I have seen the film twice, I enjoyed it both times but it doesn't seem even close to being worthy of the praise it receives. The idea that it is one of the all time great films is not unpopular and I have never read a justification for this that I considered even decent. The film touches on a few high minded ideas but my main problem is that I don't find it's exploration nor it's conclusions regarding these ideas to be particularly interesting. I'm sure there is lots to be said for how good the film is technically, things like the score, cinematography, and other qualities that are part of film as a medium, and while I do think the film has an interesting style to it my visceral reaction was always just kind of..... eh. It feels like the ominous tone and title of the film just doesn't match the content of the plot which hurts both. The tone feels like a cheap trick to artificially raise the stakes in the film and the plot feels like a disappointment, to serious of style without the substance to thematically justify it.
The film seems to mostly be an exploration and critique of the societal transition from religion to capitalism and seems to point to a few things.
- religion as an insincere power structure and societal structure.
- capitalisms as a more competent power structure.
- when push comes to shove the influence of religion is overpowered by the influence of capitalism. Society shifts towards prioritizing wealth and the values of religion will increasingly only be met to the extent that they don't conflict with capitalism.
- Capitalism is only capable of providing material wealth and a set of rules by which to compete, it can only create intrinsic value to the extent that wealth and competition are valuable. Any sense of identity, purpose, community, or other things we typically associate with overarching qualities of society and humanity will be sacrificed by a blind ideological adherence to capitalism.
To be clear I do think these idea are worth exploring, and if people want to do so through film I have no problem with that, but I simply see nothing particularly groundbreaking or impactful in the way There Will Be Blood does this. I think part of my issue is that these seem like really easy targets, like wow so you think religion is dumb and obsession with materialism is unhealthy? (sarcastic slow clap). These feel like pretty obvious points and making them in a film certainly doesn't count as all time great cinema imo, then again there are lots of religious people and lots of people who chase material wealth pretty hard so maybe I'm just not sympathetic enough to them, but even in that case I just don't see TWBB changing those peoples minds.
So I want to know, what about this film am I failing to appreciate, are their themes I missed? are their nuances I missed? Is my expectation for what a film should do with it's subject matter to high? I'm not so much concerned with liking the film more as much I am curios about different ways the film is interesting.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/lu34sh/can_someone_explain_to_me_what_makes_there_will/
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