So after seeing the Oscar nominations, I finally sat down and watched some of the Oscar movies that I’d been meaning to get to forever.

The first is One Battle After Another. I’ve been a huge Paul Thomas Anderson fan since Magnolia — really, since Boogie Nights, but Magnolia is where I locked in — and the reviews for this one have been ecstatic, so it seemed like the most no-brainer of no-brainers that I’d absolutely adore this movie.

And so as I was watching it, I liked it. It was definitely good. The Jonny Greenwood score was excellent, the acting was great, and it was a lot of fun. But… it seemed overhyped.

To some extent this is predictable. If you watch a movie after everyone’s already raved about it, it’s impossible to be pleasantly surprised, and easy to be disappointed. Still, it’s not inevitable that you’ll be disappointed; sometimes the movie does actually meet high expectations. And while there was a lot to like here, it just wasn’t gelling for me. In fact, it didn’t ever gel as I watched it — it always felt a little tonally incoherent, like it was doing a very grounded realistic thing, and then throwing in massive absurdities that were impossible to take seriously. I just couldn’t quite get my head around it.

And again, this isn’t to say I didn’t like it. But I was going to rate it like 4/5 stars, which is awfully weak considering the general 5/5 critical reception and my own predisposition to PTA. So I went looking at those reviews to see what I was missing, and the very first one I read reminded me that, oh yeah, this is an adaptation of a Pynchon novel.

And that fact just unlocked the whole movie for me. Suddenly its tone made perfect sense, and what it was doing seemed obvious. The tonal shifts that had been so incoherent as I watched it instantly resolved into something clear, coherent, and elegant. And… okay, maybe it’s still not quite a 5/5 movie for me, but it’s at least 4.5/5.

(I probably won’t, but I actually want to watch it again now that I know what I’m looking at.)