I saw this on Thursday night and have been pondering it since then.
It’s a masterpiece. Flat out. Filmmaking on a completely different level from the average, or even the great.
That being said, one of the things that distinguish brilliant films is that they aren’t liked by everybody. That can be said about everything, of course, not just masterpieces. It doesn’t matter how good somebody thinks a movie is, or how popular it might be; it simply won’t connect with everybody. There are people who don’t like E.T. or The Godfather or Independence Day and so on ad nauseum. However, what generally separates the standard “didn’t like it” from the masterpiece “didn’t like it” is the vehemence of the response. If somebody doesn’t enjoy, say, Music and Lyrics, they can shrug it off with a “meh” and feel no need to say anything further. But if somebody is mystified or bored by, say, Brick, there’s an obvious compulsion to react strongly against the glowing praise being heaped on the film; the criticism from the naysayers is much, much more forceful.
Which leads inexorably to a couple of recurring questions.
I’ll come back to the first sentence in a bit, but right now, the second observation is worth considering.
Comparing There Will Be Blood to Kubrick is directly on point, I think. That has come up a couple of times in this thread, with respect to the soundtrack, but I think the comparison goes a lot deeper than that.
Kubrick is known for his detached, observational approach. He watches, and occasionally analyzes; he never uses a subjective point of view. He wants us outside the action, and outside the characters, looking at them, looking at their experiences and their choices. He has been criticized as being “cold,” but I think that’s wrong; it’s not that he’s unsympathetic, it’s just that he is unsentimental. One of the reasons he fell in love with the Steadicam, for example, is how it detaches the camera from the floor, and turns it into a floating disembodied eye. Handheld, you feel the cameraman’s feet on the ground; on track, you can feel the camera’s wheels in the rails. The Steadicam’s view removes this subconscious sense of the camera as a physical object, allowing Kubrick to achieve his idealized detachment. He doesn’t judge his characters morally; he simply looks at them doing whatever they do, and says, Isn’t that interesting.
There Will Be Blood has much the same observational, and more importantly nonjudgemental, quality. We may be able to sympathize with various characters at various points, but we are not intended to identify with any of them particularly. We see what they do, and we understand, more or less, why they do it; and we are expected to leave the theater thinking as much as (or more than) feeling.
(This is a major contrast with just about every other major filmmaker, from Spielberg to Bay. When you walk out of the cinema after Saving Private Ryan or Transformers, you aren’t thinking much at all, but holy shit are you feeling stuff.)
That being said, it’s absolutely true that one cannot argue taste. Whether one personally enjoys or dislikes a film is entirely subjective, and individual, and not worthy of debate. I can’t argue anybody into enjoying There Will Be Blood (or Into the Wild or No Country for Old Men or any of the other difficult-but-rewarding films that came out this year) any more than somebody could argue me into not enjoying them.
But where I and film fans like me take umbrage is when the naysayers step past the boundary of personal distaste and argue that the film is objectively bad, that it is a failure, period, and that those who appreciate it are wrong. I mentioned Brick above; while you’ll find a lot of people who like it, and many who love it unreasonably, you’ll also find a small but aggressive number of viewers who label it “pretentious” and “stupid” and think it’s a piece of shit.
I could go on at great length on that subject, but I won’t – because I already have, elsewhere. In that post, on a different message board, I go on for many paragraphs about the disconnect between so-called “high level” film discussion and the viewpoint of the mainstream viewer, and I conclude that while it’s entirely valid for somebody to say “I hated it,” that personal opinion has zero bearing on the film’s merits as a work of art. Seriously, go read it. I’ll wait.
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Welcome back, I hope you enjoyed it. 
Anyway, the point here is that the discussion gets acrimonious when people are talking past one another. One person says, “The movie failed because the music was disruptive.” Someone else says, “You mean, the movie failed for you because of the music.” The first person says, “That’s what I said.”
No, that’s not what was said, to be technically accurate. However, given that it is what is usually meant, there’s something to the notion that the second person should simply take it as given that that’s what was intended. Except that this unexamined assumption can lead to additional miscommunication, if the first person did, in fact, mean that he believes that the subconsciousness of a film score is a valid measure for the success of the film.
It is, I find, exactly in these unwarranted assumptions that most of the venom in these debates can be found, and I will typically support or join the side of the debate that seeks clarification of expression, rather than the side that takes offense when things like this are not simply taken for granted.
And that’s not all, either. Sure, feel free to dislike There Will Be Blood. You thought Day-Lewis’s performance was stagy, fine. The music was distracting, fine.
But: You think the story fails because the script leaves out plot points and skips over major sections of the narrative and doesn’t explain why everybody does what they do, man, you’d better have a better argument than “it felt that way to me,” because that’s a comment on filmic structure and objective storytelling style, and you have to have your shit together, relating the detached viewpoint of this film to the detachment of Kubrick or comparing it to the non-detachment of Coppola or the cynical judgementalism of Wilder or the casual naturalism of Altman or any of a hundred other valid reference points.
It’s one thing to say the story didn’t work for you, and that it therefore failed in some Platonic sense. It’s another thing entirely to look at the film and recognize that it makes its narrative choices specifically and deliberately, and then to consider why its choices are made the way they are, and then to decide that the style doesn’t work for you, for whatever reason, personally.
Me, I can’t wait to see it again.