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Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous
the fucking ending was brilliant! i don't think it was anti-religion or anti-God but rather anti-charlatan and while i can understand why folks from atheist background could see it as such as atheists tend to see all religions as charlatans BUT i felt There Will Be Blood was criticizing the bogus charlatans who were particularly active at that time in American history
also i thought that it made Daniel Plainview's character as being a charlatan of sorts the way he played the game with the feigned conversion and the bastard in a basket
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That's pretty much what I meant.
I'm not an atheist. But I do think that evangelical Christianity is totally warped, and is basically nothing more than a long con.
But yeah, charlatans of any stripe. Be they manipulative religious zealots, cheating people out of money and into political action, or big industry types like Trump and the dudes at Enron. I think TWBB was about exposing the truth behind the lies that these two groups tell the world, and showing a terrifying picture of what hides behind the façades of "progress" and "faith" that the two primary characters represented.
Plainview telling these townspeople that he wanted to make them rich, make their lives better, when all he really wanted was power. And the preacher kid selling anger in response to Plainview's Puritan unfriendly sensibilities, also making a power grab, selling a lie of equal proportions to the masses searching for a leader, and a person to blame. A God and a Devil, I guess.
Really i agree with what you're saying completely. I just went about saying it in a different way, I guess. I don't think it was anti-religion. I'm not either. But I'm totally anti-charlatan, anti-phony ass conman, anti-greed, anti-power. And the film is a goddamn masterpiece because it presents such awesome/horrifying examples of two of the primary means by which evil is brought into the world: corrupt religion and corrupt commerce.