There Will Be Blood
A ruthless oilman and a charismatic preacher fight for souls and oil in early 20th-century California.
I drink your milkshake! Daniel Day-Lewis's Daniel Plainview is American capitalism personified — brilliant, charismatic, and consuming.
The Iraq War was about oil. This film was a 158-minute argument that American prosperity was always built on rapacious extraction.
Post-9/11 trauma shaped a decade of cinema. Superheroes became relevant (Spider-Man arrived seven months after). War films returned. Torture became contested on screen (Zero Dark Thirty). New Yorkers refused to be shown threatened cities for years.
The financial crisis prompted a wave of class-conscious cinema: Margin Call, The Big Short, and eventually Parasite were all responses to the same structural wound.