There Will Be Blood

Our DVD Price: £11.99 RRP: £17.99 Save £6.00 (33%)   special offer MovieMail Recommends! click for details Availability In Stock - should be despatched within 48 hours.  This product will be dispatched from Guernsey. Delivery times   Earn 55 Bonus Points when you buy this product. More info

Also available on... 

DVD £14.99 

RRP £20.99 You save £6.00 (28%)

View in full detail

Blu-ray £21.59 

RRP £23.99 You save £2.40 (10%)

View in full detail

Film Description

Daniel Day Lewis delivers a powerhouse performance in this Academy Award-winning tale of greed and oil in turn of the century California. Lewis is Daniel Plainview, a down-and-out silver miner who transforms himself into a rich oil tycoon. When he learns of a small oil-rich town in California, he moves there with his adopted son, HW. Using his son to project the image of a caring family man, Plainview gains the co-operation of almost all the locals in the town, with promises to build schools and cultivate the land to make their community flourish. However, over time, Plainview's gradual accumulation of wealth and power causes his true self to surface, and he begins to slowly alienate himself from everyone in his life - including his own son.

Film Information

Technical Details

Film Media

1 Trailer

View - Medium (17.00 MB)

Reviews & Articles

Share your thoughts and opinions - write a review

Review by Julian Upton on 3rd June 2008

On first viewing, one could argue that Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as oilman Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood overwhelms the film, just as
Plainview’s burning oil wells engulf their primitive wooden frames

We meet him, in an extended, wordless opening sequence, as a tenacious California silver miner at the end of the 19th Century. Submerged in a dangerous quarry, he is restlessly pursuing his buried treasure. Later, after striking petroleum, he becomes an oil prospector, and by 1911, he is travelling the state, persuading various townsfolk to allow him to drill their land. On the way he has adopted a young orphan of the mines, H.W., and perfected a mellifluous drawl that transcends hucksterism and captivates audiences of would-be colluders in his ‘humble’ plans for a future built on oil.

But as the film turns from a painstaking evocation of the spirit of the early American capitalists to a brutal treatise on greed, religion and man’s inhumanity to man, Plainview becomes an out-and-out monster, as volatile and volcanic as the lucrative black geysers he devotes his life to striking. Having bought oil-rich land from the impoverished Sunday family in a barren corner of California, he sees his empire boom while his personal life descends into betrayal, paranoia and alcoholism. An ideological clash with the Sundays’ fire-and-brimstone minister son Eli escalates into an all-consuming enmity; an explosion that deafens H.W. sees him abandoning his son; and the return of a long-lost brother further derails his sense of familial responsibility. More than anything, however, it is his relentless hunger for power that turns Plainview into one the most outrageous misanthropes of modern cinema.

Day-Lewis admittedly lets fly to a caricature of a human being here. But a film of fearless extremes requires a performance of equal courage and audacity. Indeed, it is because of this, and its fusion of the frankly absurd and the epically beautiful, that There Will Be Blood achieves the prickly quality of a true masterpiece.

View more reviews by Julian Upton

Browse all Film Reviews

Collections & Lists

This film is part of the following Customer Film Lists

The Independent - Reviewed DVDs by Independent \ MovieMail

The latest titles reviewed in this Saturday's The Information.

Create your own Film List!

Customers who bought this also bought...

Recommendations from fellow customers

No Country for Old Men

by Joel & Ethan Coen

The Lives of Others

by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Pans Labyrinth

by Guillermo del Toro

21 Grams

by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

by Julian Schnabel

Other films by...

More films directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Hard Eight

Boogie Nights

Magnolia

Punch-Drunk Love

View more >

More films starring Daniel Day-Lewis

In The Name Of The Father

by Jim Sheridan

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Philip Kaufman

The Age Of Innocence

by Martin Scorsese

The Crucible

by Nicholas Hytner

My Left Foot

by Jim Sheridan

View more >

More films starring Ciaran Hinds

Veronica Guerin

by Joel Schumacher

Persuasion

by Roger Michell

Munich

by Steven Spielberg

Mickybo & Me

by Terry Loane

Miami Vice

by Michael Mann

View more >

For questions or assistance, call us on (+44) 0844 776 0900 or email on enquiries@moviemail-online.co.uk

© 2004-2007 MovieMail, Ltd., All Rights Reserved. Find out more about MovieMail