I went to one of the first 70mm screenings of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest movie, One Battle After Another and walked out after the first 50 minutes.

I’m a huge fan of his work. I regard There will be Blood and Magnolia as great movies. Masterpieces? I’m not sure about that, but truly great movies nonetheless.

I had such high expectations for One Battle After Another and I was massively disappointed. I found it to be facile and devoid of anything original to say. Sean Penn’s performance annoyed me the most. Cheap facial expressions looking for characterisation.

Needless to say I ran against common thinking. Everyone lauded the film.. And I got canned for not watching the whole film.

Fair enough.
So I vowed to watch it again, all the way through.

I’ve been really busy lately and didn’t get the chance until last week, on a long flight from Sydney to Spain. I downloaded the film on my iPad Pro and watched it on the flight. With my Apple iPod Max over-ear noise-cancelling headphones. Not the best way to watch a film that had originally been shot in VistaVision, but I’d already seen it (or at least the first 50 mins) in 70mm so I got what it looked like.

But seeing it again, it was as though I was watching a different film.
I found it to be masterful, engaging from the first frame, and funny as hell.
And it had plenty to say, politically.
Important for our times.

In short, I loved the film.
And from this time on will shout its greatness from the rooftops.

So what happened?
Why did I have such a completely different reaction watching it on an iPad on a flight?

All I can put it down to was that I wasn’t in the right headspace when I first saw it in the cinema. I was distracted by work stuff that had been niggling me prior. I felt I should be somewhere else. And I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to accept the unorthodox approach that Mr Anderson was taking – an approach that annoyed the bejesus out of me at the time but which on a second viewing I found to be thrilling in its cinematic courage.

Later, I began to think of famous film critics that had historically trashed great movies.

• Paulene Kael, Chief Film Critic for The New Yorker and perhaps the most influential film critic of her time, scorched Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, writing that the movie “had nothing to say,” and that its storytelling was “inert.”
• Variety dismissed Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, as “a crashing disappointment,” and that it had “virtually no thrills.”
• Kubrick’s science fiction masterpiece, 2001 A Space Odyssey, got a similar hiding from critics that said it was “boring, pretentious and incoherent.”
• Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, now second on the British Film Institute’s list of Greatest Films Ever Made was derided by critics, one of whom called it a “Hitchcock-and-bull story,” Psycho got even worse treatment, with critics calling it “gimmicky and tacky,” with one critic saying that it was “obviously a low budget job.”

Maybe these critics were like me when I sat down to watch One Battle After Another – they just weren’t in the right headspace.