What's the Point?

Rating: 4/10 (13 April 2009)

After the first 20 minutes, I asked myself, where is this movie going? Unfortunately, I kept asking the same question for the next 2 hours -- where is this movie going? This is a portrait of a miserable man, whose only goal in life is to drill for oil and try to make as much money as possible. He never smiles. He doesn't enjoy life. He's not interested in women. He has no hobbies.
The story seems to violate the primary law of story-telling by featuring a character that evolves because of his experiences in life. For example, Scrooge becomes a nicer person in the end of A Christmas Carol, and Luke Skywalker becomes a man and discovers his powers in the Star Wars series. Even Darth Vader has a chance to redeem himself at the end. Here, the Daniel Day Lewis character is unchanged through the decades and we still don't know him at the end of the film.
As one reviewer pointed out, this is storytelling through minutiae -- we learn how people historically drilled for oil in the early days of the oil boom, and little more.
As another reviewer pointed out, the music is strange. My wife said it reminded her of the TV show Lost -- kind of spooky most of the time. The photography is beautiful, but there's not much of a story here. And I honestly can't tell you what the point of the movie was.