A Filmmaker's Review: 'There Will Be Blood' (2007)

Considered to be the greatest film of the 21st century so far and one of the greatest films of all time, There Will Be Blood really does live up to its name. Let's have a bit of a history of me and this movie then...

I first watched this film shortly after it came out on DVD release. Now, it was a 15 and yes, I was only 12 but that is besides the point. The point is, I didn't really get what was going on but I knew that Eli was my least favourite character. Thankfully though, the leading man seemed to agree and I was happy to see him beaten to death with a bowling pin at the end of the film. Now, when I got around to seeing it a second time I was probably around 18 or 19 years old and was in the process of re-watching Daniel Day-Lewis' entire filmography, my fandom that would, some years later get my name on ABC News for about five minutes during the 2016 Oscars Ceremony when I couldn't see him anywhere.

My third and most recent watch of the film has opened my eyes as to why it is really considered the greatest film of the 21st Century and that, I believe, is because of its extreme quality for everything. First of all, there is the incredible cinematography, brought to you by the legendary Paul Thomas Anderson. The cinematography is a thing of beauty and those landscape wide shots with the loud, throbbing music in the background have an essence that stays with you long after you've seen the film.

After this, you have the incredible talent of the legendary and (may I add, breathtaking) Daniel Day-Lewis. There is something just quite brilliant about the way the character of Daniel Plainview is played—it just seems all too real. Not just that, but the fact that the dialogue is so well written that you can hardly tell it's just a movie from time to time. But, with the logistics of what happens, you can only hope it's just a movie and not actually based on a true story. The fact that it may be loosely based on the life of Edward L Doheny is a bit much to take after watching someone bury someone who wasn't actually his brother, a young child get caught up in an explosion and go deaf and one man beaten to death in a bowling alley with one of the pins. Yes, all that and so much more in a film that may have been inspired by a true story. We're moving on now.

The next thing to discuss is the way in which this film tells its story. Through various years, it goes through a sort of 'beginning, middle and end' sort of situation. We get to see Plainview's life before he hits the oil, when he finally does and what he does with it and finally, we see what happens when power and corruption eventually screw him up and he loses his son to Mexico. The whole point of this, I believe—is to present Plainview as like a Caesar type of character. To show that once he was just a humble man, but to make him an anti-hero that humility back before he hits the oil is important to understand why he becomes mad with power so quickly. The demands he begins to fail on cause him to become almost like a dictator, but what he doesn't do that Caesar does is keep right-hand men. His trust-issues make him incredibly Shakespearean and thus, maybe Daniel Day-Lewis is the best man for the job.

I hope we've learnt something about why this film is so revered and why we want so badly to love the main character even though, in many aspects, he's a pretty horrid human being. A Byronic Hero, something of the actor's speciality—his life makes the movie what it is as we see it all through an outside lens yet, we tend to feel the same way he does about various characters such as Eli, Paul and the child. It's a brilliantly wicked movie with the potential to become our day's answer to the wartime's Casablanca. A modern classic, an instant legendary motion picture, it breaks the mould and serves us a Shakespearean tragedy of power, greed, anger and the potential to be great. It is quite possibly one of the greatest movies ever made.