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Rating: 4/10 (4 May 2009)

Having watched this film the other day and saw that people were still commenting I felt I'd like to add my ten pennith worth in.
Like a few people I really didn't get why this was a critics choice. It just goes to show how many poncy critics there are out there. Any film that starts with about 5 minutes of no script, nothing what so ever should strike you as "poncy". Now I'm all for hard hitting films, or films that make you think, the ones that aren't made for the mass populace. But this really isn't anything to write about.
Daniel Day-Lewis is a great actor, but I felt he was just re-hashing his Gangs of New York role, but with a slightly smaller hat. I really didn't understand him at all. The leap he made from silver miner to oil miner was a "blink and miss it affair". Clearly the book held more insight that was "uninteresting" or "slowed the film down". Mind you it couldn't have been any slower if you tided its legs together and fed it a cocktail of dope and Valium.
I guess you could argue that DDL was a form of anti-hero, but it's a bit of a stretch. There was no real character development, you are just meant to follow and accept his decent in to madness and greed (not that you really saw any decent, he was just mad and greedy). Oh yeah there are other people around him somewhere, not too sure where I don't think any of them other than Eli and his brother had more than about 10 lines throughout the whole film. By the end you just didn't care what happened to any of them, but you would be surprised by the fact he was still alive at whatever age he was meant to be. I thought that at the start of the film he was in his mid 30's, but then by 1927 he would have been a very old man. There was no real sense of time in that way. One minute you're in 1901, then it's 1911 for what seems like 5 years and then your in 1927. Again the book must have large "unfilmable" chunks in it, but I'm not about to find out.
The soundtrack was the only thing of real note. I really liked it, but felt it belonged in some horror/stalk 'n' slash film.
This film really just goes to show how many bad films have been made of late when films like this are critically acclaimed. To me this is another "Ryan's Daughter" a long pointless film where nothing really happens and you don't really care either. You are just left wondering just what else you could have done with those few hours of your life you lost.