What is a man's life but a segment of time and space in which men, ideas, and feelings have flashed, only to be lost themselves in the great Entropy? Yet, amidst the fury of Chaos, some of these stories have shone with a more vivid light, perhaps because within them the most elementary norms were subverted by their protagonists. An Ego-Demiurge capable of shaping, through their own story, an icon, a symbol to which others turned with wonder mixed with ill-concealed admiration. Paul Thomas Anderson, just as Orson Welles did with Charles Foster Kane, chooses to tell the story of one of these demonic beings who dominated their time through a titanic assertion of their own self, men who bent other men to the yoke of their will. Inspired by a novel by Upton Sinclair titled "Oil!", There Will Be Blood is rightly considered one of the cinematic milestones of the new millennium, thanks above all to a monstrous performance by Daniel Day Lewis who permeates the film, becoming its raw material, form, and substance of a story built around his immense talent.

Daniel Plainview is a determined miner who, in the early 1900s, breaks his hands desperately scratching at the hard granite rock of the Texan rocky expanses in search of gold. Following an accident, he fortuitously discovers an oil deposit in one of his mines. It marks a turning point in his life. Daniel begins searching for oil, no longer gold or precious stones. By 1911, he is already an established entrepreneur with dozens of wells spread across the country. He is a tough, tenacious, stubborn man, the kind of person who builds his own success through grit and the sweat of his brow. After a work accident in which he loses one of his laborers, he decides to adopt the orphaned son. At the height of his commercial expansion, he receives a visit from young Paul Sunday, who reveals to him, for a fee, that in his homeland in California, an earthquake has revealed the existence of several oil deposits that have risen to the surface in the form of vast pools of sludge. Daniel, with his son HW, immediately sets off for Little Boston, the location indicated to him, and, pretending to be a quail hunter, visits Paul's family farm. Here live Paul's twin brother Eli, a kind of preacher inflamed by religious extremism, his parents, and his two sisters. Daniel makes an offer for the concession of the land around the farm and settles in the area with his men, creating a settlement. Soon numerous oil derricks rise on the horizon while Daniel acquires vast portions of territory by haranguing the owners and citizens of that small rural community with his charismatic rhetoric, convincing them to cede their land to him.

However, some unsettling events will disrupt the man's plans: specifically, an accident to his son who becomes deaf after the explosion of a drilling well, and a furious argument with Eli, who demanded payment for his land and is mocked and beaten by Daniel. Daniel sees in Eli a fanatical charlatan who, leveraging his own logorrhea, brainwashes the faithful of his church, bending them to his will. Despite the adversities, the oil continues to gush, and Daniel, to achieve his goal, yields to every compromise: he embraces the faith imposed on him by Eli, sends his son away by shipping him off to a boarding school on the coast, and comes to terms with Standard Oil for the construction of an oil pipeline to transport his oil out of California. The story then moves to 1927 when Daniel, now old and weary, remains alone in his immense mansion. A final encounter with his son HW, and Eli, his young nemesis, will cast a sinister light on the man's soul, now filled with rancor and cynicism, far removed from any semblance of humanity.