ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER: T2.0

Can you structure a chase thriller around a hero who is emotionally indispensable but structurally more or less irrelevant? Paradoxical, but One Battle After Another does just that.

Traditionally, a chase thriller ties the protagonist to the plot outcome. The hero either escapes the pursuer or doesn't, neutralizes the threat or doesn't, rescues someone or doesn't — and the screenplay moves according to how well they execute those tasks. The French Connection, North by Northwest, Bourne films, Mad Max, T2 — they all run on the engine of a protagonist and their success rate being tested. Even when they’re overmatched, the script grants them small victories that eventually add up to an outcome.

Part of the genre's fun is watching a hero succeed at staying alive.

One Battle After Another breaks that contract on purpose. Bob Ferguson is not great at staying alive, and even worse at protecting the person who depends on him, aka his daughter Willa. He forgets the code the resistance gave him. He's intoxicated and shows up to fights without weapons. He misreads situations. His, “big” win is hotwiring a car. On genre standards, he’s not a very successful protagonist.

But One Battle After Another structures it differently by separating two key elements that are normally blended into one, namely saving someone and being unconditionally chosen by them. In most thrillers, these are the same thing — the hero saves the child, the child loves the hero; the love is connected to the saving part. Anderson runs them on separate tracks. Other people save Willa. The resistance network saves Willa. Sensei Sergio saves Willa. Willa saves Willa. Bob does not save Willa in any meaningful operational sense. What Bob does is show up. He keeps showing up. Drunk, late, useless, terrified, forgetting the code, wrong about who's chasing them…but he shows up, trying. And the screenplay makes that showing up the thing Willa needs from him, because everything else is handled by people more competent than he is.

This is why the gap is where the real movie lives. If Bob were competent, his love would be indistinguishable from his utility, and the screenplay would collapse into a run-of-the-mill protector-thriller. By having Bob present and useless simultaneously strips out the heroism. And breaks the expected.

The structural consequence of this is making the chase plot driven by someone else. Enter Lockjaw, aka the antagonist. He propels forward motion as his obsession becomes the engine.

If this reminds you of another film…hello Terminator 2. One Battle After Another is, structurally, a Terminator film that is honest about how badly the protector functions.

Both are pursuit thrillers built around a relentless antagonist hunting a parent-child unit. Both open with a mythic prologue establishing the revolutionary past, Sarah Connor's nightmare-history of Judgment Day, the French 75's detention-center raid, before settling into a present-tense chase where the radical mother has been removed from the equation and a surrogate parent figure has to keep the child alive long enough to inherit her mantle.

Both end with the child accepting that the war is generational and ongoing rather than concluded. Both are action films whose action exists in service of family drama.

Terminator 2 runs on competence. The T-800 is a hyper-capable protector who succeeds at almost everything the plot asks of him, and the screenplay rewards that competence with weight in Sarah's VO, the only father figure she could trust never to leave John, never to hurt him, and never to get drunk. Bob Ferguson is the exact opposite. The structural promise of the genre that the protector will protect is broken in scene after scene. Bob is what T-800  would look like if you stripped him of his capability and kept only his presence.

The antagonists illuminate the same. The T-1000 is a smooth, inhuman, shape-shifting law enforcement officer who can become any authority figure; i.e. let the metaphor do its work.  Colonel Lockjaw is a similar archetype: except his pursuit of Perfidia is driven by sexual obsession, racial fixation, and careerist need, not by mission parameters.

The tone, however, diverges. Cameron writes mythic action. Anderson writes screwball paranoia, where dialogue is half-buried under naturalism. T2 explains itself; One Battle After Another refuses to. Cameron tells you what Skynet is and what Judgment Day means; Anderson never quite tells you what the French 75’s plan was, because Bob doesn't really know either, mostly because he’s been baked for 17 years.

The endings rhyme but resolve differently. The T-800 chooses self-sacrifice, providing a closed loop for the timeline. Bob, on the other hand, doesn't die heroically; he survives, somewhat uselessly, and the daughter drives off toward the next confrontation. The cycle isn't broken; it's just inherited. T2 screenplay ultimately tells you that the future can be rewritten through self-sacrifice. OBAA tells you that there is no future to rewrite, only another fight, and the most you can do is raise a kid who can show up for it.

The traditional chase thriller is a fantasy about earning your family through violence. But if that’s the case, the inverse implies that parents who can't shoot well don't deserve their children. One Battle After Another refutes this. And that's what's in the gap. Not just a structural inversion but a moral one. Is showing up heroic? Perhaps not, but it’s what counts.

Written and directed by PT Anderson.