Strange, bewildering and over-hyped

Rating: 6/10 (16 February 2008)

People, please! The 18th greatest film of all-time? are you serious??! It seems to me that almost everyone has been sucked into the hype surrounding Daniel Day-Lewis' 'performance of the decade' which is, admittedly, at times captivating and menacing, but also at other times horribly over-acted (see the cringe-worthy baptism scene and pointless ending). If this is a film about one man's descent into mental illness and moral collapse, then director Paul Thomas Anderson has made a terrible hash of it. If not, then could someone please explain what the plot of this film is? It seems to me to be a disjointed assembly of loosely-connected events that do nothing to progress the story-telling process or enhance the viewer's association with the characters. And what about the characters? We have Day-Lewis' charming, ruthless and unstable Daniel Plainview, and......that's about it. The only other notable member of the 'supporting cast' was the corrupt preacher Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano. However other than serving as a frequent annoyance to Plainview - who inevitably dispatches of him - i failed to decipher the relevance of their relationship. Plainview's son, H.W. became a complete nonentity after his accident and no effort was made to develop or explain father and son's deteriorating relationship. In fact, no real effort was made to explain Plainview's personal deterioration either, leaving me with a total sense of disaffection with everyone and anyone in the film.
There Will Be Blood is slow-paced, no doubt about that - the opening scenes are dialogue-less for about 30 minutes and i regularly found myself urging the next scene, desperately vying for the picture to burst into life. It never did, and ends with a gratuitous and meaningless clash between Plainview and Eli Sunday which left everyone i was with unsatisfied and confused - where had this masterpiece gone? did i just miss the film of the decade? No, because it never was and never will be.
I'll concede, the film contains some meticulous set-detail, and the cinematography is beautifully precise. Even the score, which i believe some people have criticised, i found to be interesting and suspenseful. It's just that the suspense is never fulfilled, interest never ignited.
In the end, There Will Be Blood and the hype surrounding it, comes crashing down like Plainview's first oil derrick.
6/10