There Will Be Blood

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There Will Be Blood-720P

There Will Be Blood-480P

There Will Be Blood-360P

There Will Be Blood-720P

There Will Be Blood-480P

There Will Be Blood-360P

What is evil? What is hate? How low can an individual go with one's actions and still be considered human....? These, quite possibly, are the biggest questions raised in There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis, the tycoons at the helm of this dig for moral oil, tell a story that takes the archetypal anti-heroes of 'Citizen Kane' and Travis Bickle of 'Taxi Driver' to a whole new, 21st-century level. The film, using Lewis's character Daniel Plainview, walks through incredibly dangerous cinematic territory that questions religion, plays with the nature of greed and hate and evil, and with it all, draws terrifying parallels to the world we live in today. The film and its main character claw so deep through the limits of humanity and the landscape of hell, that you'll be thanking the Good Lord for the silver screen that divides you from this horrible world Paul Thomas Anderson has portrayed. But despite how safe you may seem in your cushy seat, you will undoubtedly walk out of the theater with all kinds of new demons and ghosts buzzing in your head and ripping away at your subconscious. In this way, Anderson has abandoned his primary previous influence of Robert Altman to take more of a Stanley Kubrick direction, creating moral allegories that creep into your psyche and don't ever leave. You should be scared. Very Scared.

PT Anderson delivers perhaps his best work with "There Will Be Blood". Unlike "Magnolia", the film's daunting runtime is not very daunting whilst watching it. All acting in the film was solid, even the work of the child actors. Daniel Day-Lewis in particular delivered a truly phenomenal performance, capturing the power of greed, fear, insanity, and comedy simultaneously, at many points throughout the film. At no point does the time period distract from the power of the film. Sometimes period pieces cannot be appreciated because they delve too deep into historical details -- turning the experience into more of a documentary than a narrative set in the past. This is not the case for "There Will Be Blood", as human interactions are the focus of the film. Johnny Greenwood's chilling score is very strong, benefiting from the elegant minimalism that he show's in the band Radiohead. The cinematography is also spectacular. Robert Elswit beautifully captures the essence of the environment and the tension amongst the characters. All in all, this is truly a perfectly crafted film.

This film raises the game for everyone out there. I have loved all of Paul Thomas Anderson's work, including his greatly underrated Punch-Drunk Love, but this is a huge leap from any of the previous movies into a realm, as others have said, inhabited by classics such as Treasure of the Sierra Madre - and then some. Every element of this film is astonishing, from the opening twenty minutes, which feature virtually no dialog, to Jonny Greenwood's score, which I have heard criticized as too imposing but which seems just about perfect to me (and brings to mind the non-Blue Danube elements of 2001 at its most experimental). Daniel Day-Lewis' performance is in a league of its own: his voice, his mannerisms, his physical movement, his stunted emotions, are flesh and blood, and hauntingly so, in a way that even Tommy Lee Jones in In The Valley of Elah (which I thought was a pretty staggering performance) can't quite attain. I will watch this film again and again simply to see something so raw and so moving and so gut-wrenching. This is why I love movies; this is what made me want to make movies when I was fourteen years old.