There Will Be Blood

Great movie, not a spaghetti western. Very good story and atmosphere 10 stars.

Weighty, morose period drama with complex characters and Daniel Day-Lewis In the early 20th century, an industrious prospector in Southern California, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), becomes a shrewd oil magnate, whose journey is paralleled with a dubious Pentecostal pastor of a remote church, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). “There Will Be Blood” (2007) is a one-of-a-kind period drama with Western elements. It’s arty and the furthest thing from a conventional blockbuster. You have to be in the mode for a deep, slow-moving, epic flick like this in order to appreciate it. The contemporaneous “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and “No Country for Old Men” are good comparisons. Whilst the story and main characters are simple on the surface, they go deep and there are some things to mine: What good is success if you have no one to love and enjoy it with? Is Daniel a sociopath or a quality individual who acquires sociopathic tendencies because his choices put him on the road of madness? Was Eli a “false prophet”? If so, was he always a con or did he become one? Why is Eli paralleled with Daniel? Does Daniel have the capacity for genuine l

I remember reading about just how much money Rockefeller was making at the height of his prowess and the sums were eye watering. His Standard Oil company is referenced in this powerful drama with Daniel Day Lewis as “Plainview”. He’s a prospector looking for silver but who has a bit of a fall and discovers that there is something much more valuable and plentiful - if you know how to find it, He gradually buys up leases and together with his stalwart “Fletcher” (Ciarán Hinds) and young son “H.W.” (Dillon Freasier) starts to develop his business with a view to building a pipeline of over one hundred miles to reach the sea. Along the way, their lives are fraught with dangers and tough choices have to be made - especially when an accident at one of the wells renders the young boy deaf. It’s at this remote site that “Plainview”meets his nemesis. Not in a competitive, business, fashion - but in a puritanical Christian one. The son of a local homesteader is aspiring preacher “Eli” (Paul Dano) and the remainder of the film sees the one trying to humiliate and outmanoeuvre the other and disclaim each’s strongly held values. It’s a slow burn, this film, but DDL is on super form as a man str