It may have no point, but that doesn't make it pointless!

Rating: 10/10 (8 December 2016)

There Will Be Blood is a difficult movie and one that managed to do something that only few movies are able to: it crawled into my head and made me think about it. At first I was trying to understand it before I realized that there was nothing to be understood, only observed. And that is exactly why people complain about it: they say this movie is pointless because it has no deeper meaning, no message and no unexpected twist. If you judge it from that point of view, you are right. However, There Will Be Blood should not be assessed that way. Paul Thomas Anderson is not trying to shove us down some kind of message that we ought to try to understand. He's just giving us the story of a man, who finds oil and consequently becomes wealthy. We, the audience, are supposed to observe and to make up our minds about this on our own. There is nothing subjective to the movie, it simply and merely documents a part of a man's life. By not being subjective or judge-mental, it makes people feel stupid because they think that they didn't get what it was all about even though there is nothing to be understood. And in that way, people are stupid as they believe that everything has to have some kind of message or moral subtext. It forces the audience to dwell on this movie and use their brains but apparently not many people are fond of thinking. There Will Be Blood is avoiding all of that which makes it a great piece of art since it accomplishes to remain compelling through the entire run-time even though there is not much happening and therefore I think people are right if they believe that this movie will be looked upon as a classic in a couple of decades.