One of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema. A Magnum Opus.

Rating: 10/10 (9 February 2008)

There Will Be Blood (2007)
Number 1 - 2007
Top 30 - All Time
Paul Thomas Anderson's Bona Fide film, is one of the most breathtaking exercises in the art of film-making you are ever likely to see. This is the apex of cinematic mastery.
The film documents the life of a misanthropic, greedy oil-man, Daniel Plainview, played terrifyingly by the spectacular Daniel Day Lewis, who will go on to win his second Academy Award.
The story begins in 1898, where Plainview is just a silver prospector, who finds a small amount of precious mineral, sells it and slowly starts his own drilling company with a few workers. One day, one of his workers dies in an accident and Plainview fosters the young orphan as his son, HW who he will later use as an object to paint himself as a family man to trick poor farmers, pilgrims, ranchers into selling their oil rich land for pocket change. Plainview is led to his ocean of oil by Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), who sells Plainview an oil lead, located on his family's property in Little Boston. Plainview agrees to come to Little Boston and yes he does discover oil and he buys the land cheaply from the Sunday family, where Eli Sunday (also Paul Dano, either playing an identical twin, or is up to something we are never assured of this), an evangelical priest who agrees for $10,000, which includes some money towards renovating his church.
The story continues, where Plainview, buys off any surrounding farms to ensure a monopoly and he grows, with prospects of building a pipeline.
There Will Be Blood is, perhaps, above all, a riveting study, of man, particularly a misanthropic, greedy man whose increasing wealth only fuels his volatility and instability. We are shown how Plainview abandons his son twice: firstly when he loses his hearing in an oil accident and at the end, when an old Plainview, who has truly become menacing (very much resembling Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York), tells his son how he was a 'bastard in a basket' as he shouts it, in his big, ghostly mansion. We are shown how Plainview shoots a man in the head, who pretended to be his 'brother from another mother' and at the end, he manically and repeatedly smashes Eli's head with a bowling pin.
Some critics have criticised the 'third act' of the film, particularly the ending of being shallow and lacking some grandeur. While I can see their point, I disagree; this is an eccentric, a menacing, destructive film, that surprises and surprises again. 'There Will Be Blood' needs no Hollywood tricks to shock or amaze.
There Will Be Blood, is also a film about the birth of capitalism, along with the birth of America, in its most primitive, preaching, desolate areas. The greedy, dishonest man who tricks the truly uneducated into handing their fortunes. Another great thing about this film comes through the portion of Eli Sunday; the evangelist, who exorcises a ghost through a lonely woman every week; who looks up to himself as a prophet of God. Some scenes are purely disturbing as we see the nature of many of the cults and sub-branches of the churches that still, very much exist in America today.
Paul Thomas Anderson's achievement equals if not surpasses Orson Welles' 'Citizen Kane', and yes this is his 'Kane'. The film, while being perfect in its cinematic nature, it is also technically superior; the cinematography by Robert Elswit, that pounding, miraculous score (or rather collection of music) from Johnny Greenwood along with the editing and the sound.
Without a doubt the best cinema of the year and probably the decade. There Will Be Blood stands close to the greatest cinematic events in history. A formidable achievement.
Absolutely breathtaking. Unmissable.
10/10