Greatest Film Scenes
and Moments



There Will Be Blood (2007)

 



Written by Tim Dirks

Title Screen
Movie Title/Year and Scene Descriptions
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There Will Be Blood (2007)

In writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's Best Cinematography-winning, brooding, turn of the century epic about a greedy, savage, and obsessive quest for oil wealth in S. California:

  • the astonishing portrayal of opportunistic, ruthless oil man Daniel Plainview (Oscar-winning Best Actor Daniel Day-Lewis): first in 1898 as a silver mine prospector who adopted an orphaned boy named H.W. (Dillon Freasier) after a mining accident and then connivingly bought 'quail-hunting' land from the goat farming Sunday family in the area of Little Boston, California and began drilling for oil
  • the scene of the oil platform explosion and fire, deafening H.W. with the blast
  • the scene at the California ocean of Plainview realizing that a man claiming to be his half-brother Henry (Kevin J. O'Connor) from Wisconsin was an imposter - afterwards, he killed him by shooting him in the head
  • the masterful scene of Plainview joining the Church of the Third Revelation, led by young crazed, charismatic evangelist Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) - in which the oil man was humiliated and forced to repeatedly and publically declare he was a sinner looking for salvation: ("I am a sinner. I am sorry, Lord. I want the blood. I've abandoned my child. I will never backslide. I was lost, but now I am found. I have abandoned my child!"), to satisfy member/land-owner William Bandy (Hans Howes) and acquire the right-of-way to build a pipeline through his land
  • the scene of Plainview's disownment of his deafened son H.W. (Russell Howard), who decided to go into competition in Mexico against his rich, profligate father - and was told about his non-biological true origins: ("You're not my son...It's the truth. You're not my son. You never have been. You're an orphan!...I don't even know who you are because you have none of me in you. You're someone else's. This anger. Your maliciousness. Backwards dealings with me. You're an orphan from a basket in the middle of the desert. And I took you for no other reason than I needed a sweet face to buy land. Do you get that? So now you know. Look at me! You're lower than a bastard. You have none of me in you. You're just a bastard from a basket")
  • the final scene in the two-lane bowling alley in his California mansion in which misanthropic Plainview mocked and vengefully berated and forced financially-strapped, deal-making Eli to repeatedly confess: "I am a false prophet. God is a superstition," before telling him he had already sucked the land dry of oil by drainage ("I drink your milkshake, I drink it up!") - and then bloodily murdering him with bludgeoning blows from a bowling pin, with Plainview's final words to his butler: "I'm finished"










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