A lot has been said about the movie There Will Be Blood. tMF featured two equally ecstatic reviews and both reviewers agreed on one thing - the movie is truly  monumental.

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One of the most significant parallels between America and this film is history - both real and reel. Two of the factors that are often mentioned as making America great are capitalism and religion - and both factors are equally often cited as reasons why outsiders hate the USA. Says Jeremy in his review:

The main contention in the film is the conflict between religion and capitalism. By showing that a complete and total devotion to either ideal would lead to a flawed conclusion, the movie does not take sides. It doesn’t need to. It’s almost as if both sides of the argument were presented and allowed to crucify each other. Had each man understood that they could have co-existed, things may have ended differently, although not nearly as engagingly. As it is, the men wound up being consumed by their own contorted sense of victory as well as by proving each other and the ideals they represented, wrong. While I think they could have coexisted with each other, once each is hell bent on destroying the other it makes you wonder - could one exist at all without the other? But as each man began at opposite ends of the moral spectrum, their paths were clearly headed along a crash course towards an inevitable conclusion.

The reason why many of the so-called 'war movies' fail at capturing an audience (or praise from critics) is perhaps the lack of connection between the moviegoing public and the characters in these films. Also people often simply want to forget, or perhaps even ignore, the escalating conflicts we see everyday in the news. PT Anderson's movie engages the audience in looking back at America's history, and also examines another kind of war - the epic battle within a man.

David best describes the parallels between this film and America in 'reel' terms:

"The movie includes elements from such classic films like Chinatown (John Huston’s character), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Fred C. Dobbs doesn’t trust anyone with his gold findings) and of course Citizen Kane (Charles Foster Kane buying everything he can, resulting him walking like a zombie through his enormous mansion). Kane looked back on “rosebud” and dwells on the lost innocence. Plainview, on the other hand, remembers a huge house that he loved to look at and hoped to live in it, but now, older and greedier, he looks back on it and it makes him sick. "

There are four really outstanding movies this year - Atonement, Zodiac, No Country for Old Men and this film. But what separates Blood from the others is its magnificence, its study of man. It says a lot about humanity and how prone we are toward greed and power. Daniel Plainview represents all of us in more ways than one. He represents our ambition, he represents our collective greed, he is our despair, he is our loneliness.

Why then is it the best movie for 2007? The most significant films are those that reflect society and humanity in general - we watch movies that celebrate the beauty of life, we also go to theatres to witness the tragedy of man - his greed and often, his fall from grace. While we tend to be swayed by all the hype Hollywood has up its sleeves, we are still capable of making this distinction - we know when a film can make a difference.

There Will Be Blood is that film - monumental in scope, breathtaking in its beauty, painful yet truthful in its depiction of man.

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