How Is Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘One Battle After Another’ Based on This Modern Classic Novel?

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is finally here, and yes, it’s every bit as confounding, ambitious, and star-stuffed as the trailers promised. The action-packed thriller marks the director’s first collaboration with Oscar-winner Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the movie’s de facto protagonist Bob Ferguson, a former radical explosives expert now raising a teenage daughter in the redwoods of Northern California, only to realize old mistakes are like ticking time bombs. Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and newcomer Chase Infiniti fill in the gaps as Anderson’s tale careens from small-town paranoia to adrenaline-pumping set pieces worthy of a multi-million-dollar blockbuster, which is exactly what the film hopes to become. PTA veered from his path-often-taking way of filmmaking for this passion project, taking nearly two decades to shape the story, working within a jaw-dropping $130 million budget, and navigating sky-high studio expectations, all while refusing to screen at film festivals, thus building anticipation for what has become one of the most talked-about cinematic events of the year.

And yet, amid the chaos of gunfire, desert car chases, and forgotten cryptic passwords, critics have turned their attention to the film’s literary DNA. Anderson’s latest is inspired by author Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, a sprawling, satirical novel about fading ’60s idealism and the adults who failed to keep it alive, pop up. Anderson has mined the reclusive genius’s work before with Inherent Vice, a stoner noir soaked in 70s thriller aesthetics that indulged the director’s favorite narrative themes. That film failed to land with audiences, but this next adaptation – in the loosest sense – seems to have found a more solid thread to connect Pynchon’s themes with Anderson’s aesthetics, all while making it relevant for a new generation of moviegoers. So what, exactly, is Pynchon’s novel about, and how did Anderson “steal” from it for One Battle After Another? Here’s what we know.

Inside ‘One Battle After Another,’ Paul Thomas Anderson’s 20-Year Obsession

It might be easier to spot the similarities between Anderson’s work and Pynchon’s novel by focusing our lens on the film first. In it, DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson is a washed-up revolutionary in a frayed bathrobe whose drug-addled memory makes every shadow – and old ally – a potential threat. He’s given up the cause to retreat to a small, backwoods town with his teenage daughter, Willa (Infiniti), in tow, only to find himself hunted by Penn’s Col. Steven Lockjaw – a militaristic tyrant with a very personal axe to grind. Del Toro plays a dojo-owning ally whose discipline contrasts sharply with Ferguson’s chaotic existence, offering both guidance and some unexpected complications. The film swings wildly between political satire, on-the-run thriller, intimate character drama – it doesn’t make sense that it would work. But Anderson’s always had a deft hand for balancing earnestness with absurdity.

According to him, One Battle After Another has been 20 years in the making, folding three of his life-long obsessions – car chase movies, female revolutionary characters, and Pynchon’s Vineland – into one rollercoaster saga. It’s part homage, part appropriation – and, as Anderson has noted, fully blessed by Pynchon himself. But, after previously dipping into Pynchon with Inherent Vice, PTA wanted to sidestep strict fidelity here, telling Esquire, “I stole the parts that spoke to me and just started running like a thief.” One Battle After Another certainly borrows the novelist’s paranoid energy and thematic threads, weaving them into something entirely its own, but there’s enough similarity that fans of will likely enjoy the other.

How Pynchon’s ‘Vineland’ Inspired Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘One Battle After Another’

Unlike Anderson’s film, which is, surprisingly, set in more modern times, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland unfolded in Reagan’s America, a world where the remnants of ’60s radicalism and government paranoia undercut daily life. Its story of Zoyd Wheeler, a burnout raising his daughter Prairie, while dodging the ghosts of a failed revolution, was both satire and elegy for a generation that couldn’t sustain its own ideals. Anderson’s One Battle After Another picks Pynchon’s pocket there – DiCaprio’s Bob inherits Zoyd’s dazed survival instincts, while Willa channels Prairie’s disconnect and contemporary angst. Both stories ask the same question: how does one generation pass the torch to the next?

But Anderson detangles his movie from Reagan-era politics and repositions activism in the 1990s and beyond via migrant detention centers, abortion clinics, and state surveillance that feels uncomfortably real. That change matters: it turns Pynchon’s generational hangover into a conversation starter about power, protest, and the cyclical nature of resistance. Vineland didn’t perform well with critics when it was first released – it was too prescient and not Pynchonian enough for fans of his past work. But that’s what makes it – and the film it’s undoubtedly inspired by – worth a closer look today. If anything, our current troubles only serve to position us as more appreciative of both the book and Anderson’s film’s main premise: What it means to inherit, squander, or reignite the unfinished battles of the past.

One Battle After Another is now playing in theaters.

Release Date

September 26, 2025

Runtime

162 minutes

Director

Paul Thomas Anderson

Writers

Paul Thomas Anderson, Thomas Pynchon

Producers

Adam Somner