I’ve been waiting to see There Will Be Blood for ages, and now that I finally have, I can fully recommend it to you.

I’ll just say it; it’s a dark film. Daniel Plainview is an oilman whose seemingly loveless nature is matched only by his competitive hunger. He travels around the country in search of promising areas to drill for oil, along with his adopted son H.W. Through the decades he becomes increasingly more powerful, ultimately consuming entire communities of unsuspecting farmers. Plainview, if not a complete psycho at the beginning, definitely ends up corrupted by power and greed. And yet somehow Day-Lewis manages to keep the audience engaged and somewhat sympathetic towards Plainview, who finally gets exactly what he wanted.

I think the only thing that really irked me about this film was the running time. At 2hrs 38mins, this one’s a biggie. Still, it held my attention the whole time, and the overall pacing of the movie was very nice. I’m not sure if I would sacrifice the potency of some of the scenes just to cut down on running time. Hmmm… Indeed…

I also hugely enjoyed the soundtrack for There Will Be Blood. Composed by Radiohead’s guitarist Jonny Greenwood, it was a perfect accompaniment to some of the film’s unpleasant images and themes. It’s a shame his score wasn’t able to be nominated for an Oscar. I have a feeling it definitely could have had a good chance.

I am surprised that Daniel Day Lewis acted in this movie. His acting, as always, was almost flawless, but I wish I could say the same for the movie. It was too long, boring, and just blah. The director tried to make this an epic, but it felt way short to be one that will be remembered in years to come.

An intermission was needed for the length of the film. It’s something that films nowadays seem to lack, and I don’t understand why. This movie especially needed it with how dull it was.

I wish I could say more, but I will just be repeating myself about the boredom I felt.

After I saw this in the theater, my friend and I went out to meet a group of people at a fast food restaurant – where we both ordered milk shakes. And then we went bowling. Kind of fitting, no?

It’s something of a paradox to state that Daniel Day-Lewis’ towering, fiery oil derrick of a performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is both the best and worst thing about this film. His acting, as oilman Daniel Plainview, is amazing, both subtly nuanced and overpowering—so much of the latter, really, that it tends to swallow the entire epic whole. Plainview is also impenetrably amoral, a man of few sympathies, and consequently the viewer has none in return for his character. It’s a tough hook to hang an entire movie on, but the film succeeds despite of it.

We see Daniel Plainview first as a gold and silver prospector (and not a very successful one) in a nearly wordless 20-minute opening sequence. Toting along his cherubic adopted son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), Plainview begins to buy up land, practically for pennies, from under unknowing farmers’ feet. It’s not a pleasant sight, and it is testimony to the power of Anderson’s movie that we find ourselves cheering, at least in the first half, for this robber baron. By 1911 Plainview has become one of the most successful oilmen in the region, though (in a crucial distinction) significantly small fry in relation to the big oil companies.

Plainview is approached by Paul Sunday (played by an excellent Paul Dano), who offers not oil, but information: his family’s farm in Little Boston, California, is floating on an “ocean of oil”, and would he be interested in scoping it out? Father and son, pretending to hunt for quail, arrive at the Sunday ranch and find not only oil seeping from the ground, but Paul’s twin brother Eli Sunday (also played by Dano), a young, charismatic preacher and faith healer, against whom Plainview wrestles for Little Boston’s soul. (Full confession: when my friend Eloise and I saw this the other night, we completely missed the point about the twin brother.)

It’s clear early on in the film that Plainview and Sunday’s different brands of hucksterism run on parallel railroad tracks. But Anderson seems to lack the confidence in his audience to appreciate what little subtleties there are in this presentation and chooses to bludgeon us with this obviousness. The abrupt tonal shift in the last twenty minutes, as Plainview descends into Charles Foster Kane madness, simply seems different from what came before; let’s just say that “There Will Be Blood” isn’t just the title, but a promise as well.

There’s little in Anderson’s previous work that suggests the heft of There Will Be Blood, unless you count the Old Testament metaphors made flesh in Magnolia, or the scams in Hard Eight, or Tom Cruise’s penis-evangelist in Magnolia. The movie is beautifully photographed, lingering over the fires of hell spurting uncontrollably from the earth, or the sere, rocky ground out of which such black bounty must be forced (and on which Jonny Greenwood’s Ligeti-like score falls like rain). It’s the visual antithesis, in more ways than one, to Days of Heaven.

This will be the film that Anderson will probably be most remembered for—for its epic breadth; the conflict between God and Mammon, or of fathers and sons; the invocation of Welles, Polanski, and Huston, or of West and Sinclair; the way it has Great American Movie written all over it. But if you ask me for a favorite Anderson film, I wouldn’t hesitate to name the brilliant but flawed Magnolia; despite its stylistic cleverness (and “clever” isn’t necessarily a compliment), glib spirituality, and full-on ripoff of / homage to Short Cuts, there was at least something questing, something more vitally human, about Magnolia and its ruined characters. It’s certainly more alive than the cold, dead heart in Daniel Plainview.