo away from film formats towards the actual movie, I thought this was great, definitely the most I’ve locked into a PTA on first viewing since Inherent Vice (but it seems most everybody else had a much easier first go with his last two than IV). I was surprised that it actually lived up to that initial announcement of how “mainstream” it would be while staying true to this century of PTA’s unsettled goofiness and a certain Pynchony spirit; if not a lot of the details of the book, then certainly funny conspiracies, funny names, and funny pop-culture to think about either PTA or Pynchon knowing. Even I’m a little surprised by some of the effusiveness (pretty surprised by the groundswell for Penn, though he’s good and he makes a helluva final impression), but it makes sense when it accomplishes such action-comedy accessible thrills while staying true to all its creator’s shaggiest and murkiest instincts.

And yes, Junglepussy does seem to play herself. Pynchon must feel real silly for not coming up with that name 35 years ago.

[Red Screamer]

The scattershot marketing strategy just worked out great for me, as I got free tickets to an advance screening at my metro stop. I’m used to that happening only with questionable deep-roster studio cuts (the last one I attended being 2018’s abysmal Truth or Dare).

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Yeah, but what EddieLarkin and I are getting at is that OBAA (and apparently Licorice Pizza and There Will Be Blood, and probably all the rest) is unique because the workflow front-to-back is 95%-100% film, never touching any digital scans. The films you indicated are effects laden and even if they bothered to use Contact Printing for the few scenes that would allow it, it would be a drop in the bucket. So, I'm not going to investigate, but I can say with near certainty those would fall into the Film->Digital Intermediate->Film Out bucket. That's not a criticism, it just makes the PTA production unique among todays productions.

I think Nolan and Anderson are similar in that they pursue an all-celluloid workflow as much as possible; it's just the kinds of films they make means Anderson has a much easier time of sticking to it. Where effects are concerned, I don't know how many shots Oppenheimer has altogether, but supposedly there are only around 200 VFX shots, where "VFX" refers to digital and non-digital effects. For shots that didn't involve any sort of digital or optical effects, the 15/70 prints were contact-printed from a master negative incorporating the 15/65 camera negative and optical blowups of the 5/65 material, but a big hitch here is that only about 40 minutes was actually shot in 15/65, including whatever footage passed through a digital stage. The 5/70 prints were struck from an interpositive, probably because the much larger print run made it inadvisable to print straight from the 5/65 negative. Dunkirk followed the same basic procedure but entailed more VFX shots; Tenet was a film-out from a DI on all formats, apparently due to time constraints.

Regarding Tarantino, I've read somewhere that his regular use of DIs is actually down to Robert Richardson's preference, which seems plausible.

[Zot!]

Yeah, but what EddieLarkin and I are getting at is that OBAA (and apparently Licorice Pizza and There Will Be Blood, and probably all the rest) is unique because the workflow front-to-back is 95%-100% film, never touching any digital scans. The films you indicated are effects laden and even if they bothered to use Contact Printing for the few scenes that would allow it, it would be a drop in the bucket. So, I'm not going to investigate, but I can say with near certainty those would fall into the Film->Digital Intermediate->Film Out bucket. That's not a criticism, it just makes the PTA production unique among todays productions.

I think Nolan and Anderson are similar in that they pursue an all-celluloid workflow as much as possible; it's just the kinds of films they make means Anderson has a much easier time of sticking to it. Where effects are concerned, I don't know how many shots Oppenheimer has altogether, but supposedly there are only around 200 VFX shots, where "VFX" refers to digital and non-digital effects. For shots that didn't involve any sort of digital or optical effects, the 15/70 prints were contact-printed from a master negative incorporating the 15/65 camera negative and optical blowups of the 5/65 material. A big hitch here is that only about 40 minutes was actually shot in 15/65, so even if every single frame of the movie had been through an all-celluloid workflow, less than a quarter would've been contact-printed from the camera negative. To make the 5/70 prints, an interpositive was struck off a separate master negative assembled from the 5/65 camera negative and optical reductions of the 15/65 material—I assume an IP was used here because the much larger 5/70 print run made it inadvisable to print straight from the master negative. Dunkirk followed the same basic procedure but entailed more VFX shots; Tenet was a film-out from a DI on all formats, apparently due to time constraints.

Fair enough, I agree they seem to be going for the same thing, I was wrong about Nolan not trying to do Contact Printing whenever possible. It's also impossible to guess whether those 200 VFX shots make up 50% of the movie or 1% of the movie. But admit that the approach would appear to be the same, though perhaps not actively avoiding VFX like PTA seems to be doing.

[Never Cursed]

Well, what do I call this: the best American blockbuster in quite a number of years, or my least-favorite PTA on the basic level of the ride since The Master? It's definitely a great movie; do I want to watch it four times in as many years? Or is that just my feeble wrestling with a movie that, unlike the ultra-pleasurable Inherent Vice or Licorice Pizza, is designed to leave a viewer rattled and in some ways unsatisfied? Despite many of the component parts being taken directly from the book and appearing in identifiable form, Vineland this is not, and if anything Pynchon's approach and resolution to the basic story is happier and more complete and conventionally set-up and laid-out than PTA's frenetic cross-cutting, constant escalation of stakes, and at-times shockingly direct invocation of modern politics. (If PTA sees himself as an Altman-esque filmmaker, here is his M*A*S*H in intention though not form, a fireworks display of left-wing anger in a particular political moment given juuust enough gloss and distance to work in its respective genre). After an opening hour that sees revolutionary hope (and the form of a sexy, glossy thriller) give way to despair in a much less fatalistic manner than the source material, Anderson shifts gears and instead of treading water sets up a series of bold, Looney Tunes-esque stories of intense comic frustration which would feel like outright farce if they weren't so relevant, so obviously and truthfully based upon real suffering in the world.

Spoiler

This culminates in a final chase sequence that pulls from the aesthetics and structure of the Road Runner of all things. It's completely out of left field, weirdly fitting, and very refreshing to see one of these movies that spends its big action and money chits in the middle and boils the finale down to the simplest moving parts. Also the one-two punch of the Penn fakeout/final scene is excellent, with some real heinous makeup closeups as well.

All of the principal cast are good-to-excellent, and Leo would merit a second Oscar if he got it, but Teyana Taylor blows everyone else out of the water and I wish the film had more of her. But then again, that's my frustration impulse at work.

Spoiler

Her interactions with Sean Penn's character, though predictable if one has read the book, take on a different quality in this movie, which more explicitly centers racism and the power that white men feel over the bodies of black women in a way that could have been even more explicitly underlined than it is. But again: her post-Act 1 disappearance is deliberately tragic and appreciated, if reluctantly so.

By the way: this is a really, really loud movie by design, both in the sense that you should see it (big and) loud, and if you have a sensitivity to that it might be worth bringing earplugs or whatever.

[rrenault]

I find it a bit odd that Paris, considering how serious and popular a cultural pastime cinemagoing there is, won’t be getting any of the premium celluloid format options.

[GaryC]

I find it a bit odd that Paris, considering how serious and popular a cultural pastime cinemagoing there is, won’t be getting any of the premium celluloid format options.

Seems to be always the way, and I don't know why. When Oppenheimer came out, there were four IMAX 15/70 prints in Europe and the UK had three of them, two of them in London (BFI IMAX and The Science Museum) and one in Manchester (Vue Printworks). The other one in Europe was shown in Prague.

I remember that Paris was the one place where I've seen film showings in Omnimax and Showscan, both on the same day in 1988 when I was Interrailing, so it wasn't always the case that Paris didn't have premium formats available.

[bearcuborg]

The perf damage couple on which version to see…it’s VistaVision.

[therewillbeblus]

Never Cursed's post is good enough for me to leave most of my thoughts at the door for now. I preemptively bought tickets to two more screenings this week, so we'll see if more percolate.. in the meantime, two observations

Spoiler

1. This is a film full of people who "rat," from multiple revolutionaries who had dedicated their lives to these causes down to Willa's high school friend, a pattern that is all left admirably yet uncomfortably ambiguous... it's surely exploiting how the power dynamics of authoritarian rule can break even the strongest and most loyal people by praying on their fears, but I think it also hints at how -despite our best efforts to band together and find sameness, camaraderie, connection, we ultimately feel disconnected enough and fearful at our core to be easily weakened. I do think this is a hopeful film on some scale -mainly that doing some good in a world of evil counts, even if we don't change the whole system- but that track record also sorta demonstrates an inevitably broken culture beyond mending, as long as certain fascist forces exist.

2. It's interesting how Willa's martial arts skills are subverted by the narrative. I kept waiting for her to have an opportunity to use them, but in the end, the weapon she chooses and has to use is a gun (and her attempts at using her body as force all fail - with Penn, in the bounty hunter's car kicking the glass, etc). I wonder if PTA sees martial arts as a more innocent (and spiritual, certainly exhibited by Sensei) form of violence, and this is a commentary on guns just being where we're 'at' now.

Again, there's something tragic and angry below the cathartic surface, including that climax.

[Never Cursed]

Spoiler

2. It's interesting how Willa's martial arts skills are subverted by the narrative. I kept waiting for her to have an opportunity to use them, but in the end, the weapon she chooses and has to use is a gun. I wonder if PTA sees martial arts as a more innocent (and spiritual, certainly exhibited by Sensei) form of violence, and this is a commentary on guns just being where we're 'at' now. Again, there's something tragic and angry below the cathartic surface of that climax.

Spoiler

Absolutely, and the same is true of Bob/Pat even more with his hunting rifle. So much energy expended upon keeping the gun with him/ready to use, and he fires two shots with it, neither of which hit anything. Almost every invocation or promise of violence used by the major players in the film is somehow subverted or used against its perpetrator (Sensei Sergio never busts out the karate moves, Sean Penn's physique and bravado get him nothing but a face full of hamburger meat and lungs full of carbon monoxide, a sexy sportscar driven by a white-nationalist assassin is just a stoppable force when colliding with an immovable object). I took this to be a sort of philosophical statement of sorts: mass violence has a power that the lone gunmen can never possess. The right way to fight fascism, per the film, is with organized and collective resistance, not as a one-man army. The only things that bring down mass violence are rats and traitors (even on the level of the fake molotov cocktail protestor); everyone's undoing is also everyone's most American impulse: to do it alone (Bob pushing Perfidia away after Willa is born, Perfidia selling out the gang to save her life, Willa keeping a secret phone, Sean Penn breaking away from the ICE raid to take care of Willa himself, D.W. Moffett taking care of Sean Penn himself, Avanti's realization that his "friends" don't see him as a person).

Unrelated thing: Couldn't help but feel bad for poor

Spoiler

Peter Bogdanovich when I heard that last pre-credits needledrop. I wonder how much Warners had to pay whoever owns Petty's music rights to get it. Fitting if on-the-nose song, but the Shirelles selection is so perfect. And y'know, between that scene, the butt plug stuff in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and the champagne bottle in Babylon, surprising number of straight male-recipient anal insertions played for comedy in big-money Oscar movies lately (though maybe Willa would have a thing or two to say about "straight").

[therewillbeblus]

I liked the needledrop because it seemed a clear love letter to Demme

[Never Cursed]

Oh definitely. It just reminded me of the other big auteur fan of that musician

[rrenault]

I find it a bit odd that Paris, considering how serious and popular a cultural pastime cinemagoing there is, won’t be getting any of the premium celluloid format options.

Seems to be always the way, and I don't know why. When Oppenheimer came out, there were four IMAX 15/70 prints in Europe and the UK had three of them, two of them in London (BFI IMAX and The Science Museum) and one in Manchester (Vue Printworks). The other one in Europe was shown in Prague.

I remember that Paris was the one place where I've seen film showings in Omnimax and Showscan, both on the same day in 1988 when I was Interrailing, so it wasn't always the case that Paris didn't have premium formats available.

To be fair, Paris did get Oppenheimer in “regular” non-IMAX 70mm, and they got Licorice Pizza in 70mm blowup, but there’s no sign of any celluloid distribution of One Battle After Another, which is odd.

[mfunk9786]

Saw this yesterday. Kind of amazing how Anderson subverts tropes like a 'car chase' while a) providing the same level of raw entertainment value and b) doing something wholly original that you haven't seen him try before. I had the same sparkle watching the driving scenes in the early third act of this film that I did seeing Reynolds Woodcock drive out to the country. Anderson's camera placement and movement during these sequences is truly dizzying. YMMV on how much emotional impact it has, but his typical sweetness is on full display. And the film has very little in common with anything else he's made to date, so despite the Pynchonian strangeness around the edges, it is by no means doing Inherent Vice again. Sean Penn is a shoo-in for an Oscar.

[therewillbeblus]

I'll be surprised if they award Penn the Oscar, but I'd certainly celebrate it. I think the performance (and character) is just a bit too strange to get that kind of swarm of support behind it

[Zot!]

Spoiler

I’ve not read the book, but did anybody feel the caricatures of black revolutionaries were a little too “Foxxy Cleopatra”? It’s wacky enough to transplant 70’s style militants to the 90’s, but when they all speak like a third rate Tarantino pastiche, it grates. Luckily that’s mostly over with after the first act and I found the rest of this to be enjoyable if unremarkable. Some genuine laughs and a few great setpieces. The car chase was indeed clever and well done. For all my complaining this is the best thing I’ve seen from Hollywood in forever.

I saw the 70mm 1.85:1 in a 1000 seat theater and it look perfectly nice other than a few shots I wish had a pinch more headroom. The projection was perfect, and I wish there was more film projection now. Maybe I’m just sensitive, but it just feels so much more organic with none of the harshness I feel like I observe even at quality digital projections. Call me nostalgic but I loved seeing those cue marks again.

[Never Cursed]

Spoiler

I’ve not read the book, but did anybody feel the caricatures of black revolutionaries were a little too “Foxxy Cleopatra”? It’s wacky enough to transplant 70’s style militants to the 90’s, but when they all speak like a third rate Tarantino pastiche, it grates. Luckily that’s mostly over with after the first act and I found the rest of this to be enjoyable if unremarkable. Some genuine laughs and a few great setpieces. The car chase was indeed clever and well done. For all my complaining this is the best thing I’ve seen from Hollywood in forever.

Spoiler

I don't think the revolutionaries' races are mentioned save a couple Black Panthers-types in the book, but the character that Perfidia is based upon is almost certainly white. But most of it didn't bother me given how generally exuberant everyone is in the French 75. The only thing that really irritated me were the two or so abortion name checks, which were the only pieces of dialogue to sound like they were written by a poser (not that it isn't worth fighting over, but would armed revolutionaries mention it specifically alongside anti-cop messages)?

To give you an idea of how much of a loose adaptation this is, the book has zombies, ninjas, and Godzilla. I think there's maybe one line from the book in the film ("you are so unsuitable for my daughter").

[therewillbeblus]

Spoiler

It’s wacky enough to transplant 70’s style militants to the 90’s

Spoiler

Does the film ever explicitly state the time periods we're engaging in? Because I thought it was interesting how the "90s" section you're referring to was reminiscent of today (rather than the 90s) in the exact same way the future section was. I liked Ehrlich's point that "the action starts in a recognizable today before jumping 16 years forward into a pointedly unchanged tomorrow." The film is attempting to be timeless, but I think there's just as much reason to believe that the film starts in today's timeline and jumps ahead to the future (despite phones being the same, the DNA test kit seemed futuristic, DiCaprio says he was born in the 80s - which would be accurate for a future timeline - etc.), but it doesn't really matter because Ehrlich's quote hits on a theme of incessant fascism as a constant.

[Zot!]

Spoiler

There are no on screen titles for the year during the first act, probably because we’re meant to be in this alternate timeline where militant radicals are still a going concern, but the cars seemed era specific to the late 90’s - early 2000’s, whereas the rest of the film is pretty firmly mirroring today’s world, including the slang the kids speak, and phones and fashions and such. To your point however, the narration says “16 years later, and not much has changed”, which to me meant both Bob’s lack of progress, but also society and culture’s lack of advancement, including the same migrant internment camps as well as cars still looking just as shitty as 16 years previous.

[mfunk9786]

Spoiler

There is a reference made to only using 1G cellular technology because “they don't scan those frequencies anymore.” Were the film meant to take place on a reliably coherent timeline, it’s worth noting that Bob’s phone wouldn’t work by the mid-00s or so, and the last remaining 1G network coverage to go down was in Russia in 2017. In other words: I don’t think we’re meant to overanalyze any of this, Anderson doesn’t use any bulletproof signifiers around time/era and so we probably shouldn’t either.

[Never Cursed]

Spoiler

There is a reference made to only using 1G cellular technology because “they don't scan those frequencies anymore.” Were the film meant to take place on a reliably coherent timeline, it’s worth noting that Bob’s phone wouldn’t work by the mid-00s or so, and the last remaining 1G network coverage to go down was in Russia in 2017. In other words: I don’t think we’re meant to overanalyze any of this, Anderson doesn’t use any bulletproof signifiers around time/era and so we probably shouldn’t either.

Spoiler

Agreed 100%. I think the mixture of time signifiers (this, the cars, Bob's age, etc.) are meant to be evocative on an individual level (with the first third being "the immediate past" rather than a specific past year) rather than cohere into a specific indication of a year or decade (this isn't No Country For Old Men, where it absolutely takes place in a specific time despite the filmmakers not specifically saying so). Pretty sure that the opening "detention center" sequence shows the Trump border fence, too, but it isn't like Trump gets a specific namecheck or anything, which is probably intelligent on Anderson's part

[therewillbeblus]

Exactly, which is why Ehrlich's quote is so apt - and makes it even more disturbing that that span of time could result in such little change