It’s probably too late to write anything new about One Battle After Another.
If you’re not living in a vacuum, you’ve already heard the verdict: movie of the year, some say of the decade - or more. It won’t surprise anyone when Paul Thomas Anderson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Chase Infiniti, and Jonny Greenwood start collecting Academy awards - most of them, one way or another.

That story is already written.

The film’s biggest impact for me isn’t its closeness to reality - it’s the story of a father and his daughter. Because no matter how loud, strange, and chaotic the world becomes - no matter how high the stakes appear - no revolution in a man’s life is bigger than the moment he becomes a father.

Strip away the noise, the tension, the history pressing in from all sides, and what remains is a man who has already fought his battles - and lost enough of them - trying to figure out how to raise a child without turning her into another casualty of his unfinished life. That’s something many of us are wrestling with.

Bob isn’t heroic. He isn’t a bad guy either. He’s distracted, emotionally overloaded, and deeply human. He loves his daughter, unquestionably - but love isn’t the hard part. The hard part is what leaks through despite it: fear, anger, an unresolved past. Kids don’t need explanations to absorb these things. They just need to share the same space long enough. The daughter isn’t written as a symbol or a moral device. She’s observant, smart. She notices when her father is physically present but emotionally elsewhere. That distance - not of space, but of attention - is one of the film’s battlefields.

What feels accurate to me is how the film frames protection. Fathers often believe their primary role is to fight - to keep danger out, to hold the world back. The movie suggests something harder: sometimes the real work is learning when to stop fighting, when to stop treating life as a series of battles that must be won. For Bob, his daughter is both grounding and threat. Grounding, because she pulls him into the present moment. Threat, because she exposes how fragile his old certainties really are.

The film refuses easy redemption. There’s no moment where Bob becomes wise or healed. He isn’t fixed by the end. And that feels like real life. Becoming a father doesn’t erase who you were - it just makes the cost of staying the same impossible to ignore.

The most important thing a father can do isn’t win battles. It’s knowing when to stop fighting, and making sure his child doesn’t inherit a war that was never theirs.

That’s the battle that mattered most to me here.

And in the end, it’s the one Bob finally wins.