I’ve been incredibly eager to check this one out for a number of months now, simply because Paul Thomas Anderson was directing it. I had only previously seen There Will Be Blood and Punch-Drunk Love, but loved those films. Adding to that, my excitement spiked over the last few days just from hearing all the crazy buzz around this one. Unfortunately, I was not only disappointed by One Battle After Another, but I really had a hard time seeing what most other people seem to be seeing in it. I felt nothing walking out of the theater.

I think what made it so hard for me to grasp onto was the character work. The story was really generic, though very well done in some aspects that I’ll get to in a bit, so the characters not really working really made it even more difficult for me to enjoy this. None of them are rootable in any way; they are all just really terrible people. Sure, some of them have an ounce of goodness in them, but only when it comes to the people they love, who also happen to be terrible. There’s also not much character development at all, either, a huge one-eighty from There Will Be Blood and Punch-Drunk Love, which both had masterful character and story development. This made for a bunch of setups and payoffs that didn’t work for me at all. There were surprisingly a number of small turns in the story that were definitely meant to be shocking, but none of them really did anything for me because of everything I’ve already said.

I thought the pacing was kind of abysmal, too. At one hundred and sixty-two minutes long, I can’t help but think that this movie should have been at least twenty minutes shorter. Since there wasn’t much character development, that means that there were a bunch of scenes that definitely could have been cut out. It was also one of those films where I was checking the time every ten to fifteen minutes, which I don’t do very often. I probably would have been less harsh on my rating if it hadn’t taken up so much of my day, to be honest.

For the stuff, that just kind of irked me the wrong way, I’ll touch on that a little bit briefly here. There was definitely some very gross and offputing sexual content that I wasn’t a fan of whatsoever, and that had no place in the movie. A lot of it was kind of sick to be fair, like I’m not sure why someone would want to come up with that for a story. It’s fairly brief stuff and only really takes place towards the beginning, but it still really made me feel just wrong. For example, and I don’t want to touch too much into spoiler territory, but a gun is literally used as a sexual device. The other thing is that this movie had practically no positive message at the end of the day. Nothing insightful that hasn’t been done already, and for me a movie has to be either entertaining or have a meaningful story for me to enjoy it.

Now, for my positives, they all have to do with Paul Thomas Anderson simply just being in the director’s chair for this one. The cinematography is absolutely fantastic, especially the scenes shot in Texas, and really added a “dirty” look that perfectly fit the film. There were also a few scenes where Anderson came back at it again when it came to the tension. I was, in fact, on the edge of my seat a few times. The comedy wasn’t half-bad either, and I did chuckle a few times, though the guy sitting next to my dad and I seemed to think every other scene (even if it wasn’t comedic) was laugh-worthy.

Really, when it comes down to why I didn’t like this movie, I’ll go back to the character and story development. The film really just didn’t give me a solid reason to care about anything that was happening. I already mentioned I didn’t like the characters because they were all terrible, and the story certainly didn’t grab me at all like I was hoping it would. I honestly don’t think that I’ve ever felt more different when it comes to a movie compared to the majority of the audience in my entire life.