The James Logan Courier

Reviewed by Howard Yang, Courier Staff Writer

Despite its relatively weak box office record, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood was one of this year's most critically acclaimed films and was nominated for 8 Oscars.

The film's plot is an adaptation of Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! and revolves around Daniel Planview (Daniel Day Lewis), a miner who strikes it rich in the oil business and is gradually consumed by greed as he begins to place his ambitions above everything, his son, his community, and his morality.

To add to the drama, Plainview's murderous ambition for oil is matched by a young preacher named Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), who uses God and religion to his advantage the same way Plainview uses the promise for oil and wealth. The audience is then promptly subjected to a harsh, sometimes brutal display of moral decay as both men reveal their true nature.

While the plot of the film is more than sound, the main draw of There Will Be Blood is, without a doubt, Daniel Day Lewis. A renowned actor, Lewis plays Plainview with such fearsome intensity that one might have believed that he wasn't acting at all. One cannot help but feel sorry for Lewis' character and be afraid and resentful of him at the same time.

"There will be greed. There will be vengeance. There will be blood."

With a tagline like this, one can't be blamed to think that maybe he'd walked into a Stallone-action flick by mistake. Fortunately, patient viewers willing to sit through this 2 hour 40 minute train of a movie would find that the sheer display of fine acting and story depth of this film make it a true Oscar contender.