There Will Be Blood
 Sep 13th, 2008
Advantages:
Astounding cinematography, grpping plot, mesmerising lead performance .
Disadvantages:
That ending might throw some viewers a touch .
Recommendable:
Yes
Detailed rating:
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  DavidJay
About me:
Hi, I'm fairly new to Ciao, and hope that I can be of help. I aim to be as honest as i can be, and ...
Member since:20.08.2008
Reviews:27
Members who trust:1
Review rated by 7 Ciao members on average: very helpful 
Brilliant as he is, the "auteur" tag flung about in relation to Paul Thomas Anderson from at least Boogie Nights has always seemed a touch premature. Yes, those films were astounding, but could were they REALLY the work of a wholly unique voice? The truth is, Boogie Nights was the best film Martin Scorsese never made and Magnolia could've easily fallen from Robert Altman's fingers (albeit with a touch of post-MTV sheen). Only Punch Drunk Love, his fourth feature, felt in any way distinctive (and even it had a fair wallop of the Kubrick's about it).
With There Will Be Blood, though, Anderson has crafted a film that truly feels like it could have been made by nobody else. It is a bold, idiosyncratic epic shot through with a lo-fi, indie-flick intimacy. It is at once cacophonous and quiet. A contradictory, Old Testament fable bristling with moral ambiguity and pitch-black humour. Deserving of every superlative thrown his direction, Daniel Day Lewis' plays Daniel Plainview, a relentless, black-hearted, whiskey-slugging oil prospector who arrives in the town of Little Boston, California with his young son H.W with the intention of exploiting both the townspeople's ignorance and untapped oil fields.
Matters are complicated when the ambitions of the town's minister, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) come into conflict with Plainview's, the resulting web of antagonism, back-stabbing and revenge serving to buckle both men irrevocably. Though two and a half hours long, There Will Be Blood leaves one pleading for more. From its opening, dialogue-free twenty minutes of pit-delving and leg-breaking to its devastating, ambiguous conclusion, it is an absolute joy. A heavy, oft-times uncomfortable joy, perhaps, but a joy nonetheless.
Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame composes a striking, skewed musical score which slathers even the most seemingly routine of sequences with an almost unbearable sense of impending doom. At times it sounds like what one would expect to hear accompanying the THX logo at the start of this or the other blockbuster. At others, it is propulsive, clattering and rhythmic. There Will Be Blood is a dust-scratched, Bible-beaten epic set in a turn-of-the-20th-century America nigh-on indistinguishable, politically and spiritually, from the one in which the film was produced. It has as much to say about our hopes and fears for the 21st century as its does about its protagonists' hopes and fears for the 20th.
A masterpiece.
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![There Will Be Blood (2 disc Special Edition) [DVD] [2007]](http://picnicb.ciao.com/uk/79293663.jpg)
22.09.2008 17:05
Good review havent seen this yet but now want to more, thanks! x
13.09.2008 09:45
Great film, tho the ending was a little dissapointing!