From its opening scene, There Will Be Blood announces itself as an heir to 2001: A Space Odyssey. With a soundtrack shriek that’s pure Kubrick, the camera fades up on an untamed landscape, where lone prospector Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) chips away in a hole. He’s driven by the equivalent of 2001’s monolith—in this case, oil: the substance that will inform everything he does, and that will make him wealthy to a point where wealth becomes his only interest.

Black gold eventually pours from the ground, of course, and when it does, a fellow prospector’s child is immediately baptized with it; Anderson spatters the lens with oil, too, initiating us into Plainview’s faith. Blood may tip its hat to John Ford and notions of collective ambition, but at bottom it’s a story of individual obsession—and may inspire a similar obsession in viewers. This is the most original and compelling Western in a year of Westerns: so new, so bleached of conventional beauty and so alienating (thanks in part to a nerve-jangling score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood) that it might as well be set on Mars.

The movie alludes to Days of Heaven, Giant, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Citizen Kane, but it’s every inch a P.T. Anderson film. Blood is not a departure from his style (as some have suggested) but a refinement, seizing on the notions of family and commerce that ran through Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999) and reworking them on a different plane. Anderson pares down Upton Sinclair’s 1926 muckraking novel Oil! to an archetypal, even operatic tale of greed and competition, culminating in an ending that’s as much a shock to the system as the frogs in Magnolia.

Excerpt from TimeOut Film Guide located HERE

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Paul Thomas Anderson has been striving to make a masterpiece ever since he first exploded onto the American movie scene 10 years ago with his insanely ambitious second feature, Boogie Nights. Replete with showy camera moves and performance tics (borrowed from Scorsese and Altman, respectively), this ostensible portrait of the ’70s porn industry, while wildly entertaining, was in essence little more than a nonstop series of attention-grabbing set pieces. His hyperactive follow-up, Magnolia, gathered even more terrific actors and set off emotional crises at an even more frantic and furious pace. Even Punch-Drunk Love, the goofy romantic comedy he made with Adam Sandler, fairly pulsed with PTA’s unmistakable need to assault the viewer with evidence of his genius. “I get a bit giddy,” I wrote some years ago, “imagining what Anderson might accomplish one day if/when he finally calms the f--k down.” It’s a pleasure to report that the wait is over. His latest effort, the magnificent oil-baron epic There Will Be Blood, firmly and thrillingly demonstrates what switching to cinematic decaf can do.

Excerpt from Mike D'Angelo at the Las Vegas Weekly located HERE