Stirring, riveting, and masterful.

Rating: 10/10 (21 January 2008)

There Will Be Blood is a harrowing, pensive, and rhythmic work that reveals and subsequently skewers you with ghastly human truths. Once ignited by greed and power, these truths are impossible to extinguish. The film is epic in its setting and cinematography, but simultaneously intimate in its contemplative, intense, and brooding focus on its characters. The two scopes complement each other perfectly.
Daniel Day-Lewis' performance is, of course, remarkable. The drawl that he applies to the character is over-the-top, but so is the character himself in his strident eschewal of any substantive human contact, as well as in his bitter resentment towards snake oil preacher Eli (played fantastically by Paul Dano).
Jonny Greenwood turns in a masterful score that hearkens back to Krzysztof Penderecki's bombastic, droning atonal blares that were adapted for Kubrick's The Shining. It's fitting, as Daniel Plainview's sharp descent into madness mirrors that of Jack Torrance. Greenwood's work avoids the sterile and generic orchestral din that has dominated most cinema of the past ten years, and instead experiments with sustained, moaning strings and piquant ticks and snaps. The aural doom-scape he creates quickly and deservedly assumes the role as the film's third principle character. This is the greatest film soundtrack of the twenty-first century.
With its pitch-perfect music, performances, direction, and cinematography, There Will Be Blood is a stunning achievement.