There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood

Opening Shot

Fifteen minutes. No dialogue. Daniel Plainview climbs into a hole in the desert and breaks his leg falling to the bottom of a silver mine. He drags himself out, hauls his ore to town, and stares at the assayer with the focus of someone who has already decided that nothing, including his own body, will stop him. Robert Elswit shoots it like a western by way of a horror film, and Jonny Greenwood's score enters like something crawling out of the ground.

What It Does

Paul Thomas Anderson strips the American origin story down to its two foundational impulses: capital and faith. Then he locks them in a room for 158 minutes and watches them destroy each other. Daniel Day-Lewis doesn't play Daniel Plainview. He becomes a force of appetite, a man who has confused dominance with purpose. The performance is so total that it warps the film around it; every other actor is essentially responding to a natural disaster.

Elswit won the Oscar for this, and he earned it in the derrick fire sequence alone. The camera doesn't cut away from the burning oil tower. It stays, and stays, and Plainview stands in front of it with his arms spread, and you realize you're watching a man worship the only god he believes in. Greenwood's score, heavily influenced by Penderecki, does something unusual: it tells you the film is a horror movie before the characters figure it out. The dissonant strings in the opening signal that everything Plainview builds will cost more than he advertises.

The bowling alley scene is the one everyone remembers, but the scene I can't shake is quieter. Plainview sitting with his sleeping adopted son on the train, the boy who is useful to him as a prop for sympathy. Day-Lewis lets you see the calculation and the genuine affection simultaneously, and in that overlap is the entire character.

Why It's on the List

This is the definitive American film of the 21st century so far. Not because it's about oil or religion but because it understands that the founding energy of this country is appetite dressed up as ambition. Anderson made five great films before this one. This is the one where he stopped being compared to Scorsese and Altman and became his own reference point. It redefined what an American epic could look like in a century that had mostly given up on making them.

The Argument Against

Day-Lewis is so enormous that the film occasionally becomes a one-man show, which can make the supporting performances feel thin by comparison. Paul Dano's Eli Sunday, while effective, doesn't quite match the seismic force opposite him, and the final confrontation tips from intensity into something almost campy. "I drink your milkshake" became a meme for a reason. The line is either the perfect capstone or the moment the film loses its grip. I go back and forth.

Closing Image

Plainview sits on the floor of his private bowling alley, splattered in blood, the body of Eli Sunday crumpled nearby. "I'm finished," he says. The butler approaches. The strings swell. He is rich beyond imagination, alone beyond repair, and the camera pulls back just enough to show you how much empty room surrounds him.