“I drink your milkshake!” – Daniel Plainview
Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007) is a grand, epic, strange, and mysterious film. It is just as curious as it is involving. What Anderson was able to accomplish was to present its story of a ruthless and greedy oil prospector at the turn of the 20th century, and provide him with deeper layers that make him more than what he may seem at first. There is something hidden, bubbling just beneath the surface of both the character and of the movie itself. It’s hard to pinpoint, but we know assuredly that Anderson is giving us more than what is simply on the screen. Ambition and capitalism is taken to the extreme, where no one, including family and loved ones, will stand in the way of a man driven to insanity by his success. So far does the character go, that we doubt he’ll ever be able to return from the abyss.