There Will Be Blood Score

Camilla Broccolo

The way the movie There Will Be Blood started, set the tone for the rest of the movie. Starting without dialogue, and only the background sounds of a oil production site, you could understand the emotion of the scene, which was intense and dramatic.  In most movies, actors portray the emotion in a scene through their voices, actions or acting. Conversely, in There Will Be Blood, the emotion was communicated through the score in the background. The emotion in the first oil production scene was set by the sounds of the machinery and then the baby crying in the background.  Most scenes in the movie had a escalating score in the background which lead up to the final scene which included the violent death of Eli.  This technique was in a way misleading because throughout most of the movie I was expecting something big to happen  because of the music, but then it never did.  On the other hand, after HW loses his hearing, the music is used to show that he is deaf.  I thought was well done because in most scenes focusing on HW, even in the middle of the explosion which was meant to be loud and scary, you could not hear anything that was going around HW, but only the score in the background. I was immediately able to understand that he lost his hearing in the explosion because of this technique that was used.  Overall I think that the score of this movie fit well to communicate the emotion in the film.