Solid

Rating: 6/10 (1 September 2010)

Overall, There Will Be Blood is a film with a good opening, a few good potential moments and scenes (as with the faux brother), but it ends in near disaster. Its ending would rank as one of the worst in history (think Akira Kurosawa's Rashomom) if only the rest of the film had been stronger. Also, in no way, shape, nor form is the film an 'epic.' Other than the word 'surreal' the term epic may be the most overused and misused word in the arts. An epic is a tale that covers a great deal of history, time, and place. It also delves deeply into the characters and plot. There Will Be Blood is a series of cursory sketches that are meager and often poorly connected. I spoke of the hit and miss cinematography, but the musical scoring to this film is even worse. And, even if one were to put aside the technical lack, and the script problems, there's the acting. It's simply not good. The two main characters, Lewis and Dano have no chemistry, in the sense that their hatred of each other never seems genuine. And, while Dano is a cipher emotionally, Lewis chews scenery even more than he did as Bill The Butcher In Martin Scorsese's Gangs Of New York. Granted, while not a great film, that film was better written than this one, but there is a certain cartoonishness in Lewis's portrayal that neuters all attempt at real drama. One cares not a damn for any of the mannekin-like characters- save perhaps for the faux brother, whose very fakeness was designed merely to show of Lewis's character's rage and psychopathy, but did nothing of the sort. It only made the faux brother's character seem slighter by his casual dismissal from Daniel's life. Also, the tale is both too linear and too sparse in development to have any real poesy. It relies not on characterization but grotesques- they aren't even caricatures. And, after the first fifteen minutes, I kept wondering what a real visionary director like Theo Angelopoulos or Michelangelo Antonioni would have done with this film's premise- even its footage, for quality editing could have severely tightened the film up, and made it less dependent upon overwrought theatrics. In essence, one can tell this was a Hollywood film, even from the first minutes of silence.
There Will Be Blood attempts to be epic, great, and tie in with the current political zeitgeist by showing viewers the beginnings of what caused global warming. Instead, it is a meandering tale that relies on soap operatic tricks (such as Bandy's blackmailing Daniel into Eli's church- why?) that don't even have a payoff, however cheap; as well as being dull and poor in almost every filmic aspect (not unlike its twinned, wildly overpraised critical cousin, the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men). That this film got so raved over as a great piece of cinema shows how little critics and filmgoers today understand real art and/or care about it. Which scenario is worse is open for debate. This film's quality isn't.