THERE WILL BE BLOOD.

This movie finally decided to come to my little town, so I went and saw it ASAP. I know I’m a little late into the game with this movie, but here I go anyway. I pray nobody decides to burn me alive over this review, because I’m not giving it a ‘perfect’ or ‘best film of the year’ like basically everybody else. Granted, it’ll be close, but not the best. Anywho, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I can get into the review. The movie is about Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his quest for Oil. He’s brought to a small California town by Paul Sunday (Paul Dano). There he stays, at first, with the Sunday family, including Paul’s brother, Eli (also Paul Dano). And he finds oil. That’s about the gist of it.

Just to get it out of the way first, the acting in this movie was phenomenal. I can totally see why Daniel Day-Lewis was nominated for an Oscar. The character of Daniel was breath-takingly acted. However, everybody gushes over Day-Lewis, but not many people focus on who I thought was the guy who stole every scene he was in, Paul Dano. He played his character(s) with such subtlety (at least when he wasn’t doing the preaching thing) that you just wanted to strangle him. It was that good. I actually realized that the parts I disliked most about the movie were the parts that Paul Dano weren’t in. And that brings us to the movie’s first strike.

There were some really confusing parts in this movie. Two parts strike me the most. First, the opening 10 minutes (AKA the stuff where nobody says a damn thing). The first 10 minutes bugged me for a few reasons. And no, it wasn’t because nothing was being said. I thought that was fine. It’s just I had a hard time understanding what the heck was going on. First he’s digging for silver, and then he’s hunting oil? Where was the transition? How did he go from one to the other? And why? If the point was the oil, then why start the movie with the silver mine? I just completely did not follow that. Another thing about the first 10 minutes was the music, but I’ll get to that in a moment. The second part of the movie that struck most to me was the entire chunk of the movie involving Daniel’s ‘brother’. Now it wasn’t his actual brother that bothered me. That was fine. I just mean the entire portion of the movie starting when he shows up and ending at the portion when he… goes away. Everything that happens during that period of time makes little sense, especially why Daniel’s son seemed to be so pissed off at his dad, and why he sets the cabin on fire. There were some other things in that part of the movie, but I can’t remember specifics. It just felt like that whole section brought the movie down a notch for me (and, coincidentally, this entire section was void of Paul Dano, as were the first 10 minutes. I smell conspiracy!).

Now I mentioned the music. Again, the music was great, for the most part, and was really fitting for most of the scenes. But there were two or three scenes in which the music felt so badly placed that it took me out of the movie. For instance, the first 10 minutes of the movie… nothing exciting is really happening, yet the movie is playing this really tense and scary music like you’d find in a killer-chasing-victim scene of a thriller. It was just completely out of place. And there were at least one or two other times in the movie this happened.

However, those are the only faults I found with the movie. Everything else was spectacular, from the acting to the visuals (Though I still maintain what I said for the LAMB posting that it’s great, but probably won’t win Art Direction. But what do I know?).

So now, for the first time using my new rating system, I give There Will Be Blood…

A Keanu 'Whoa'

(P.S. I drink your milkshake! I drink it up! *slurp* - If there were a ‘Best Line in a Movie’ Oscar, that would take it.)

(P.P.S. It took me a large chunk of the movie to realize it, but I realized that there were quite a few times when Daniel Day-Lewis' voice reminded me of Sean Connery.)