The Book of Eli (Movie Review)

One of the increasingly popular, though not necessarily new, settings being used in contemporary film is the post-apocalyptic wasteland. We’ve seen this all over, from the machine-controlled Terminator: Salvation to the post-zombie apocalypse Zombieland, to the crazy Mad Max-homage settings of Doomsday, and the recent and outstanding ashen, barren world of The Road. This would lead one to think that The Book of Eli is just another knock-off, riding the whole post-apocalypse craze. But while the film is far from perfect, it provides a compelling new look at the setting, as well as a brave visual style that makes a viewing worthwhile.

The opening scene has what could be either snow or ash floating in the foreground set against a background of corpses and waste. A cat wanders the waste looking for what it can scavenge, and as it begins to feed there’s a sudden, surprising movement as an arrow runs through it.

The opening sets the tone. We are in a world of scavenging, of death, and of sudden, harsh acts of violence. It’s a world you wouldn’t want to live in. And yet, we find here people surviving, pushing on, and in the midst of this world a man who has a reason to strive to survive, a mission that he must fulfill.

30 years after “The Flash” which we are supposed to take as the apocalyptic event that sets the stage of The Book of Eli’s events, we are introduced to Eli, played by Denzel Washington. He does two things. He carries a copy of the King James Bible. And he kicks ass. A lot. With various weapons. As an ascetic, monk-like warrior whose only personal pleasure is derived from a beat-up iPod, Eli walks West, following a voice and faith, taking the book somewhere.

On his road West are the obligatory post-apocalyptic road bandits with bad hygiene. There’s no real twist in how they are portrayed here than in other films, nothing really interesting, expect for their being fodder for some pretty amazing action sequences. When the directors, the Hughes brothers, pull out for their first big action sequence and go into silhouette, one gets the sense that though they are playing in a playground that many have been in before, they are trying to do something new with the same materials.

When, in that first action sequence, Eli engages the band of bandits in silhouette, we get not only a beautifully choreographed hand-to-hand combat sequence (with a chainsaw, plus points in my book for anything that has chainsaw combat) but we see that the Hughes brothers are trying to create a character who will be elevated to the level of myth. In that scene we are asked not merely to see Eli as another weary traveler, but rather we see that the Hughes brothers, through Washington’s righteous warrior, are channeling Toshiro Mifune’s samurai and Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name.

As Eli progresses down this road he comes by a town. He’s looking just to pass through, but after a barroom brawl the town’s big boss, played by Gary Oldman, takes an interest in him and his book. It turns out that Carnegie (Oldman) has been looking for the book because he is aware of its power.

In typical Western fashion Oldman’s Big Man is a bad dude who is looking to branch out and exploit more people using the book’s message. Oldman plays up the stereotype, and we see depth that isn’t otherwise in the script. He recognizes the power of words, of creating meaning, in a world where things are seemingly meaningless. Without order, it’s up to the people to create order. And one could imagine Oldman’s Carnegie believing in his mandate to rule. His belief in such can be seen as a direct referent to present political leaders’ willingness to do evil for what they believe is good.

Also playing an integral part, both as stereotype and later as important to developments, is Mila Kunis’s Solara. She’s a girl from the town, she is under Carnegie’s control because Carnegie has taken her mother as a mistress, and she finds herself realizing that there is more to the world after her encounter with Eli. She becomes the female sidekick, the one who Eli seems meant to save and possibly convert. Of course there have to be the irritating moments of the sidekick nagging the hero to let her tag along, but once these are past, we get some good material.

Working with content that would be familiar to anyone who has seen a Western, the Hughes brothers amp up the similarities; you’ve got the main street, the bar/saloon, the rooftop gunners, and all these other visual elements that are meant to remind you of a Wild West town. All that’s lacking is someone getting their hat shot off. In a later scene a long house out on the prairie is besieged, and it looks just like another scene from various Western movies.

Though the film plays upon these visual similarities, it strives to make all the action sequences seem more vicious, because of the setting. Washington’s Eli may be a righteous man, but he’s a righteous man who doesn’t hold back when people try to get in his way, ready to get them out of his way with guns, bows and arrows, and I’m not sure if it’s a short sword or a really big knife. Of course it has to convince us that Eli has been walking the path for 30 years, and we are indeed convinced whenever the lightning-quick reflexes are shown.

The Hughes brothers do great with action sequences, but have problems in other aspects of the film. Primary among these is their inability to allow certain images to speak for themselves. There is their constant need for explanation, and it is generally tolerable when mixed in with the good action and tense sequences. But when the film winds down we find that this tendency cannot be suppressed, and thus we have images that would speak fine on their own being explained by character dialogue.

It’s frustrating when the film has laid the groundwork visually, for various levels of interpretation to be made. That’s why they work in broad strokes, not bothering to make their characters particularly unique, but instead leaving them at the level of stereotype so that we aren’t necessarily invested in the unique character but the idea of what these characters represent.

We have a righteous man on a quest from God. Oldman’s Big Man is The Man who wants to oppress; he wants the book, but he cannot be allowed to possess it. And caught in the middle is Kunis’s Solara, representing the youth who must intervene and make a stand because the world will be theirs and they must have a hand in the kind of world they will have. You’ve got your thugs and townspeople (and weirdly enough Tom Waits as “the engineer”) who are pretty generic.

It shows us here that it’s not a single book, but rather the people who read and carry the book, who will define the morality of it. It’s a pretty cliche sentiment, not too far from “Guns don’t kill people; People kill people” but nonetheless potentially effective within the post-apocalyptic context. Great scifi tells us about our present world by showing us an imagined one, and in that sense The Book of Eli is generally a success, until it starts to worry that its audience might not get it, and then delivers an extra ten to fifteen minutes of exposition which really bog the film down and remove a lot of dramatic impact.

I might actually recommend to viewers that they walk out before the movie ends, so that they can mull over the important points being made, rather than have them spoon-fed and thus rendering the reader’s participation in the creation of meaning removed. Still, the film takes a different look at the post-apocalyptic setting and one cannot overlook how well it works.

It provides all the grimness and action of the genre, but also examines the role of literature and of art in a post-apocalyptic context. We call these things the humanities, and in the hopes of rebuilding society and humanity both protagonist and antagonist in this film look to literature and the Good Book. Eli holds on to humanity and compassion, despite all the violence he must commit, through reading the book and its messages (whether the book justifies all the violence he commits is something that is, perhaps questionable, but something that we can overlook at the moment) and listening to soul music.

Where The Book of Eli succeeds is in showing us a post-apocalyptic setting where people are grasping for humanity. So many of its characters have lost it, and since the film’s events occur 30 years after the Extinction Level Event the younger characters have no concept of what a “civilized” world was like. There’s the struggle of good and evil here, but it sidesteps the idea of religion as good or evil in itself, which could have been a major stumbling block had that become the focus, and instead makes the use of it, and thus of anything that could shape thought and consciousness, as powerful, world-changing weapons, more powerful than any weapon fired in the film’s barren California wasteland. While it slips in certain parts, the overall good handling, as well as the impressive action scenes, and its attempts at myth-making, make it a film well worth watching.

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