Steven Seighman
The wait for the limited SteelBook edition of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Best Picture Award–winning film One Battle After Another has been a long one. Announced in mid-March, it finally hit shelves on June 2, and it was worth the wait. Not only does this version include the same beautiful 4K-UHD transfer as the bare-bones release from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment in January, but it also includes a bevy of supplemental materials that collectors and PTA fans were missing until now.
Loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, One Battle After Another tells the story of Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), an ex-revolutionary whose quiet off-grid life gets upended by the return of an old enemy, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), and the disappearance of his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). Members of Bob’s old crew, The French 75, resurface from the past to help save the future.
Pynchon set his novel in the Reagan era, but its themes are still timely this curren decade. Anderson brings that era forward—first to 2009 in the prologue, and then to the present day, where it still feels at home, tackling subjects like immigration, white supremacy, and law enforcement overreach. Action-packed from the start, OBAA’s plot culminates in a high-speed car chase over the rolling hills of a remote California highway that’s unlike anything that came before it. At its heart, the film is character-driven—a story about the lengths one will go to to protect their family, told in the intense, quirky way only PTA can.
After years of Academy snubs, this is the film that made Paul Thomas Anderson an Oscar winner. It raced neck and neck through an exhaustingly long awards season with another Warner Bros. film, Sinners. In the end, One Battle After Another took home six statues, including awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Within the SteelBook package for One Battle After Another are both 4K-UHD and Blu-ray copies of the film, along with a 24-page booklet of set photos. A third disc contains all of the director-approved special features, including featurettes that cover everything from the early days of casting to opening night.
Special Features
Camera, Lighting & Costume Tests: This six-minute collection of test shots and rehearsal takes oozes PTA. Its beautiful still portraits, roving camera work, and Southern California “golden hour” light make it a great pregame for the film, all set to original music by composer Jonny Greenwood.
Chase Infiniti Screen Test: This is 11 minutes of the camera focused on breakout actor Chase Infiniti, including her audition for the part of Willa and chemistry reads with Regina Hall and Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s a great look at the talent the 26-year-old brought to this, her first role in a feature film.
Learning, Studying . . . Always Perfecting: Director Paul Thomas Anderson hasn’t recorded a director’s commentary track for a film since the release of Boogie Nights on physical media in 1998. However, he does often include lengthy “making-of” documentaries as special features. With One Battle After Another, that’s exactly what you’ll get in Learning, Studying . . . Always Perfecting, a 53-minute vérité-style featurette that follows along as the cast and crew build the film from start to finish. It ends with a touching tribute to first assistant director Adam Somner, who worked on all of PTA’s films since There Will Be Blood and passed away shortly after this one wrapped production.
The Cutting Rooms: PTA is one of the few directors who continue to work on film in a time of digital filmmaking. This eight-minute deep dive into the editing process explains how he and a handful of others have brought traditional editors back to the world of techniques like “negative cutting” and “dissolve transitions,” where the work is done by scissor cuts, not mouse clicks.
Opening Night at the Vista: One Battle After Another was shot in VistaVision, a film process invented in the 1950s, which had a run of about 10 years before fading out. This seven-minute feature takes you behind the scenes of the film’s opening night screening at the Vista theater in Los Angeles, which required the installation of a VistaVision projector and specially sized screen. The installation is documented here, intercut with man-on-the-street interviews with fans who traveled across the country to see the film this way. It’s all quite a testament to what an event every new Paul Thomas Anderson film is.
