In 2017, The New York Times selected 25 Best Movies of the 21st Century, and this film topped the list.
In September 2019, the film was selected as "100 Best Films of the 21st Century" by the British newspaper "The Guardian", ranking first.
Daniel Day Lewis won the 80th Academy Awards for the film.
Before the film emperor was selected, the newspaper commented on his acting skills in this film:
"If Daniel Day Lewis doesn't win an Oscar, then we're going to rewrite the definition of 'acting,' he's unlike any great performance — he's even greater!"
Paul Thomas Anderson, known as Hollywood's genius director, was 37 years old and claimed to have been snatched by a giant "Kubrick's Hand" when he made the film.
The film is filled with the sound of soul tearing.
The promo poster's striking cross-drawn derrick already covers multiple hints, and the title is derived from Exodus chapter 7, line 19: "Egypt is full of blood-colored scenes, even wooden or stone containers..."
As a result, the fish in the river died, and the river stinked, and the Egyptians could not eat the water in the river, and there was blood everywhere in Egypt.
The initiator of all this was however the Egyptian pharaoh was stubborn in his heart and refused to allow the people to go, and because of this, various miracles appeared, and finally Moses led everyone to split the Red Sea and walk out of Egypt.
And the film is as the title implies, human beings step by step to the blood-colored abyss, from the game with their own hearts to the negotiation and trade with the devil until finally becoming a demon, the mask tears off the skeleton that is black to the bone, thinking that God is playing between the palms of the hands, but in fact, there is not even a little human remains.
The film runs from the beginning to 14 minutes and 33 seconds, with no dialogue, and apart from a few soundtracks, there is only the gasp of oil extractor Daniel Previ (Daniel Lewis), who skillfully goes down the well, operates roller skating, digs silver mines, and once explodes him into a dark underground, dragging his legs out of the pit, the huge nightmare of death has swallowed him up, and God has given him a windfall after giving him a taste of despair, darkness and loneliness.
At the same time as breaking his leg, he picked up a stone with a high gold content, and because of this stone, he saw a little light from the bottom of the penniless, dark and boundless bottom, and began to have workers continue to search for God's black blood, oil.
It is not difficult to see that Daniel's situation is the epitome of most of the excavators in the United States at the end of the 19th century, the dark life is inches away from death every day, everyone fights against survival, and once successful, the back of the flying yellow Tengda is a dark memory that can never be erased, and more is lost in endless darkness.
In this sense, Daniel was lucky, and just when his career was on the way, God once again sent the messenger Eli (Paul Dano), the son of a down-and-out farmer who provided news of oil underground.
When asked if daniel believed in God, Daniel's answer divided the two into different camps, one a realistic opportunist and the other a fanatical admirer of God, which also set the tone for the near-crazy duel between the two later.
Eli finally introduced Daniel to his own land, and Daniel and his son came to explore the terrain on the pretext of hunting quails, and along the way taught and personally demonstrated various businesses to his son.
Although it is to buy oil, but to buy it at the price of hunting quail, in that era of speculation and deception everywhere, survival requires means.
A classic speech that follows perfectly portrays how the future oil tycoon went from greed to greed and darkness.
In the face of the dazed and ignorant villagers, he certainly knew what was needed for them.
The whole speech, poking at every pain point, eliminating many worries, the subsequent plot for his every sentence is snapped in the face, the puncture of the lie, but also makes this speech more frightening - the so-called know every worker is very good, when the worker has an accident, he can not call the worker's name at all!
The so-called personal exploration is just leisurely in a distant house, and even the son has no idea where he is.
After all, the people found the smell of money in Daniel's speech, who doesn't want to get rich overnight?
Except for the Bandy family, everyone made way for Daniel, the exploration of oil wells began unimpeded in the town, and Daniel's American dream became clearer.
Then, the two major accidents that followed once again pushed Daniel into an unsure choice - an accident directly led to the death of the worker, daniel just hastily cleaned up the scene and disposed of the workers' bodies, which also showed the chaotic state of the United States during the primitive capital accumulation period.
Another accident breaks Daniel down and pushes his inner passion for desire to the extreme.
The oil rushing up from the ground rushed to the cross-like pole, and his son H.W. was playing on the pole when he was thrown to the ground by a heavy earthquake.
His oil-stained son was rescued by Daniel and put aside, and he went straight to the spray-burning oil column, his face full of ecstatic black blood!
The ignited oil gushed into a pillar of fire, and the fire illuminated the entire dark night, and this ritualistic fire became a key turning point in the film.
Since then, there has been no longer a hypocritical gentleman pretending to be a gentle gentleman, and there is no warm picture of father and son inseparable.
The various rivalries between the characters have sprung up from the bottom of the sea, and the sea under the undercurrent has begun to make waves.
The raging fire roars at night like the shadow of Satan, the soundtrack is mixed with classical music and various nightmare sounds, the gates of hell have been opened, and Daniel walks into the abyss in the fireworks of black blood.
First of all, in the face of the sudden loss of his son's deafness, he suddenly turned the image of Daniel's father and son soldier into a joke and handle for everyone.
When my son H.W.'s line foreshadowed the adoption of the child of a co-worker who died in an accident from the very beginning, I preferred to believe that he was motivated by compassion for the instinct of life.
After the son is old enough, Daniel has skillfully taken H.W with him at any time, in order to win the sympathy and trust of the other party, and has won most of the business with the family card, it can be said that Daniel's career has a great credit to his son in the take-off stage.
H.W.'s deafness, Daniel has the responsibility of improper care, H.W's hatred for his father from the initial silence, refusal to communicate, to later see the man who claims to be Daniel's half-brother enter between him and his father, the child's instinctive sense of crisis of rejection makes him ignite the house, and the price of anger is ruthlessly abandoned by his father and sent to a distant place.
Years later, the son becomes an adult and marries his own young Mary (Eli's sister), the young man who grew up together under the darkness is the only ray of sunshine in the whole film, and H.W's smile is enough to melt the heart of any girl.
When they leave to start their own business, Daniel has shackled himself deeply in the dark, he curses this only relative as a "bitch", and his roaring anger is vented to the young man in front of him along with the little bit of humanity left in his heart, which eventually exhausts Daniel's residual struggle not to be taken away by the devil.
The devil's footsteps are never silent, even when you are hit with a stick.
Daniel's naked means of money are lamented, and the other line of the story, the hypocrisy and secrecy of the missionary Eli, is even more chilling.
First he appeared in front of Daniel as a weak man and asked for information fees, and then when Daniel negotiated with his father, he raised three thousand dollars to ten thousand at once, saying that it was for my church, which made people mistakenly think that this was a young man who was full of fear and willingness to dedicate himself to God and faith, and was a messenger of God, who was running around in the human world for the Holy Lord in his heart and building a home.
When Daniel and his party began to explore for oil in the town, he did everything he could to attract the workers to the church, and all the villagers in the town were enrolled in the church, so as to expand his power.
And looking at what he did in the church like Daniel, he saw at a glance that he did not really believe in God, but only used various means to drive the demon away from others, and all kinds of crazy actions, as if he was deeply under the claws of the demon.
In the United States of the nineteenth century, in addition to the barrenness of life, what was even more scarce was the lack of faith and serious blind obedience, only the evil people could see through the evil people' things, and the good and ignorant villagers obeyed, followed and gradually formed a force under the seduction of Eli.
But the person who followed would never be Daniel, who knew all too well the trick behind Eli, because it was a bad means that even he despised to disguise and use God.
Therefore, the tit-for-tat confrontation between two hypocritical people makes this movie play a double of evil.
The conflict between the two intensified, from the initial politeness, moderation and control, to the two climax points later, which also pushed the inner darkness of these two people to the peak.
Eli used the excuse that the worker's death accident was due to the intervention of demons, and used the excuse to blackmail Daniel into handing over the money promised to build the church, so as to fight evil and really relieve his anger, watching the moment when Eli was beaten down, it seemed that some praise for Daniel's sophistication and shrewdness.
But Daniel also had moments when he had to bow his head, and that was for the money.
Upon learning that the Tubing must pass through Bandy's house, and that the only Bandy who had not signed an agreement could only promise Daniel an "exorcism", Daniel did not hesitate to step into the church and leave it at the mercy of Eli.
In this round, Eli pulled back a city, and also got the cost of building a church that he did not get from the last beating.
For Daniel, everything in the church was nothing more than a fit to achieve his wishes – the oil pipeline was in hand! God and demons love whoever I love, I only love money. So he could easily shout: I left my own son aside! Lord, give me holy blood to drive out the demons in me.
From the very beginning, Eli told everyone that for the sake of my church, not the church of God, at the beginning he was trying to seek his own self-interest in the name of God, so when he encountered an economic crisis and he was in a difficult situation, he visited Daniel again.
In the spirit of sacrifice and dedication, the lion opened his mouth and asked for 100,000 US dollars in exchange for helping Daniel absorb the oil of Bandy's house.
And at this moment, Daniel, the son has left him, alone in the empty and dark villa, no longer have any human emotions and pity. Faced with an even more hypocritical Eli, he decided to exercise demonic power on God's behalf.
Not only did he inform Eli that his self-interested abacus was completely miscalculated, but he also made him say the following: I am a fake prophet, and God is the product of superstition.
Eight consecutive repetitions, perhaps eight times of shouting across the screen, made the film miss Oscar, but it was also these eight incantations that shattered the obsession and confusion of the prophets, Gods, and religions of that era, and can still ring in the ears to this day.
In the end, in this battle between demons, Daniel swung his bowling stick and hit Eli's head many times, not only the missionary in front of him who disgusted him so much, but also the inner demon who seduced him step by step, strangled him, and made him deeply imprisoned in this dark house.
At this point, the film stops abruptly, but it deeply embeds people and cannot live with themselves.
After watching the film, a reporter from the Detroit News wrote: "Crazy epic, magnificent outstanding performance... A week after watching the film, I can still hear my brain creaking manically. ”
The New York Times summed up the film with this sentence: "Anderson's film is not the American Dream, it is the American Nightmare, and the audience will follow the film into a fiery hell, and everyone will be boiled and cursed in it." ”
And in my mind, the first line that opened the story echoed deeply - no!!!