A Great Movie About Oil

Rating: 10/10 (19 October 2012)

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson steps outside his contemporary world of dysfunctional Angelenos to explore a very different dysfunctional man that happens to be an oil pioneer whose trailblazing spirit is equaled only by his murderous ambition.The movie entitled,There Will Be Blood is Anderson's loose adaptation of the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair that features Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano together with Dillon Freasier,Kevin J. O'Connor and Ciarán Hinds.
The screenplay focuses its attentions on Daniel Plainview, a miner who happens upon black gold during a disastrous excavation that ends in a broken leg.Pulling himself up from the bowels of the earth, both literally and metaphorically, Plainview embarks on a systematic and steadfast approach to mastering the oil business. Using plain-spoken and straightforward language, Plainview launches a campaign to convince small-town property owners they should let him drill their land. Without him, they won't have the equipment to access the profit beneath their feet. He builds an empire this way and gradually becomes obsessed with the intrinsic value of power, growing increasingly irascible and paranoid in the process. Plainview meets his match in Eli Sunday, a teenage preacher in the small California town of Little Boston, whose brother tipped Plainview off to the town's plentiful supply of untapped oil. To fully reap the benefits of the land, Plainview must suffer the opposing whims of this "prophet," whose legitimacy is questionable at best. And it's unclear if either man is prepared to pay the humiliating price the other wants to exact.
A sprawling epic of family, faith, power and oil, this film is set on the incendiary frontier of California's turn-of-the-century petroleum boom.Also,it establishes itself as a film of Darwinian ferocity, a stark and pitiless parable of American capitalism.Anderson has truly made an old fashioned, great movie. Not to be missed!!!